Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Consultation or Contest: The Danger of Mixing Modes.
AU - Bishop, Patrick
AU - Kane, John
N1 - RAE_import_type : Journal article RAE_uoa_type : Politics and International Studies
PY - 2002/3/1
Y1 - 2002/3/1
N2 - This paper argues that public consultative procedures undertaken by governments or their public services sometimes go awry because of certain confusions as to the nature and purposes of consultation. One of the most important of these is a tendency to view consultation as an exercise in policy determination by the public rather than as public input into the representative democratic process whose ultimate use is to be defined by the elected decision-makers. The result of this confusion is a tendency to misunderstand or overestimate what public consultations can achieve, and a failure to make a distinction between occasions when such consultations are useful and occasions when they must give way to explicit political contest. Three levels of activity — the technical, the transactional and the political — are analytically distinguished along with the modes of action-response appropriate to each — in order to explain and clarify the nature of good consultative practice.
AB - This paper argues that public consultative procedures undertaken by governments or their public services sometimes go awry because of certain confusions as to the nature and purposes of consultation. One of the most important of these is a tendency to view consultation as an exercise in policy determination by the public rather than as public input into the representative democratic process whose ultimate use is to be defined by the elected decision-makers. The result of this confusion is a tendency to misunderstand or overestimate what public consultations can achieve, and a failure to make a distinction between occasions when such consultations are useful and occasions when they must give way to explicit political contest. Three levels of activity — the technical, the transactional and the political — are analytically distinguished along with the modes of action-response appropriate to each — in order to explain and clarify the nature of good consultative practice.
U2 - 10.1111/1467-8500.00261
DO - 10.1111/1467-8500.00261
M3 - Journal article
VL - 61
SP - 87
EP - 94
JO - Australian Journal of Public Administration
JF - Australian Journal of Public Administration
SN - 1467-8500
IS - 1
ER -