The Opportunities and Challenges of Citizen Participation: The Institutionalization of Deliberative Democracy in Taiwan
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Lee, Yi-Ching
Abstract
In representative politics, people''s political participation has been simplified into voting zero-sum game, so government decisions are often unable to meet people’s expectation with the lack of discussion on public policies. To some extent, the introduction of the concept and form of deliberative democracy seems to provide another way for people to face the contradiction and plight between representative democracy and citizen participation. However, reviewing the process of democratic developments, we can find with the rising of various increasingly mature issues, levels of field experiments, and conference mode operation, deliberative democracy in Taiwan is now faced with the problem whether to enter the stage of the operation within the system.
Therefore, this thesis focuses on the institutionalization of deliberative democracy issues and concerns the system-link problem of deliberative democracy in the policy process. In other words, it tries to examine if the citizen deliberation can steadily and systematically be imported into the existing decision-making system so as to build a stable circulation mechanism of policy reasoning, and promote democratic governance effectiveness through a proper system design. The results show that deliberative democracy hasn’t had a radical conflict with the existing decision-making system yet. However, the institutional designs and system-link forms of citizen deliberation are affected by the differences of organizational structures, terms, and interaction among different decision-making bodies. Therefore, the inducement of bureaucracy system, the accountability of decision-making, the adjustment and construction of the legal system, and the general social conditions are the key issues bound to be faced with when deliberative democracy follows the route of institutionalization in the future.
In addition, the institutionalization of deliberative democracy not only concerns the construction of the system itself, but also requires a lot of collaboration and support of political, social and cultural conditions. Only through the instilling the ideas of democratic administration in civil system, the collection and arrangement of lay knowledge, the input of funds and manpower, the strengthening of civic education, the continued promoting of public discussion, and the spill-over effects from media and so on, can citizen deliberative mechanism have stable operation so as to become a new momentum to boost the long-term deepening of democracy and public speculation in Taiwan.
Subjects
citizen participation
democratic administration
representative democracy
deliberative democracy
institutionalization
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