Ágnes Bátory and Sara Svensson both from the Central European University Budapest co-authored a remarkable paper about public consultations. They analyzed Viktor Orbán’s national consultations in Hungary, these are probably the most wide-scale consultative exercises in contemporary Europe. Some of our readers might not know that the Orbán government repeatedly sent questionnaires to every household in the country in some 8 million copies.
The alleged purpose was to channel public preferences into the Orbán government’s decision-making on issues from unemployment to how migration should be handled by the EU. However there were important shortcomings, the weakness of procedural guarantees and bias in the framing of the questions marked out the consultations as a tool of political manipulation and propaganda tool rather than a genuine instrument for participation.
The authors inject a dose of healthy skepticism into the debate about consultations to show that there are circumstances in which public consultations will achieve anything but greater legitimacy and better policy-outcomes. They discuss the questionable assumptions in the participatory governance literature and examine a recent example of the misuse, and abuse of public input.
You may download and read the paper by clicking here.