The Process is the Reality: Perceptions of Procedural Fairness and Participatory Democracy
The Process is the Reality: Perceptions of Procedural Fairness and Participatory Democracy
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DOI：
10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00840.x
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发表时间：
2010-10-01
影响因子：
3.1
通讯作者：
Carman, Christopher
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Carman, Christopher
为了让公民与其治理机构（重新）联系并（重新）参与，许多先进的工业民主国家采取了旨在“改变”公民与公共机构互动方式的创新改革。本文评估了苏格兰议会的请愿制度（一项旨在将苏格兰公众与议会联系起来的改革）在多大程度上影响了人们对政治制度的更广泛信任。本文利用结构方程对苏格兰议会请愿者调查的数据进行建模，发现过程评估在影响请愿者对政治机构的信任方面远远超过结果评估。因此，仅仅采取允许“公民参与”的改革不足以提高公众对政治制度的支持。在采取变革性改革时必须非常谨慎，以确保那些选择“参与”政治机构的公众认为程序公平且政治中立。
To (re)connect and (re-)engage citizens with their governing institutions, many advanced industrial democracies have adopted innovative reforms designed to 'transform' the way citizens interact with public institutions. This article assesses the extent to which the Scottish Parliament's petitioning system, a reform designed to connect the Scottish public with its parliament, influences broader trust in the political system. Using structural equations to model data from a survey of Scottish Parliament petitioners, the article finds that process evaluations far exceed outcome evaluations in influencing petitioner trust in political institutions. Hence simply adopting reforms that allow for 'civic engagement' is not enough to improve public support for the political system. Great care must be taken in adopting transformative reforms to ensure that those members of the public who do choose to 'engage' with political institutions see procedures as fair and politically neutral.