Elected representatives and citizen participation

How political experience enhances representation

Abstract

While investigation on citizen participation abounds, what elected officials think about it remains relatively unexplored in the political science literature. Citizen participation is becoming institutionalised in public decision-making processes while, paradoxically, elected officials tend to temper their legitimacy. This article studies the meaning that elected representatives give to citizen participation through two participatory mechanisms of different nature (popular consultation and citizen panel) in the Belgian city of Ottignies–Louvain-la-Neuve. Based on a thematic analysis of interviews with local elected officials, this article suggests that political experience shapes the relationship of elected officials to citizen participation. Experience is understood, as Dewey points out, as the knowledge acquired by elected officials as a function of the surrounding conditions, here mainly partisan and institutional. The more the elected officials are socialised by their party, the more the elected officials and their party remain in power, the more they instrument participatory devices.