Insights and Applications Participatory Democracy, Representative Democracy, and the Nature of Diffuse and Concentrated Interests: A Case Study of Public Involvement on a National Forest District

To evaluate whether public involvement on a national forest district fairly represents the public's values, this article proposes four hypothesis tests. First, it is hypothesized that public-invo1l)ement programs operute according to a participatory democracy logic, in which broad cross sections of the public participate in public involvement opportunities. A second hypothesis is tested that public involvement rejects a representative democracy process in which interest groups participate yet represent the underlying distribution of issue interests qf the public at large. Recuuse the,findings indicate that interest groups do outcompete the public in participation, ~wo additional perspectives are entertained. A political economic perspective is considered thut posits thut the incentive structure characterizing diferent interests dejines participation. This perspective is contrasted with a perspective that argues that environmental "elites " prevail in participation and in the process misrepresent the public's values. Tests are made to adjudicate between alternative hypotheses. The findings and their implicutions for democratic public involvement and decision making are considered. Keywords diffuse and concentrated interests, environmental attitudes and elitism, participatory and representative democracy Decisions about the environmental management of public resources is a topic of considerable national interest. Federal environmental polices instituted in the 1970s have fundamentally altered the opportunities for public participation in decision making in agencies such as the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This has led to considerable academic attention to the structure of public involvement opportunities (Blahna and Yonts-Shepard 1989; Force and Williams 1989; Sirmoll et al. 1993), the growin