1,721,649 research outputs found
Why citizen participation succeeds or fails: a comparative analysis of participatory budgeting
No full textMatt Ryan’s landmark comparative review of participatory budgeting, or collective decisions on how public money is spent, reveals the factors behind its success in achieving democratic engagement.The culmination of ten years of research into participation, this is a systematic analysis of how, when and why citizens gain control over these important decisions. Comparing global examples of both positive change and notable failure, the book provides persuasive evidence and guidance for future public involvement in taxation and spending.For advocates and participants of democratic reform and those with interests across political science, this is an essential guide to one of the most significant democratic innovations of our times
Using cases in political science: reflections on Keith Dowding’s ‘The Philosophy and Methods of Political Science'
No full textThis short response presses further on considerations about the N of cases and so-called qualitative and quantitative evidence in political research. I ask whether Dowding’s critique of the claims of causal process-tracing is relevant to case studies as they appear in real-life political science. I argue that choosing a case is an integral part of performing a case study and case studies in reality are always situated within research designs that are attentive to a case’s relationship to others. Dowding’s work in my view could be complemented by a further elaboration of its pragmatic implications for how we consider and favour certain approaches to sampling and types of data in our field. In widening the debate, I ask why systematic reviews and meta-analyses are conspicuous by their absence in political science. Finally, I return to a discussion of what this means for disciplinary culture and cumulative advancement of disciplinary knowledge
Moving beyond input legitimacy: When do democratic innovations affect policymaking?
Full text linkThis article makes three key contributions to debates surrounding the effectiveness of democratic innovation, deliberation, and participation in representative political systems. In the first instance we argue that more attention should be paid to the role that participation actually plays in governance. We show that the literature on democratic institutional design often neglects concern about the effects of innovative institutional designs on more traditional representative fora, at the expense of concerns about their internal procedures. Secondly we argue that despite limitations, replicable systematic comparison of the effects of institutional design is both necessary and possible even at the level of national governance. We present a comparative analysis of 31 cases of National Public Policy Conferences (NPPCs) in Brazil. Finally, we show that popular deliberative assemblies that vary in their familiarity and their policy area of interest, and that organize their structure and sequence deliberation in different ways can be associated with differential effects on both option analysis and option selection stages of the policy process respectively
Public participation in parliamentary policy scrutiny: practices, perceptions and deliberative potential
No full textThe failure to examine failures in democratic innovations
No full textWhile empirical research on democratic innovations is characterised by steady growth in output, a study of the top journals in political science shows that in the last ten years the vast majority of these empirical studies focused on best practices. Empirical evaluation of the lessons that we can draw from failures in participatory and deliberative processes are extremely rare. This pattern of success and failure is not representative of reality. Various specialized monographs and studies in less prominent journals have investigated a variety of problems and failures. Why do we see this pattern of ‘failure neglect’ in top journals? In this paper we explore some of the causes of this pattern elucidating the impact of sampling bias, innovation bias, publication bias, and the loss of independence due to the difficulty of implementing participatory action research in politically contested projects. We argue that this lack of representativeness in the real-world cases of deliberation that command the attention of general political science audiences is currently a major barrier to understanding democratic improvements. Without a comparison of success and failure, our models for successful outcomes will be chronically overdetermined, which ultimately reduces their chances of adoption in practice
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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