Towards Robust Hybrid Democracy in Scandinavian Municipalities?

Abstract

This article calls for the development of democratic hybrids that combine elements of representative democracy with elements of participatory and deliberative democracy. It presents and evaluates an empirical model of hybrid democracy from a Danish municipality and tests whether the positive Danish experiences can be transferred to a Norwegian municipality with less favorable local conditions. The finding is that the hybrid model of democracy is relatively robust in the face of context variation, not least due to conducive local dynamics in the Norwegian case. The relative robustness of the so‐called ‘Gentofte model’ may stimulate its diffusion in countries sharing key elements of the Scandinavian model and inspire municipalities in other countries to experiment with the development of hybrid democracy. The diffusion of hybrid democracy helps to enhance the overall performance of local democracy and reduce the inherent tension between democratic leadership and democratic equality.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 73 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.