Verkostodemokratia : teoreettinen analyysi politiikkaverkostojen demokratisoinnin haasteista

Kirjoittajat

• Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko

Abstrakti

This article discusses the preconditions and new forms of democracy on the basis of the logic of network society. The point of departure is the assumption that when the central functions of soci­ety are increasingly organised through networks, this should be reflected in a way or another in democracy as well. The fundamental problem is that networks have developed alongside public hierarchies – i.e. traditional bureaucracy and the institutions of representative democracy – as an organisational form that sets the agenda of and exerts influence on public policy without clearly instituted democratic control. The idea of network democracy proposed in this article comprises four theoretically grounded perspectives on the democratisation of networks, those of representa­tive democracy, associationalism, participatory network democracy and user democracy. This model provides a systematic account of the basic forms of the democratisation of various kinds of policy and administrative networks as well as the framework for assessing their functionality. The formation of network democracy is conceptualised as a two-layer process: the framework pro­cesses based on the political-administrative outer circle of the representative government, on the one hand, and the core processes of the inner circle that relies on network logic, on the other. Probably the greatest challenge of our time in this respect is to determine to what extent, if any, the core processes of network governance should be subject to democratic control.