The impact of institutional context on government-citizen initiative interaction and performance: findings from four countries with different polity models

This paper examines the relationship between citizen initiatives and governments across four countries characterized by different polity models. It contributes to the literature in two specific ways. It first tests the effects... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines the relationship between citizen initiatives and governments across four countries characterized by different polity models. It contributes to the literature in two specific ways. It first tests the effects of government support on citizen initiative performance on a large scale basis by using survey data collected in the four countries. It thereby pays specific attention to the role of government boundary spanners in shaping and enhancing this support. Second, it compares the relationship between citizen initiatives and governments between four countries and examines differences in government attitude, type and level of support and level of red tape faced by citizen initiatives. We deliberately selected countries that score differently on two constitutive dimensions: their level of ‘corporateness’ and their level of ‘statism’ (Jepperson, 2002): Germany, France, Sweden and the UK. Differences in the nature of the interaction, level of red tape faced by civic initiatives and responsiveness of local governments can therefore be expected. The (preliminary) results show that both government support in implementation and collaboration and in providing resources and resource acquisition positively impacts upon the performance of citizen initiatives. The role of competent government boundary spanners strongly enhances government support and is actually more strongly impacting on citizen initiative performance: the relationship between government support and citizen initiative performance disappears when government boundary spanning is added to the model. Comparing the countries revealed some significant differences in means scores on government support, attitude and experienced level of red tape. These differences are partly in line with the distinct polity models of the countries. However, not all comparative findings can be explained by differences in statism or corporateness, suggesting other factors, such as recent policy discourses on active citizenship, should be taken into account here.