La influencia ciudadana en la decisión pública, y la influencia de los factores de cultura política, y apoyo y recursos de la administración en la participación ciudadana local en Bogotá

Resumen

Citizen participation, within the theoretical discussions on democracy and public management, has become more salient in the academic literature. This interest has been built up, in part, from the connection between citizen participation on the one hand, and multiple benefits for both authorities and citizens regarding governability and institutional legitimacy, on the other. As a result, governments in different countries have striven to implement strategies that promote citizen participation in public affairs. Therefore, different participation spaces have been created in which citizens can directly participate.The characteristics of the participation in each scenario vary, and indeed results do too. Accordingly, academics try to make sense of citizen participation as a process and of its results. Certainly, this is an unfinished business, with several methodological and theoretical proposals. However, they all have in common the interest of studying the participation phenomenon, understood as the citizens’ direct involvement with the aim of influencing the public decision-making process.In this sense, this dissertation attempts to account for the citizen participation process, at the local level, in Bogotá, by means of its two main objectives: to characterize the influence on public decisions citizens that participate at the local level in Bogotá have, within the frame of the usage of new citizen participation spaces, identifying along these lines difficulties and success factors these participatory experiences have. Secondly, to identify the impact that political culture and social capital, on the one hand, and the authorities’ support and resources, on the other, have on local citizen participation in Bogotá...