Who should (not) participate? Public service organisations’ attitudes towards participation in policy-making modes

Governments increasingly experiment with participation in policy-making, in an attempt to create more responsiveness and trust among citizens. Despite the abundance of literature on participatory policy-making, the attitude towards this of the organisations implementing public policy has seldom been studied. This article addresses public service organisations (PSOs) operating in a mixed-form market, and studies their attitude towards different participatory policy-making modes. We assume their attitude is dependent on their level of publicness, operationalised by legal status and integrative publicness. Our results show that, overall, PSOs prefer participation by sectoral organisations, and client participation in policy-making, compared to other policy-making modes. These results can partly be explained by PSOs’ publicness. We conclude that the often-cited advantages of citizen participation in policy-making are not (yet) appreciated by all PSOs: for PSOs as the implementers of policies the perspective of clients in policy making is most important.