Meer of minder democratie? Een kwalitatief onderzoek naar de manier waarop burgers de democratie in Nederland beleven.

Abstract

Despite the fact that democracies -even in non-western countries- pop up like daisies, the debate on democracy has never been this comprehensive (Zakaria, 2003). Scientists, policy makers and politicians: they all seem to agree that democracy needs renewal, and that we should want is a ‘direct democracy’; a democracy model that aims to give the power to the people in the hope that this will revive the interaction between citizens and politics. In this explorative study we use four focus groups to investigate whether Dutch citizens themselves’ think adjustments on the current representative system are required, and whether they agree on the fact that more citizen participation –by means of introducing more elements of a direct democracy into the democracy- is desirable. Moreover, we also ask -in contrast with current research on this topic-, whether more power on behalf of experts could be beneficial. Thereby we also take the view of a ‘stealth democracy’, which stems from Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002), into account. Overall, participants of this study seem to agree that more direct democracy isn’t urgent, although citizens should always be able to exert an influence on decision-making, current opportunities to do so are sufficient. Besides this, participants of the focus groups raise objections when it comes to the capability of citizens to make important decisions. Next to this, participants draw attention to the public discourse, which –according to them- is largely affected by the influence of the media. Next to rejecting more direct democracy, participants disapprove about the possibility to give more power to experts as well. Presumably, subject of this opinion is the fact that in the Netherlands appealing on experts is quite common when it comes to important decisions to be made. Although adjusting the representative democracy by way of adding elements of a direct democracy or a stealth democracy cannot find lots of support among the participants, people are dissatisfied with the way the current system functions. Citizens seem to assign politicians a very complex task: although people still want politicians to be responsible for decision-making, decisions are not easily found legitimate. The participants level criticism at the self-interest of politicians and take offence of the political game in which politics mostly ends up. People declare they long for capable politicians who take the public into account while making decisions.