Can Citizen Governance Redress the Representative Bias of Political Participation?

• Author: Peter John
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2009.01995.x
• Date: 01 May 2009
• Published date: 01 May 2009

Peter John

University of Manchester

Can Citizen Governance Redress the Representative

Bias of Political Participation?

Promoting

Participation

Inside

Government

Peter John is the Hallsworth Chair of

Governance in the School of Social Sciences,

University of Manchester, where he is a

director of the Institute for Political

and

Economic Governance. He has held posts at

Birkbeck College and at the Universities of

Southampton and Keele. He has interests

in the public policy, urban political, and

participation. He is the author of

Analyzing

Public Policy

(1998) and

Local Governance

in Western Europe

(2001). He was codirec-

tor of the U.K. Home Off‌i ce’s Civil Renewal

Research Programme in 2004–2005.

E-mail: peter.john@manchester.ac.uk

Can a more collaborative form of public management

correct for the historical link between social and

economic status (SES) and political participation?

New initiatives to involve the citizen directly in public

decision making—citizen governance—aim to include

a wider representation of groups in society because they

draw from service users and seek to recruit hard-to-

reach groups. To test the claim that citizen governance

may be more representative than other acts of political

participation, this essay reports data from the 2005

English and Welsh Citizenship Survey. Using descriptive

statistics and regression analysis, it f‌i nds evidence

that citizen governance is more representative than

civic activities, especially for young people and ethnic

minority communities. Policy makers can f‌i ne-tune their

interventions to reach underrepresented groups without

believing the citizen governance is a panacea for long-

running biases in civic participation.

Citizens have several means to inf‌l uence the

public decisions that are made on their behalf

by bureaucrats and politicians.  ese range

from traditional democratic acts, such as voting, peti-

tioning, and lobbying, to more informal consultation,

complaining, and community-based decision making

(see Fung 2006). But each one of these acts often only

reaches some of the public some of the time.  ose

who are the most advantaged are often better placed

than others to advance their interests because they

tend to have higher incomes, more education, and

more free time at their disposal. But is it possible that

some avenues of participation have a wider representa-

tion of the population than others? In particular, can

citizen governance, which has been trumpeted by gov-

ernments of all political hues as a new way of engaging

the public more fully in its decisions, involve a more

diverse group of citizens? It may be uniquely placed to

of‌f er this benef‌i t because of its close relationship to the

users of public services. Moreover, state agencies often

have as their mission better access to underrepresented

groups. Bureaucracies, which have in the past been

organized along hierarchical lines and with a large

degree of professional autonomy, may now include the

public in more ef‌f ective and fuller ways than tradi-

tional democratic mechanisms.

Socioeconomic Status and Participation

 e starting point of this article is the reliable f‌i nding

from decades of survey-based studies that the key

measures of political participation—voting, more

active forms of involvement, citizen contacting, and

group membership—are skewed toward those with

higher incomes, those who are employed, and those

with more years of education—factors that cluster

together (see, e.g., Barnes and Kaase 1979; Jennings

et al. 1989; Verba and Nie 1972; Verba, Schlozman,

and Brady 1995; Verba et al. 1993). Even with recent

advances in our understanding of political participa-

tion, which incorporate the role of context, skills,

and psychological factors, socioeconomic status (SES)

remains important as a prior factor. In one of the

most comprehensive analyses of U.S. participation

ever carried out, Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995)

f‌i nd that SES determines the skills that, in turn, af‌f ect

participation. In most studies, years of education and

employment appear as part of a standard battery of

statistical controls in multivariate models (e.g., Pattie,

Seyd, and Whiteley 2005, 152–85).  e dominance

of SES also runs across comparative studies (Verba,

Nie, and Kim 1987) and in surveys of political par-

ticipation in particular countries, such as the United

Kingdom (Parry, Moyser, and Day 1992, 63–84).

Moreover, early evidence showing that citizen-initiated

contact with public of‌f‌i cials is more representative

(Verba and Nie 1972) has not been sustained (Serra

1995, 182; Sharp 1982). Nor does direct democracy

perform any better. As Dalton, Cain, and Scarrow

summarize, “A much larger inequality gap emerges for

modes of participation that come closer to direct or

advocate forms of democracy” (2003, 262).

Academics and practitioners worry about the bias in

political participation because theories of democracy

depend on the practice of political equality (e.g., Dahl

1953). Democracy implies that citizens should partici-

pate on equal terms. And from the related literature

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