Discussions on the role of participatory approaches in technology assessment and technology policy have a long history. While in the beginning this subject was handled mainly as a theoretical requirement for democratic governance of technology, active involvement of stakeholders and laypeople became popular in TA exercises throughout the 1980s. Since then, a variety of participatory TA (pTA) me...

The EU represents a new and complex political system which, according to numerous social scholars, suffers from the so-called democratic deficit. The basic argument behind this claim is that citizens lack control of the EU because, within its political system, national parliaments of member states possess only limited powers which have not been adequately compensated through steady empowerment ...

While there has been a proliferation of academic interest in ‘democratic innovations’, most empirical analysis tends to rely on single case studies. Very little attention has been given to either comparative analysis of innovations or the conditions under which they emerge and are sustained. Recent studies of participatory budgeting (PB) have begun to utilise cross-case analysis in an attempt t...

An alert, informed electorate is considered vital to a robust democracy, and the main path to that electorate includes formal education. The educated citizen is politically attentive, knowledgeable, and participatory, and the uneducated citizen is not. However, this fact conceals a less favorable effect of education. Educated citizens possess the cognitive skills to reject facts inconsistent wi...

Challenges to post-conflict leadership in African states highlight the need for democratic capacity building, with clear participatory processes involving communities and the leadership as a necessary condition to mitigate new or resurrected conflicts. This article explores transformational leadership and how it relates to democratic capacity building in Rwanda. We argue that community capacity...

In their classic, The Civic Culture, Almond and Verba (1963) define the ideal democratic citizen as an allegiant, trustful, and modestly participatory person. This ideal has shaped how scholars think about consolidated democracies as well the process of democratic development. In contrast, we argue that a new model of assertive citizenship spreads as nations experience social modernization, and...

The paper contributes to the current discussion on the role of participatory methods in the context of technology assessment (TA) and science and technology (S&T) governance. It is argued that TA has to be understood as a form of democratic policy consulting in the sense of the Habermasian model of a "pragmatist" relation of science and politics. This notion implies that public participation is...

The author argues that in democracies a strong state and strong civil society are not mutually exclusive. Only a democratic, legitimate, and strong state can provide the environment for civil society activities to flourish; in return, only a strong and a participatory civil society can outline the reach of state strength vis-à-vis the society. The author discusses the need for civil society org...