Panel Paper:
Citizen Engagement in a Dutch Context
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Since the 1950s citizen engagement has been used within the government to improve the quality of democracy. As a consequence of building up the Dutch welfare state by non-profit organizations active citizen engagement was a building stone. As the faith and trust of citizens in governments have declined citizen engagement seems to become more important. Several studies suggest that active citizenship helps to improve social cohesion, support of citizens, trust of citizens, live-ability of communities and safety. Nevertheless, there are also disadvantages known (e.g. increased expenses, difficulty in measuring effectiveness).
Consequently of these advantages a development within both national and local governments is perceivable in which new practices of citizen engagement emerge. One of the challenge governments face is the declining trust of citizens in national and local governments. With regard to citizen engagement the assumption is that more engagement leads to more trust in governments in general and thus also in municipalities. With the emerge of these new citizen engagement practices the question remains if the use of citizen engagement indeed contributes to trust of citizens in their government? This question is central in current study and examines if citizen engagement is a solution for the declining trust of citizens.
The purpose of this research is to obtain insight in from which perspective and how the citizens of three medium sized Dutch municipalities (i.e. Zeist, IJsselstein and Ermelo) view trust within their municipalities according to a Likert-scale and to the extent in which they engage by a cross sectional study in 2017. By means of an ordinal regression our several assumptions are tested. Findings are derived from three questionnaires involving 1400 citizens in total. In these questionnaires the following points are discussed: How much trust do citizens have in their own municipality? Which form of engagement do citizens use? And which municipal role do citizens prefer? Also we use several socio-economic explanations as age, education and gender to explain trust. The findings reveal that trust is mainly explained by citizen engagement. In addition, citizens who report to engage multiple times contributes to the amount of trust citizens have in their own municipality.
List of references:
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Irvin, R. A., & Stansbury, J. (2004). Citizen participation in decision making: Is it worth the effort?. Public administration review, 64(1), 55-65.
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Verhoeven, I., & Tonkens, E. (2013). Talking active citizenship: Framing welfare state reform in England and the Netherlands. Social Policy and Society, 12(03), 415-426.
Full Paper:
