Search

Citizen participation has been a popular format in policy fields like environmental and climate policies for many years. More recently, however, it has extended to issues of foreign policy which has long been considered as a prerogative of the executive in democratic systems. This paper analyses citizen participation in German foreign policy by comparing deliberative-participatory processes implemented by the German Federal Foreign Office (AA) and the Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety (BMU). We draw on recent scholarship in the field of deliberative democracy in order to gain a better understanding how the two ministries understand citizen participation, how they implement these processes, and what effects they have on formal decision-making. Using interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, we investigate two processes of citizen participation in depth. We argue that ministerial understandings of citizen participation determine how they design formats in their respective field. This leads to quite divergent implementations and results of deliberative-participatory formats in the field of foreign policy, depending on whether the AA or the BMU initiates them.

This article analyzes how and why foreign policy (FP)-makers use dialogue and participation processes (DPPs) with (groups of) individual citizens as a source of public opinion. Taking Germany as a case study and drawing on DPP initiatives by the Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt, AA) since 2014, we analyze the officials’ motivation for establishing such processes and find four different sets of motivation: (1) image campaigning, (2) educating citizens, (3) listening to citizens, and (4) changing the citizens’ role in FP. Our article makes three contributions. First, we provide a novel typology of the sources of public opinion upon which FP-makers can draw. Second, our study points to the importance of, and provides a framework for, analyzing how officials engage with public opinion at the micro-level, which has so far been understudied in FP analysis. Finally, our empirical analysis suggests that both carefully assessing and influencing public opinion feature prominently in motivation, whereas PR purposes are of minor importance. Recasting the citizens’ role in FP gains in importance over time and may mirror the increased need to legitimize FP in Western democracies vis-à-vis their publics.

By critically engaging the literature on the inclusion-moderation hypothesis, this paper seeks to show how the normative structure of secularism constitutes, enables, and restricts the discursive space in which Islamists can justify political action. It analyzes changes in Tunisian Ennahda's discourse (2011–2016) as an attempt to navigate between standards of recognition imposed on them by the normative power of secularism on the one hand, and what they can convincingly integrate into their own platform on the other hand.