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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
New Public Management reform puts an all-new perspective on public managers and politician’s accountability towards citizens. It tends to shift public administration to an open system making citizens an important stakeholder. Public participation has been reported as frequently used in service delivery and management (mostly budgetary) decisions. Public administration scholars and practitioners analysed, in the last decade, the different ways of citizens participation, their motivation, impact on public management and public officer opinion concerning citizen’s co-management (Yang & Callaham, 2007; Handely, Milam, & Howell-Moroney, 2010; Wang, 2001).
This paper proposes to test the relation between the mechanisms to voce citizen, political responsiveness and citizen political culture. Firstly, we argue that citizens participation is greater and meaningful according to the level of ethical responsibility displayed by politicians. The second explanation is based on the degree of citizen political culture and agues that in jurisdiction where citizens are more aware of and more motivated to follow public policies, there will be a higher level of public participation. Finally, we argue that there are contextual factors, that also play and important role in this accountability process.
We gathered data for this paper from a survey conducted among local governments in Portugal. Citizen Participation, as a dependent variable, was studied in two alternative dimensions: on the one hand, use of participation mechanism and on the other decision making process. In the survey respondents were asked to rank how often they use participation mechanism and in which specific decision making process. As independent variables, we use political responsiveness and citizen political culture. Responsiveness to participation values was obtained from a ranking based on respondents’ perception on public participation. Citizen political culture was measured using a set of three indicators: concentration of mass media; education level; electoral participation.
Description
Keywords
Civic participation
Citation
Rodrigues, Miguel; Pinto, Liliana (2011). Accountability towards citizens: stakeholder perception from Portuguese local government. In 15th Annual Conference of the International Research Society for Public Management. Dublin