Decision-makers, advisers or educable subjects? Policymakers' perceptions of citizen participation in a Nordic democracy

Abstract

The perceived disconnect between policymaking elites and citizens has intensified demands for citizen engagement in democracies, but we know little about policymakers' attitudes towards increased citizen involvement. This study presents an in-depth, mixed-methods analysis of participatory views of politicians, public officials, and interest group representatives in Finland. We first utilize a unique survey battery presented to representative samples of policymakers (n = 675) and ordinary citizens (n = 1701). We then perform a qualitative content analysis for 24 in-depth interviews of high-ranking policymakers to explore reasons for the observed attitudes. We find that while citizens strongly support participatory attitudes, policymakers are more skeptical, especially when participation threatens their control of the policy process. Elite skepticism stems mainly from low trust in citizens' capacity to deal with complexity, and to relieve the pressure to engage citizens more elites support learning-based methods. The broad citizen-elite attitude gap may require re-negotiating representative mandates in the future.