Acceso usuarios
Cristina Leston-Bandeira, Sven T. Siefken
Public engagement has become a noticeable activity for parliaments across theworld. However, we lack understanding of its role despite considerabledevelopments in scholarly work on public engagement in the sciences andon deliberative and participatory democracy by social scientists. This articleprovides a framework to understand the significance of parliamentary publicengagement and to evaluate its effectiveness. It explains how parliamentarypublic engagement has emerged because of a representational shift inwhois doing the representing in parliament and inwhatis represented, followingkey societal changes. We define parliamentary public engagement, showingthe importance of differentiating between the activity, its effects and broaderdemocratic ideals. We identify information and education as the types ofengagement activity most developed by parliaments, with much still to do inconsultation and participation activities. The articlefinishes with a discussionof seven key challenges in developing and implementing effectiveinstitutional parliamentary public engagement practices
