Abstract
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Research on enhancing public participation has increasingly concentrated on using novel instruments to collect the opinions of passive as well as active citizens in order to inform the decision-maker about preferred policies. These techniques, however, do hardly contribute to achieving the classic political-philosophical ideals of citizen involvement. Based on the newest European Value Study, this paper proposes a measure to distinguish passive and active citizens. It shows that passive citizens do have particular background characteristics in terms of age, education, and poverty. Compared to the active part, they also adhere to different values. This is seen in their high adherence to materialistic values, the absence of interpersonal trust, and the importance attached to hard work and not to tolerance and respect. All this does, however, not result in differing opinions about policy issues between the two groups. This implies that just collecting such opinions through the use of ICT, polling, and focus groups, and calling this participation 2.0 or ‘light’ participation as is proposed nowadays, fails to contribute to the original goals of public participation.
The question is whether that matters and whether the proposals recently made to solve this problem are sufficient. What are the main reasons to involve the passive part of the population also in public policy processes? Has the line of reasoning changed through time? How large is the group of passive people? And, does this group constitute a specific group in society in terms of their background, basic values, and opinions about concrete issues?
To answer these questions, the paper first addresses the question in theory, showing that the arguments on the need to include the ‘political inert’ have changed fundamentally.
Empirically, the recently published newest version of the survey on European Value Studies (ESV) allows one to investigate whether there are differences in background, values, and opinions between the politically and socially active people and those who do not belong to any political or societal organization. The third section elaborates on the nature of the ESV study, the countries involved, and the variables incorporated in the analysis. This concerns the background of both groups in terms of age, gender, and education, their basic values, and their opinions about policy issues. The fourth section presents the outcomes of the analysis into the differences between the two groups in 16 European countries, specifying significant relationships between the variables and the differences therein as found in different countries. The article ends with a reflection on the implications of the outcomes and a more specified answer to the research question.
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