Participatory Instruments and Democratic Innovation: Evaluating Four Italian Cases

The ordinary political landscape, with particular reference to so-called “consolidated democracy”, has produced a series of phenoma for example the mistrust of citizens towards their representatives, which emphasize an alarming gap not only between the political and social characteristics that shape democracies, but also between descriptive and normative meanings of the same regimes. In such democratic regimes, many scholars have underlined a progressive crisis in quality, which can be summarized as the emerging of a post-democratic model (Crouch, 2005), the presence of “rhetorical democracies” (Canfora, 2007) or “the failing to keep their democratic promises” (Bobbio, 1995). If we consider these last sentences and the progressive degeneration of Western democratic regimes, several authors, like Patenam (1970), Macpherson (1980), Barber (1984), and the more recent Habermas (1997), Dryzek (1990), Ackerman (1991) and Gutmann (2002), have expressed their theoretical schemes which are based on the concepts of participation and deliberation. In such a climate, Participatory Budgeting can be seen as a democratic instrument able to provide new ways of involving citizens to participate in the definition of the local political agenda and the ensuing of public policies. By starting a deliberative process among representatives, citizens and local institutions focused on the main budgeting entries, this instrument has been able to generate positive effects not only in the governance dimension, but chiefly in the system of values and inside the prescriptive meanings that built the concept of democracy. Among the five dimensions used by the framework to evaluate a democratic innovation participation, deliberation, effectiveness, enlightenment and legitimacy- our analysis focalizes upon the first four ones.