In recent decades, municipal investments in citizen dialogues and other types of civicparticipation in politics have increased significantly. This is because they want to involvetheir citizens in the development of society more than every four years when there areelections. One of the municipalities that in recent years has made a major investment incitizen dialogues is the municipality of Örnsköldsvik. With their investment in theTillsammanskontraktet, they want to involve the municipality's citizens in the futuredevelopment of society and together with the municipality shape the guidelines fordevelopment and thereby strengthen local democracy. However, there is criticism of citizendialogues and in how municipalities choose to shape the design of it. According to many, thedesign is crucial if the citizen dialogue will strengthen democracy or, on the contrary, evenhave a negative effect on it. Other researchers also believe that the municipalities'investments in citizen dialogues often does not lead to any major changes in the design andthus do not have any major impact at all on democracy.That study examines one of the citizen dialogues that Örnsköldsvik's municipality hasinvested in designing a new design for, the municipal pensioners' council. The aim of thestudy was to identify how the new design is designed, how it differs from the previous designand also what the design of the citizen dialogue can have on the impact on democracy. Toanswer these questions, the study uses Archon Fung's democracy cube and its threedimensions of who participates, how they communicate and make decisions and the degree ofinfluence to identify the new design, its change and its impact on democracy. By conductinginterviews with both representatives from the municipality and participants, the results of thestudy show that the municipal pension council's new design has increased the democraticpotential in the municipality by mainly making changes in the dimensions of how theycommunicate and make decisions and the degree of influence where participants have agreater chance to bring forward their perspectives and thus a greater chance of indirectlyinfluencing. However, the dimension of who participates has not changed since before andthere is a problem with including low-resource citizens, this part can thus have a negativeeffect on democracy in the municipality.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-197925 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Lavin, Filip |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Statsvetenskapliga institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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