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One of the current challenges of democracy is the increasing complexity of governing and, consequently, increasing civil servant influence at the expense of elected representatives. This is also affected by what politician-civil servant relations look like and by contextual aspects, although knowledge about the extent and impact of this influence is selective. Thus, this paper examines civil servants' influence in evidently complex and resource-intensive processes by conducting a study of citizen dialogues in two rural Swedish municipalities. Expectedly, traits of this context can be recognised throughout the results. The findings point to the position of the involved civil servants as important to the level of civil servant influence in these processes. They further suggest that process complexity may contribute to amplifying already high civil servant influence. However, they also confirm expectations about civil servants' dispositions towards political legitimate processes, which appeared to dampen the impact of the skewed influence. I conclude that, with these contextual preconditions, the studied form of process can potentially increase civil servant influence. I also argue that, given the size and form of this study, this highlights the need for further studies in local rural contexts and local politician-civil servant relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusion in local policy processes through citizen dialogue has been depicted as both the solution to many democratic challenges and a democratic problem in itself. Nevertheless, it has been widely adopted throughout Europe. The hierarchically flat, co-governing setup of these instruments can be expected to clash with representative-heavy political cultures, such as that in Sweden, which raises questions about what role they end up having in this context and whether they complement representative democracy. By conducting a comparative study of two rural Swedish municipalities, we confirmed that traditional, hierarchical governance indeed dominates the studied processes. Our results also suggest that, due to skewed participation and unclear input handling, the studied instrument does not appear to constitute a viable complementary democratic institution in terms of representation. Instead, we argue that, conducted in this way, it may potentially fill a range of different purposes without aspiring to fully complement representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]