Political consequences of participative practices in an urban context: two case studies in Rome

This article presents the results of a research on two participative practices carried out in two of Rome’s municipalities, namely Participatory Budgeting and the collection of comments on the City’s new master plan. Practices are compared through a typology based one hand on their impacts on the political and institutional systems (expressed by a «consultative vs. decisional» continuum) and on the other hand on the kinds of social interaction (“aggregative vs. deliberative”). Explanations of the differentiated nature of the analyzed practices are found in several independent variables, such as the specific public policy domain that hosts each practice, practice regulations, their creators’ and promoters’ political cultures and strategies. A final question concerns two alternative scenarios : practices of deliberative democracy may either be penned into policy niches, thus not affecting major decisions within the urban context, or be an ingredient of policies for common goods, alternative to the neo-liberal policies that have been prevailing in many cities’ agendas over the last 20 years.