Citizen Participation and the government decision making capacity

Citizen Participation and the government decision making capacity

Citizen participation is a right of citizens to intervene in public management through different mechanisms, which are exercised at different levels, whether local, regional or national.

The rights of citizen participation and control are established in the state's political constitution. The participation of citizens retains a certain balance and the decision-making capacity of the government is, perhaps, the most important dilemma for the consolidation of democracy.

The so-called governability of a political system is subordinated to this counterweight, which is usually posed in terms of an increase in demands and expectations over a limited response capacity of governments.

Governments assume their responsibilities of what is supposed to be their representative quality, but which in any way reproduces well the daily difficulties faced by any public administration.

The public resources are always meager to solve all social demands, even among the societies of better development and higher incomes. And one of the biggest challenges for any government is the wise allocation of those limited resources based on certain social, economic and political priorities.

If we had a simple vision of the democratic regime, we could infer that the best government is the one that results in each and every one of the demands posed by citizens in the shortest time possible. However, it happens that such a government could not be in the best conditions of accessibility of resources, the requirements of society would tend to increase much faster than the true potential response of governments.

Each requirement that is satisfied would generate new ones, while the resources to the scope of the government would be irremediably limited, to the dynamics of its economy. So, at the limit of the conflicts that could develop the permanent tension between the aspirations of equality and freedom among citizens, a regime capable of satisfying the slightest inclination of their nations, would end up destroying itself.

Beyond the imagination, for the rest, in the modern world, there have been tested two types of political regime that have tried to control with the same rigidity both the demands of citizens and the responses of their governments - fascism and communism-, and both have failed.

The freedom of individuals doesn’t let to be governed fluently, nor is it possible to cease without further desires to achieve greater equality. So, modern democracies move between both aspirations, in the investigation of that balance between demands and responsiveness; between citizen participation and government decision-making capacity.