Page - 190 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

There is a political will to take participation seriously. A set of criteria for a good standard of participation processes has been defined, but the implementation of those criteria is difficult in practice, because it is influenced to a great extent by authorities and individual actions and their abilities and readiness to learn. Furthermore, questions of compatibility of participatory elements and the underlying claim of participation as codetermination in decision-making with the representative democratic model are still open and have to be solved. 3. New Challenges through Participation The traditional role of participation in representative democracy is quite small. Mainly it is based on participation in elections and memberships in political parties or interest groups. In Germany, other forms of small scale participation are possible on local and federal government levels, e.g. hearings, town hall meetings and referenda. Several principles are counted among the basic characteristics of representative democracy (Biegelbauer & Hansen 2011). These include equality, representation and accountability. Equality and representation are intertwined which means that representation of all interests is the overall aim, irrespective of professional career or social status. Subsequently, decision-makers should form a representative portrayal of society and decision-making processes should not be contingent on minority interests (Biegelbauer & Hansen 2011; Saward 2016). According to the representative democracy model the main challenge in implementing participatory elements is to guarantee equality and representativity in decision-making processes (see Hoppe 2010; Michels 2011). Decker and Fleischer (2012) analysed citizen dialogues introduced by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in 2010 and 2011 on future technologies and discussed problems of equality and representativity in participatory processes as well as the consideration of the outcome of theses dialogues in decision-making. They concluded that expectations on representation were not fulfilled although more than 1,000 citizens per dialogue were involved based on random sampling. In practice the dialogues showed a bias towards older, highly-educated male participants due to voluntary self-selection processes (Alcantara et al. 2016; Benighaus et al. 2016). Nevertheless, Decker and Fleischer (2012, 97) came to the conclusion that if quality of deliberation could be fulfilled (1,000 representative citizens in table rounds of 8 to 10 people) “the outcomes could be considered as representative” and put “pressure on the Government to actually implement the recommendations [...] and not just to consider it as ‘another form of advice’” (Decker & Fleischer 2012, 97). Apart from that the societal challenge is not only to guarantee efficiency of participatory elements in decision-making, which means that participation is expected to be more than information and should tend towards codetermination. Regarding equality and therefore legitimacy of participatory processes political authorities and decision-makers should keep in mind that power can be applied to a greater extent in participatory processes than in representative decision-making processes (Geißel 2009). Moreover, it is difficult to identify all preferences of people concerned, because informational costs are extremely high (Feindt & Newig 2005). As a consequence, not all affected individuals can be informed and participate in the process, individuals’ own interests predominate and participants might be overloaded by the complexity of the issues. This can lead to selectivity which in turn challenges equality (see Craig 2014; Swyngedouw 2011, 2005; Thaa 2016). 190