Improving Local Democracy Work: Does Social Capital lead to More ...

Improving Local Democracy Work: Does Social Capital lead to More Transparent, Participatory and Deliberative Municipal Governments? Jakub Lysek, [email protected] Department of Politics and European Studies, Palacky University in Olomouc2

Paper prepared for: ECPR 2016 Joint Sessions of Workshops, Pisa. Deliberative Systems in Comparative Perspective: Conceptual, Methodological, and Empirical Innovations. Workshop Director: Jonathan Kuyper Workshop Co-Director: Andre Baechtiger First Draft! Draft Version – Please do not cite without the permission of the author!

Abstract: This paper explore to what degree the local governments in the Czech Republic involve citizens to a decision making process. Based on the large N analysis of 205 Czech municipalities with extended scope of authority, this paper analyzes whether the openness, transparency and deliberation is conditioned by the level of social capital. It is hypothesized that innovative democratic techniques are more common in municipalities located in areas with high stock of social capital. Preliminary results show that generally there is modest positive correlation between social capital and the extent the municipal government employs modern participatory and deliberative techniques. This is particularly true in municipalities with higher electoral turnout. Similarly, more transparent municipalities are in areas where dense network of various NGOs is. Yet from cross-sectional study we are not able to draw direction of causation.

Introduction There is growing evidence of public disillusionment with the institutions of advanced industrial democracies. The decline in electoral turnout, low levels of trust in politicians and political institutions and decline in membership of traditional mobilising organisations are just three expressions of the growing disconnection between citizens and decision-makers (Smith 2009: 3). What is more, in recently democratized countries the level of trust has even never reached the level of advanced industrial ones. It is believed, that more transparent, participatory and deliberative democratic innovation might build up trust in democratic government once again. Normatively speaking, this institutional reform might help to improve good governance, especially, in time of shift from a government to governance system that is characterized by a polycentric fluid intangible structure (Denters and Rose 2005: 246). As a result, the accountability decreases and without democratic innovation, this situation might further lead to disillusionment of citizens. Yet with the rapid development of modern technologies, deliberative and participatory mechanisms are not only 1

Jakub Lysek, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jakub_Lysek Support for this paper was provided by the student grant: IGA_FF_2015_008, Participation, Media and Local Politics. 2 http://www.kpes.upol.cz/en/home

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theoretical concepts of political philosophy, but can actually be and sometimes already are introduced in practice. The feasibility of ideal models of modern democracies has potentially increased. This is mirrored by increasing interest in new ways of involving citizens in the political decision process that affect their lives (Smith 2009, Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012, Geissel and Newton 2012). Much attention was paid to participatory and deliberative techniques. Mostly qualitative studies emerged on participatory budgeting, deliberative minipublics, or on democratic innovation in general. Most of democratic innovations occurred in specific context such as Porto Alegre participatory budgeting, New England town meetings and Chicago Community Policing, Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform in British Columbia (Fishkin and Luskin 2005, Smith 2009, Fishkin 2012). Yet we know little about the factors that help to explain why some governments are more willing to employ these innovative techniques. Existing research points to that cities located in regions rich on social capital should perform better (Putnam 1993, Rice 2001, Knack 2002, Coffé and Gayes 2005, see Andrews 2012 for review). From this theory we can derive assumption that their government should be more inclusive and responsive to citizens and more willing to engage with them. Based on the large N analysis of 205 Czech municipalities with extended scope of authority, this paper tries to answer to following question: Is openness (transparency), participation and deliberation conditioned by the level of social capital? Because open and deliberative mechanisms are not enforced by law and by central government, it is assumed that cities, where the electoral turnout, civic participation and volunteering is more common, will also promote more transparent and deliberative mechanisms to involve citizens in the political process. The main dependent variable is a composite index measuring openness of a government and degree of how citizens are involved in terms of participation and deliberation. It consists of various indicators of innovative instruments employed by municipal governments. All indicators are connected with citizen’s involvement in the decision making process, however two clusters can be identified. The first one is transparency and openness consisting of online broadcast of legislative debates, publicly available contracts on municipal webpage, publically available budgets, open data and transparent accounting. The second cluster of variables indicates possibilities of citizen’s involvement such as participatory budgeting, participatory urban planning, minipublics/roundtables and geoparticipation (emotional maps).3 The main independent variables are classical indicators of social capital such as electoral turnout, number of NGOs, share of people organized in voluntary associations4. Statistical techniques, such as regression analysis, will be used as well as visualization of data via Esri GIS mapping software to see spatial differences. The paper has also practical policy implications. If the outcomes will point to that there is no association between social capital and transparent, participatory and deliberative local government, this would indicate that municipalities are not predisposed to be non-transparent and inimical to their citizens. This is relevant because if otherwise, the Czech central government should stimulate or even force municipalities to become more transparent by law to ensure that even in the locations of

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Some of those techniques are specific to the Czech context. They might be interesting for foreign audience as good practices. 4 „One should also control for other variables that might influence openness and inclusiveness of city government. Therefore a set of control variables such as incumbency, party fragmentation, and government alternation will be included.“ In time of writing this paper, it had not been done yet.

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low levels of social capital good governance still occurs. This would likely stopped vicious circle of alienated citizens and undeliberative local governments.5 This paper proceeds as follows. Firstly the context of Czech local governance is explained. In the second chapter, the relationship between participation, deliberation and transparency is conceptualized. The third chapter explains casual link between social capital and introduction of democratic innovations. Next part describes data and research design, which is followed by analyses. The paper concludes with the results. 1. The Czech Republic system of local governance and democratic renewal The Czech Republic has experienced its own specific path in democratic local reform. The immediate effort was aimed at renewal of democratic local governments as such. This was subsequently accompanied by fragmentation of local governments as new municipalities were created by secession from larger forcefully amalgamated municipalities in the past. In 2000 the regional tier of government (14 regions as total) was created as a condition for EU entry in 2004. All regions have directly elected council which constitutes the regional board. Although the local and regional tier of government exhibits lower turnout rate in the election, they are trusted the most among all institutions (central government, parliament, president, etc.). Possible explanation is that citizens can meet local representatives and can more easily participate in local politics than on the national central level. They can easily see the policy outcomes and then reward or punish councillors. The communist heritage has negatively influenced the level of participation in all CEEs. Because the former regime did not allow free and authentic growth of civic society, what has subsequently fundamentally affected the citizen’s participatory and deliberative competencies as well as willingness of citizens to voluntarily participate in the political process (Howard 2003). The main reasons are lack of participatory experiences and persistent antipathy to compulsory participation that was so typical for communist regime (Vrablikova 2009). In the 90s the political environment was not favourable to participation and deliberation as well. Classical Schumpeterian model of democracy was preferred and even pushed by both prime ministers Vaclav Klaus and Milos Zeman. The former was leader of right wing Civic Party, the later of Social Democrats. Regardless of ideological affiliation both refused participatory mechanisms, greater involvement of citizens and both attacking NGOs and both were opposing Vaclav Havel vision of participatory and deliberative democracy. Yet the Czech society has changed dramatically after twenty five years. The participatory skills have enhanced, the number of NGOs mushroomed and some voluntary associations have even enlarged their membership. Now the change is also visible at the institutional level. A local government frequently uses expressions such as partnership, participation, deliberation, discussion with relevant partners or stakeholders and inclusiveness in official documents. In some municipalities this is not only a formal language that could be attributed to Europeanization and to EU regional policy, which plays crucial role in CEE countries, but actual and practical policy. Secondly, we are in time of shift from a government to governance system. Governance has many adjectives such as network governance, participatory governance, or society cantered governance. Governance is characterized by a polycentric fluid intangible structure. There are EU institution, central governments, regional tiers, district, and municipalities, all together with private or NGOs agencies 5

If the result show that there is if no correlation between social capital and transparent, open and deliberative local government is found that would indicate that municipalities are not predisposed to be non-transparent and inimical to their citizens. On the other hand if there is a strong correlation between social capital and transparent, open and deliberative local government the Czech central government should propose, or even force, municipalities to become more transparent by law to ensure that even in the locations of low levels of social capital good governance still occurs.

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providing services for citizens and operating in complex networks (Denters and Rose 2005). This complex governance structure poses threats to traditional legitimacy and accountability of institutions. How might these new problems of accountability and legitimacy be solved? This question is relevant both from a normative and empirical analytical point of view. Kersbergen and Waarden (2004:161) in this regard argue that “an interesting idea, stemming from political science itself, is the concept of deliberative democracy of Paul Hirst (1994). In essence, this suggests that policy networks be extended to include all the governed. Democracy in this sense is about government by information exchange and consent, where organized publics have the means to conduct a dialogue with government and thus hold it to account.” Government by consent dissolves the problem of accountability. This requires institutional and political reform, the adoption of “democratic model, which involves devolving as many of the functions of the state as possible to society (whilst retaining public funding) and democratising as many as possible of the organizations in civil society” (Hirst 2000: 28). Why is it important to follow local politics that is frequently neglected by scholars on deliberative democracy? Foremost, local politics is local. This means that is closer to citizen, it deals with everyday problems and is said to be less ideological biased in policy making than national level. As Dahl (1998: 110) claims, the smaller a democratic unit, the greater its potential for citizen participation and the less the need for citizens to delegate government decisions to representatives. Local politics thus represent an ideal environment to introduce and employ participatory and deliberative techniques. Most of which are simply inapplicable at the national level. 2. Participation, deliberation and transparency as ingredients of democratic innovations There is no clear division between participatory and deliberative democracy in everyday political practice. When it comes to feasibility of those modes of democracy, participatory and deliberative aspects of democratic institutions mingle and overlap. In empirical studies, such as this, it is more precise to speak about the democratic innovations (Geissel and Newton et al. 2012). Democratic innovations are both participatory and deliberative in nature. Yet we can still distinguish between the two theories of democratic ideal type. Participation means that citizens are involved in the decision making process, be it institutionalized or spontaneous. In institutionalized form people have say or even can decide about the policy outcome. So the participation can be also viewed as the degree the citizens are involved and have themselves the decision making power. Conversely, deliberation could be linked to the quality of decision making process. “Deliberation, or deliberative democracy, broadly defined, is thus any one of a family of views according to which the public deliberation of free and equal citizens is the core of legitimate political decision making and selfgovernment” (Bohman 1998: 401). Deliberative democracy highlights the importance of considering how democratic innovations enable citizen to make considered judgments; other approaches to democratic theory may offer insights into other aspects of citizen participation (Smith 2009: 11). As Smith argues, the danger of leaning too heavily on one theoretical position is that significant elements of democratic practice and institutional design can be overlooked (Smith 2009: 11). Therefore, when empirically analyzing various sets of democratic institutions, it is unachievable to draw from only one of the two influential democratic theories. One precondition of different modes of democracy such as deliberative or participatory democracy is that citizens are as much informed as possible. Only then they can effectively participate and deliberate in decision making process. Any conception of deliberative democracy is organized around an ideal of political justification requiting free public reasoning of equal citizens (Bohman 1998: 402). Access to information for all citizens is necessary condition of such equality in ideal concept of deliberative democracy. Therefore transparency of government is integral part when evaluating innovative democratic modes of governance. 4

The high concern of scholars is the feasibility of deliberative and participatory modes of steering. How can ideal “philosophical” concepts operate in reality? Do they always lead to better outcome? Some critics argue that there are many weaknesses in theories of deliberative or participatory democracy. For example, it is argued that as a theory, the deliberative democracy fails to provide a satisfactory account of how decisions should be made. If deliberation does not lead to consensus (a rare occurrence), how is conflict to be dealt with? (Smith 2009: 11). Similarly, participatory theory of democracy has it limits when the capacity of citizens is taken into account. Not all people are able to participate as it has been proved that typical participant in most of the democratic innovation technique has higher socioeconomic status (Michels and De Graaf 2010: 486, Bakker et al. 2012: 408). Even when citizens are selected randomly, there could be “internal exclusion” (Young 2000). Some people may not have their voice taken seriously as they gave cues indicating they are not well informed or not worth listening to (Fishkin 2012: 77). In general, mostly highly educated citizens without any material needs are more willing to participate or take part in deliberative process, and have larger say as well. Finally, the achievability here is of partial importance. Democratic innovations can be introduced by top-down decision of political elite or by bottom up initiative of citizens. In either way there can be obstacles to improve democracy work. Political elite can face demobilized and apathetic citizens. This is commonly true in Central and Eastern Europe, where political participation and mainly electoral turnout is the lowest, what is especially evident during election to the European Parliament. Similarly, an active group of citizens can face obstacles or bureaucratic burdens from ruling elite, being either politician or bureaucrats. Even when political elite agree on setting or starting deliberative polling, mini-public forum, roundtables or citizen panels, these democratic innovations could be misused for legitimization particular interests of the political elite. For above mention reason, the crucial question is what the favourable conditions for participation and deliberation are. 3. Why should social capital lead to a more transparent and deliberative government? When Robert Putnam firstly published his study on benefiting role of social capital on a society, it triggered high concern of scholars in the field of democratic reform. Generally social capital refers to connections among individual – social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them (Putnam 2000: 19). Higher stock of social capital should lead to more effective societies as it ease collective action. Putnam considers participating in social networks and voluntary organisations important to life satisfaction and, more importantly in this context, to democracy (Michels and De Graaf 2010: 480). Yet the concept of social capital has been largely criticized for its vagueness (Lin, Ericsson 2009). Also it was emphasized that social capital can actually be simultaneously the cause and the consequence of many social outcomes (Moore and Recker 2015: 893). Some scholars (Berman 1997) even warned that not all the social networks and norms can be benefiting for the society. Robert Putnam (2000: 22) partly answered some of those objections by differing between bonding and bridging social capital, the former being hostile and later being beneficial to broader society. In his book Bowling Alone, he also specified five key distinctive dimension of social capital: community organizational life, engagement in public affairs, community volunteerism, informal sociability and social trust (Putnam 2000). In political science literature frequently used term “civic society” could be viewed there as an integral part of the social capital fitting into first two dimensions, hence social capital is rather broader or umbrella concept. In some studies it is more convenient to use concept of social capital rather than just civic engagement. Social capital variables can capture the overall engagement of society better. 5

Social capital concept fits thus well into modern democratic theories that presuppose active and engage citizenship. This thought could be traced back to Alexis de Tocqueville and following modern scholars on participatory and deliberative democracy. As was already outlined, for modern democratic theory the feasibility is the question. As Jürg Steiner argues, establishing favourable conditions for deliberation is not a straightforward task because, empirically, deliberation is a multidimensional phenomenon (Steiner 2012: 183). Such conditions can be institutional (non/random choice of participants, lead discussion by professional mediator etc.) or contextual, and as contextual condition we can intuitively consider the concept of social capital. If we normatively accept the theoretical assumption that participatory and deliberative techniques as such have higher legitimacy over the traditional hierarchical type of government, we can now focus on what are the possible explanations of why should social capital lead to better governed polity. In their work, Boix and Posner (1998: 690) identified several models of the relationship between “the co-operative capacity of society and the performance of its political institutions”. These are Rational Voters and Competitive Elites, Rule Compliance, Civic Virtu, Bureaucratic Efficiency and Elite Accommodation. Yet only the ones which are arguably the most important for enhancing participatory and deliberative methods of governance are briefly describe. In ideal setting of high stock of social capital, regarding the first mechanism, voters are well informed, prompt to mobilize and eager to punish under-performing elected representatives at the ballot box. Recognizing this, representatives are anxious to please voters and govern according to their wishes. They work hard to implement policies preferred by a majority of their constituents and press bureaucrats to deliver the goods as efficiently as they can. Another mechanism, Civic Virtu, is connected to civic skills of citizens. Social capital may indeed foster civic virtue among the citizenry, much as Tocqueville saw in Democracy in America. Likewise, social capital promotes good governance by shifting community tastes from particularistic interests to more community-oriented concern (Boix and Posner 1998: 691). Social capital is also inevitably link to participatory democracy. As Michels and de Graaf (2010: 480) stated, participatory democrats believe that participation has several functions in democracy. The first is the educative function: citizens may increase their civic skills and become more competent if they participate in public decision-making. A second function of participatory democracy is the integrative function. Participation contributes to citizens’ feeling of being are public citizens, part of their community. As a consequence, they may also feel more responsible personally for public decisions. Bureaucratic effectiveness, in turn, can oil democratic wheels of participation and deliberation. Officials in environment rich on social capital are more responsive to citizen’s demand and citizens are more receptive to proposed participatory projects. Moreover, many of the deliberative techniques are highly demanding on skills not only of the citizens, but mainly the bureaucrats, officials and senior municipal managers who are responsible for carrying out respective projects on democratic innovations. A fifth model, elite accommodation, links social capital and good governance through the former's ability to foster accommodative practices among otherwise antagonistic elites. Social capital thus eases or facilitates deliberation. As Amy Gutmann argues: ‘the legitimate exercise of political authority requires justification to those people who are bound by it, and decision-making by deliberation among free and equal citizens is the most defensible justification anyone has to offer for provisionally settling controversial issues’ (Gutmann 1996: 344). Naturally there might operate another causal mechanism that links social capital to better democratic governance. It should be mentioned, that social capital and good governance can mutually reinforce each other. Governments pursuing participatory and deliberative democratic innovations can in turn increase participation and trust of citizens. Whatever is the direction of causation, the following hypotheses is tested. 6

Hypotheses 1: High level of social capital will lead to a government that employs participatory and deliberative techniques, and is more transparent and open to citizens. 4. Data and research design The analysis is conducted on the case of 205 municipalities with extended scope. This type of municipalities was created in 2003 after administrative reform aimed at adapting the administrative structure to enormous fragmentation of the Czech municipal structure. Municipalities with extended scope form new type of districts that are convenient for comparative analysis and data visualization via mapping software. All municipalities have the same competencies besides the capital city Prague and so called group of twenty five statutory cities that are granted power to create submunicipalities within their authority. Yet statutory cities still belongs to the category of municipalities with extended scope. Therefore only Prague will be excluded from an analysis due to the incomparability. The main advantage of comparison is that it allows large N analysis in which the statistical techniques can be employed. A downsize of a cross-sectional analysis, unlike to longitudinal panel study, is that it is not able to properly verify the direction of causation. Dependent variable The main dependent variable is composite index of open and deliberative government. As was outlined in the theoretical part, two clusters can be found. The first is transparency and openness, the second depicts participation and deliberation. All variables were selected in line with the Czech specific local government context. This means that some mechanisms might be unique; some are frequently used by local governments in the Czech Republic but uncommon to different countries. Table 1: Indicators of participatory, deliberative and transparent municipal goverment No.

Variable

1

Publicly and Online Available Budget

2

Transparent Accounting

3

Online Available Contracts

4

Open Data

5

the Association of Healthy Cities membership

6

Participatory Budgeting

7

Participatory Planning

8

Emotional Maps

9

Roundtables

10

Social Networks

11

Online Broadcasting of Council Session

12

Opinion Polls

Regarding the transparency, the core variables are those that somehow help to open municipality to its citizens. Four variables were included. The transparent or publicly available budgeting, transparent accounting, publicly available contracts regularly published on the internet and open data. All as indicator variables coded 1 if present, 0 otherwise. Because the specific Czech context, each mechanisms will be briefly explained so as the reason why they were included into the composite index.

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The transparent budgeting is a webpage application that allows citizens to look on municipal revenues and expenses online. The quality of application might vary as some cities present only necessary information, frequently only aggregated expenses according to respective budget sections like expenses on administration, education, culture, sport etc. The most transparent and open cities have their application linked with transparent accounting and respective contracts, all easily traceable for the ordinary citizens. However, most of the municipalities have basic application. Recently, an NGO have crated online application that presents all budgets of all municipalities in the Czech Republic.6 It instantly gathers official data from the Ministry of finance. Hypothetically, own municipal application is not thus needed anymore, however, the presence of such an application represent willingness for open and transparent government. This is particularly true when the application poses advanced features that are missing in unofficial NGO version. The transparent accounting is quite new think. After long pressure from the society, it was firstly offered during presidential electoral campaign in 2013 by major as well as smaller banking institutions in the Czech Republic.7 Subsequently, transparent accounts became popular among pioneering municipalities. If the municipality uses transparent account, the citizens can view upcoming and incoming transactions online. From who a municipality received payments and to who a municipality is paying and for what. This is of particular importance as citizens, NGOs, journalists and local entrepreneurs can check and monitor possible misconducts for example in public procurement. Ideally, these two above mention applications work perfect if they are also linked to the public contract register. This means that all contracts are published online and publicly available. According to the NGO State Reconstruction (Rekonstrukce státu) this measure is the most crucial in combating corruption in the Czech Republic. The initiation originally came from a councillor of middle sized city Semily in Northern Bohemia Jan Fárský. He is a member of the Party of the Mayors that is also currently represented in the national parliament. Other councillors and mayors in the Czech Republic are not so optimistic about publishing contracts online, pointing to “unreasonable bureaucratic burden” for small towns. There was fierce debate between politician and NGOs pushing for reforms that lead to the approval of a bill that forces state organization, regional and municipal government to publish all contracts above 1 900 EUR (50 000 CZK) online in the central register. The Union of Towns and Municipalities, an umbrella association for mayors, was opposing to strict rules. As a result the obligation to publish contracts does not apply to small municipalities and there is one year opt out that unpublished contracts are not valid. In time of writing, the municipalities were asked if they published all contracts although the law does not force them to do so, if they published all and most of the contracts, if they published only some contracts or if they don’t publish them at all (ordinal coding, 3, 2, 1, 0, respectively). The last variable that belongs to the transparent cluster is whether municipalities publish so called Open Data. The philosophy behind is that municipalities will publish online all possible municipal data for free and open use. All are machine readable datasets that allows rapid and instant analysis of “data crunchers”. At the first glance, municipal representative does not see the point of publishing data. They are convinced that citizens don’t care about it. But the opposite is the truth. For example there is data section in the Czech Public Radio Broadcaster8 where data journalist frequently publishes interesting data analysis also based on municipal data archives. Finally, open data are features of “smart cities”. In the second largest city Brno, a citizen spontaneously developed 6

Municipal-budgets, www.rozpocetobce.cz Transparent Account, http://www.fio.cz/bank-services/bank-accounts/transparent-account 8 Czech National Radio, „Open Data“, http://www.rozhlas.cz/zpravy/data/ 7

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an internet application that allows users, citizens, to easily find all the documents from the office board. All documents are linked to a map application.9 The second cluster of variables we can label as participatory or deliberative. There is no strict line as some mechanisms are more participatory in nature and others more deliberative or combining both. Most of the variables are coded as dummies. As total there are eight variables. The membership of municipality in the Association of Healthy Cities, participatory budgeting, participatory planning, emotional maps, roundtables with citizens, communication on social networks, online broadcasting of council session and opinion polls among citizens on municipal webpage. Municipalities that are foremost willing to include citizens in decision making process are members of the Healthy City association in the Czech Republic.10 Though the association is primarily focuses on sustainable development, health and quality of life in the municipalities, it foremost stimulates participatory and deliberative actions. Municipalities have full-time employed coordinator that facilitates all kind of participatory and deliberative activities. The membership is voluntary. It assists to help coordination and share of best practices among municipalities involved. Second indicator is if the municipality uses participatory budgeting. Because this is still rare in the Czech Republic, and only in a couple of municipalities the project is going on (Říčany and Semily), the indicator has more values and is ordinal. 0 stands for the answer that municipality is not planning participatory budged, 1 that the municipality is considering participatory budget but the decision was yet made, 2 stands for project in preparatory phase and 3 for ongoing project. Similar way how to include citizens is participatory urban planning. This process is usually facilitated by an architect and other municipal officials. Most typically cities are consulting citizens on revitalization of residential areas, mainly large prefabricated tower blocks build during Communist era. The ideal form of participatory planning is that a city set a municipal land for a certain project being a city park or public transport stop, and invites citizens to determine the final arrangement of public space. All moderated by an architect and designer, because citizens are not capable to meet desires with practical limits, an architect can also help to reach an agreement among citizens, because participatory planning is typical of conflicting ideas or fantasies. The original and genuine way how to include citizens in policy making is by mean of a tool called emotional maps (Pánek and Pászto 2016). In the Czech Republic the development and support is at the Palacky University in Olomouc at the Department of Development Studies. Emotional maps have power to present spatial information in understandable and widely accepted form to general public. Mental maps and mental mapping are activities usually used in the first phases of the community mapping and the process of creating the knowledge about the common space and environment. Emotional maps allow citizens to get involved in the process of collecting information related to their emotional links with their environment. The idea is grounded within the GeoParticipation – using spatial tools in order to involve citizen in community participation.11 Emotional maps can be used in a very practical way. A municipality needs to project cycling paths and can use emotional maps to determine the best solutions for its citizens just by simple asking which roads they use the most to get to work, school etc. Emotional maps are thus innovative participatory tool for improving democratic governance.

9

Otevřené Brno (Open Brno), http://otevrenebrno.cz/ Healthy Cities Association, http://healthycities.cz/ 11 Emotional maps, http://pocitovemapy.cz/index-en.html 10

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A basic way how to engage citizens in policy making is simply to talk with them on a special event such as roundtable session. City representatives discuss problems and issues that are of citizen’s interest. Such a special event is facilitated by the coordinator of Healthy Cities, but not necessarily. Representatives of a city including politicians and officials debates various topics with citizens in groups created according to discussed topic such as culture, sport, administrative reforms, security (municipal police) etc. Citizens and representatives can raise a proposal. Subsequently they briefly describe the core issue. All proposals are than listed and people participating in a round table then vote for those the municipality should deal with first. The main advantage is that politicians have set of proposals they can introduce in practice, conversely citizens might directly influence a policy making. Another variable describing deliberation is the communication on social networks. Social networks are modern tools that are deliberative in nature. However, they are still only human tools and it`s up to citizens if they use the tool bad or well. Contemporary studies on social networks bring mixed results. On the one hand they ease communication and social interaction. They allow discussion of large number of people, even though some social groups are still excluded such as elderly or people who don’t have computer skills. On the other hand social networks can create “opinion ghettos” and thus paradoxically can be detrimental to deliberation and to democracy as such. The last variable is whether municipalities ask citizens about their opinion. This could be done by fully-fledged representative opinion poll. Yet most municipalities use only online survey on their municipal webpage or have online discussion. However, such surveys might be susceptible to intentional manipulation. An asked question could be instrumental and might lead citizens to answer it in a certain way. Such survey serves as confirmation of a certain policy that is pushed by political leaders rather than a deliberative tool. On the other side, the misuse of deliberative techniques might apply not only for survey but also for roundtables, emotional maps or participatory planning. In any case, opinion polls in all forms were added to composite index of open and deliberative government. All variables were standardized using z-score. The advantage is comparability of variables measured on different scales. The composite Index of open and deliberative government is mean value of all variables. The index is visualized in map. Each polygon represent municipality with extended scope. The greener colour, the more open and deliberative municipal government is. Grey areas mean that municipal government use democratic innovations only rarely.

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Map 1: Index of open and deliberative government

Independent variable As an independent variable various measures of social capital are used. However, the problem is data accessibility on such a low level of aggregation. Three variables were used: electoral turnout in latest municipal election 2014, number of NGOs per capita, and membership rate in the Czech largest sport association.12 Former depicting civic participation through conventional electoral process, the later depicts the dense of civic networks. All three variables were transformed to zscores and averaged. The following map 2 shows social capital index in municipalities with extended scope. The deeper red the higher stock of social capital.

12

The first two variables were obtained from the Czech Statistical Office, membership rate was requested from the Czech Union of Sport, http://www.cuscz.cz/

11

Map 2: Social Capital Index

Fortunately, there is a way of cross-validation to check if just three variables characterize social capital. On the regional level, there are plenty of variable of social capital that can be used. All form one latent factor. Electoral turnout, number NGOs per capita, and membership in sport organizations highly correlate with other variables such as blood donation per capita, newspaper readership, trust in regional government (Lysek 2013). Comparing two map of social capital measured on different administrative level, we can see that available variables on municipal level fairly depict social capital on regional level, where other frequently used social capital variables are used. From both maps (2 and 3) we can see that social capital is lowest in Northern Bohemia and in Northern Silesia. Both regions were former industrial regions during communist regime. After political and economic transformation these two regions faced crisis and problems. Northern Bohemia is well known for corruption scandal of regional political elite. Generally, this region has highest criminal rate, unemployment rate or divorce rate. Conversely, the region has the lowest level of social capital measures such as electoral turnout rate, membership in voluntary associations (sports clubs), The region has the lowest readership of newspapers (broadsheets), however, the highest readership of tabloits in the Czech Republic. It is interesting, that Northern Bohemia is stronghold of unreformed communist party. After regional elections in 2012, the communist party took office and governs in Northern Bohemia with Social Democrats as main coalition ruling party.

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Map 3: Social capital index on the regional level

Source: LYSEK, Jakub. Sociální kapitál, stranická soutěž a výkon krajských vlád v České republice.. Olomouc, 2013. (page 67) http://theses.cz/id/fnobre/Lysek_Jakub_Sociln_kapitl_stranick_sout_a_vkon_krajskch_v.pdf

Summed up, municipalities in Northern Bohemia and Silesia should have less open and deliberative government because of low social capital and particularly of low civic and political participation in these two regions.

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5. Analysis The analysis proceeds as follows. Firstly, I will analyze dependent variables itself by means of factor analysis to see, whether variables are indeed clustered by some latent pattern. Secondly, I run simple regression of the two indexes: the Index of open and deliberative government and Social Capital Index. Because some relations might be vanished by aggregation into single indexes, I run also regression model where social capital index is decomposed into specific social capital variables – turnout, NGOs per capita, membership in sport association. Factor analysis run on a set of depended variables, which form single index, shows that variables are correlated with each other. It is so, because all variables have positive correlation coefficient with first extracted component. Interestingly, the variables depicting participation and deliberation correlate more than variables depicting transparency. This pattern could be seen even more in column showing correlation with second extracted component/factor. Here “transparency” or “openness” variable correlate positively, meanwhile the variables of deliberative or participatory instruments correlate weakly and negatively with extracted component.

Table 2: Factor analysis of dependent variables Component Matrix

a

Component/Factor Variable:

Publicly and Online Available Budget Transparent Accounting Online Available Contracts Open Data the Association of Healthy Cities membership Participatory Budgeting Participatory Planning Emotional Maps Roundtables Social Networks Online Broadcasting of Council Session Opinion Polls

1 ,394

2 ,558

,219

,306

,410

,502

,265

,532

,381

-,177

,284

-,448

,531

-,356

,376

-,044

,590

-,214

,356

-,010

,505

,115

,605

-,269

Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis. 1 = 18 %, 2 = 11 % of variance explained.

For each component extracted we can save values and subsequently those values plot in a graph. The first component we can name as “Deliberative / Participatory (Government)” and the second component as “Openness and Transparency”. The graph shows that we have four groups of municipalities. First group of municipalities is strong in both dimension, second is weak in both dimensions, third and fourth group is strong only in one of the dimensions. Such a plot could have been done simply by summing variables in respective cluster based on theoretical criteria, however, factor analysis can prove, if this theoretical clustering operates in reality. From a methodological point of view, factor analysis is better suited for creating such dimensions.

14

Figure 1: Municipalities on transparency and deliberative/participatory government dimensions

Note: X axis are scores from factor 1, Y axis are scores from factor 2. Interesting cases (municipalities) are labelled.

The main implication is that municipalities employing democratic innovations such as deliberative round tables, participatory budgeting or city planning, emotional maps, opinion polls, Facebook etc. are not necessarily more open and transparent. And surprisingly that transparent and open municipal government is not always keen to engage with citizens. Next step is to analyze whether social capital has effect on how deliberative, participatory and open municipal government is. First regression models are for the overall Index of open and deliberative government. Model 1 is without regional dummies, model 2 is with regional dummies as control variables, model 3 shows effect of specific social capital variables, and last model 4 includes region dummy variables again to control for specific regional outliers. This is also for tables where factor 1 and factor 2 serves as dependent variables. In all models a logged population is included to control for municipality size. Significances are also shown, even though the whole population of so called municipalities with extended scope are analyzed. This is because statistical significances are derived from standard errors, and secondly, because there are still municipalities that has about the same population, yet there were for administrative reasons not granted title “municipality with extended scope”. Therefore we can interference the results on all Czech cities that have population above 3550 which is the MES with the lowest population. There are 380 municipalities above this threshold as total from which only 205 constitute districts of municipalities with extended scope.

15

Figure 2: Main regression models Index of open and deliberative government Variable Social capital index

Model 1

Model 2

0.106*

Model 3

Model 4

0.124*

Turnout

0.080*

0.091*

NGOs/per capita

0.054

0.091*

Sports membership

-0.005

-0.015

0.233**

0.189**

ln(population)

0.218**

0.204**

Region dummy: Jihočeský kraj

0.025

0.046

Plzeňský kraj

-0.225*

-0.241*

Karlovarský kraj

0.236

0.306

Ústecký kraj

0.031

0.034

Liberecký kraj

0.193

0.244

Královéhradecký kraj

-0.042

-0.049

Pardubický kraj

-0.149

-0.128

Vysočina

0.180

0.135

Jihomoravský kraj

0.145

0.101

Olomoucký kraj

0.037

0.052

Zlínský kraj

0.139

0.196

Moravskoslezský kraj

0.030

0.092

Constant

-2.086**

-1.994**

-2.238**

-1.857**

r2

0.228

0.315

0.242

0.334

N

205

205

205

205

Note: *