Does Democratic Anchorage Matter?

Does democracy matter? This is an intriguing question. Not only as a normative question, democracy is a value in itself that can be cherished for that reason alone but also as a question of its impact on the outcomes of governance processes. In this article, the authors look at the question of to what degree citizens and politicians are involved in governance processes around environmental projects and what the effect is of these forms of democratic embedding on the outcomes of those projects. The research is based on a survey in 2006 that resulted in 337 respondents involved in spatial projects in the Netherlands. The analysis shows that, according to respondents, both stakeholders and political parties are well involved in the process (stakeholders slightly more than political actors). The authors also find that both democratic anchorage forms are related to perceived outcomes, but only stakeholder involvement has a strong significant effect on outcomes.

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