Innovative, participatory, and deliberative procedures in policy making: democratic and effective? EJPR vol. 46, n°4, juin 2007.

Direction du vol. 46, n°4, juin 2007 du European Journal of Political ResearchOur overall project aims to establish a dialogue between normative democratic theory and research on policy formulation and implementation. In this introductory chapter we first note the growth of various participatory and deliberative procedures in policy-making, portray the context of this growth, and justify our case selection. We then present the conceptual framework that is used for the study of these procedures, which mainly draws on participatory and deliberative democratic theory, and on the literature on the shift from “government” to “governance”. Based on this conceptual framework we focus on four research questions that we consider as particularly important for the assessment of the contribution of the devices under scrutiny to democratic and effective decision-making: questions of openness and access (input-legitimacy); regarding the quality of deliberation (throughput); questions of efficiency and effectiveness (output-legitimacy); and also the issue of their insertion in the public space (questions of transparency and accountability)