Interactive decision making has become a recurrent practice, especially in local
governments (Edelenbos, 1999; Klijn, 2008). Many administrations, in fact, involve
citizens, social organizations and broadly speaking stakeholders, in the early stages of
policy making, before the development of policy proposals (Kickert et al., 1997;
McLaverty, 2002). The intended purpose is to adopt better and more democratic policy
decisions, avoiding recurrent problems encountered in usual “go alone” decision-making
(Edelenbos and Klijn, 2005); at the same time, interactive decision-making may enhance
public administrations’ intangible assets (Coglianese, 2002; Irving & Stansbury, 2004)
and establish bridging relationships with their publics (Van den Bosch & Van Riel, 1998).
Generally speaking, stakeholders might provide decision makers with information they
lack, leading to more informed solutions; conflicts and use of veto powers might be
prevented through information and consultation (Bobbio, 2005); citizen and social
organizations might support the implementation of policies that are regarded as more
democratic and legitimate. Interaction can take place through many organisational
arrangements: public hearings, referenda, participatory planning procedures, citizens’
juries, etc. (OECD, 2001; Bobbio, 2005). On the other side, interactive policy making is
not riskless. Decisions on who or what group constitutes a stakeholder to be consulted
arises problems of democratic accountability (Barnes et al., 2003); vested interests could
affect decisions; decision making process might become too time consuming (Irving &
Stansbury, 2004).
Although interactive policy-making has been largely debated, how to evaluate its
effects is still under-analyzed (Koppenjian, 2008). The present article tries to conceptually
and empirically contribute to this debate. More specifically, the main research questions
the paper addresses is: how do organizational arrangements influence the outcomes of p. 3
interactive policy making? The article proposes, consequently, that the organizational
structures adopted in practice to manage an interactive process influences significantly its
results, although mediated by some contextual factors. In other terms, we base our
analysis on two assumptions: the importance of network management (Kickert et al.,
1997; Klijn, 2008) and the influence of formal organizational structure in shaping
behaviours (Egeberg, 2003). In the light of this assumption, a model for qualitative
analysis has been developed, mainly enriching some previous contributions in the public
administration literature. Subsequently, the model has been used to analyse five case
studies, with minor adaptations suggested by the data collected during the research. The
paper presents the conceptual model and the results of five case studies.
