The Democratic Character of Public Encounters: Theory and Evidence (UK & Italy)

• In Event: Public Administration and the Law in Democratic Contexts

Abstract

We present a novel approach for examining the democratic content of public encounters, or direct focused interactions between unelected public and private agents. While public encounters have inspired robust literatures (e.g., Bartels 2013), we contend that existing work has not congealed around questions of democracy. First, we build an analytic framework that relates the experience of public encounter to the belief systems of the individuals it involves. Second, building on recent normative arguments about democratically responsible public administration (Bertelli 2021; Bertelli and Schwartz 2023) we show how certain public encounters have important democratic content and the potential to reshape the belief systems of those involved. Third, to provide an initial test of these normative expectations in two ways. A pair of survey experiments examine how knowledge and explanations of administrative procedures influence respondents' perceptions of the importance of normative principles and perceptions of responsible action in general population samples from the UK and Italy. Adapting a recent methodological innovation in the political knowledge literature (Kraft 2023), a mixed methods study explores if and to what extent exposure to democracy-preserving encounters influences respondents' understandings of the administrative process and its underlying normative principles in a general population sample from the UK.

Authors

• Anthony Michael Bertelli, Pennsylvania State University

• Silvia Cannas, Bocconi