Democracy in Hybrid Governance

Abstract

If public administrators think of the relationship between network governance and representative democracy in different ways, as we showed in Chapter 5, what are the consequences of new practices of hybrid governance for the democratic fabric of our cities and societies? Governance transitions, such as those from the legacy of politically headed public bureaucracies to more diverse and hybridised forms of governance, are inevitably generative of democratic consequences. At a fundamental level, they change the structure of rules and incentives through which access to, and decisions within, and outcomes from the public policy process are configured. For example, the development of deliberative polling and new forms of e-democracy to some extent opens the black box of policy making to the ‘wisdom of the crowds’. And outside government itself, the growth of social-networking technology reduces the barriers to social movement formation and increases their ability to mobilise actions and support in new and almost instantaneous ways.