Instructional Outcomes of School-Based Participative Decision Making

Building on the notion of transparency as a strong democratic value and theories of procedural justice, this article reports an explorative experimental test whether transparency in decision making may lead to increased perceived legitimacy in terms of decision acceptance and trust. This is done in a context of difficult decisions of high importance for citizens – namely priority setting in public health care. An experiment was designed in which ordinary citizens were presented with a description of a case of priority setting between two groups with different health care needs. One group was given no information at all on the decision‐making procedure, as an example of non‐transparent decision making, and six groups were presented with different descriptions of the decision‐making procedure, as examples of transparency in decision making. The transparent procedures were derived from three basic forms of democratic decision making: representation, direct participation and expert decision making. A second manipulation framed the decision‐making procedure alternatively in positive or negative terms in order to capture media framing effects as well. According to the findings of the study, transparent decision‐making procedures tend to weaken rather than strengthen general trust in health care – a finding that might reveal obstacles to attempts to strengthen the legitimacy of health care by employing transparent procedures. The results also show that while the form of decision making had no significant impact on perceived legitimacy, positive or negative framing of a decision‐making procedure influences public perceptions of both the procedure and the decision outcome.

Why people comply with rules, why they contribute to public goods and why they behave prosocially in general is a fundamental question of social science. In the tradition of Gary Becker and the chicago school, economists have traditionally considered punishment by the authorities as the main or sole reason why people would comply with the law and contribute to public goods. In this thesis I argue that this model is importantly incomplete and leads to lopsided or even mistaken policy advice. I stress the importance of social interactions between agents and apply game theoric examples to show how the standard model can be enriched. In the second chapter, I survey the empirical literature, both experimental and econometric, on the deterrence literature. From this review I conclude that the literature does not demonstrate a robust effect of deterrence. I then review theoretical work in which sanctions interact with social norms or long-term processes of preferences formation. In such models deterrence often does not have the straightforward effect that it has in standard theory. The chapter concludes with an example: a model of crime in neighborhoods where signaling is important. I show that in this case, the threat of police violence may be counterproductive on its own, but can be useful in combination with other, softer approaches. The third chapter departs from the fact that the population of contributors to a public good consists of a mix of reciprocal and selfish agents, an assumption borne out by much experimental evidence. I then show that if there exists a government or authority that is superiorly informed about the fractions of these types in the population, a policy of harsh sanctions may convey that there are a lot of bad types in equilibrium. As a result, equilibrium sanctions will generally be lower then they would be under symmetric information. In the fourth chapter, I report the results of a laboratory experiment aimed to test if sanctions can indeed have a signaling effect. In accordance with the signaling hypothesis I find that ‘endogenous sanctions’ tend to make people more pessimistic, especially those who were optimistic at the start of the game. In the last chapter, I model an alternative approach to compliance. I consider the widely reported fact that the possibility to participate in a decision making procedure tends to raise voluntary compliance with authorities, even if the actual decision is not beneficial to the agent. I show that the introduction of a decision making procedure in which an agent can change a decision of the policymaker with some probability, can be a signal of altruistic motives of the policy maker towards the agent. This means that even if she does not change the outcome of the decision in practice, the agent trusts the policy maker to treat her well in the future, and will engage in more voluntary compliance. In the Epilogue I add some remarks on the potential of participatory decision making as an alternative policy tool to the standard economic command and control framework. van der Weele, Joel (2009), On Sanctions and Signals: How Formal and Informal Mechanisms Produce Compliance European University Institute DOI: 10.2870/12176