Although early citizen participation experiments
often disappointed, requirements for involving the public
and actual involvement in administrative decision making have
grown substantially since the 1960s. In the United States, citizen
participation requirements had been attached to more than 150
federal programs by the end of the 1970s (Advisory Commission
on Intergovernmental Relations 1979). “By the mid-1980s,”
according to Frederickson, “citizen participation had modified the
usual methods of making decisions in a host of policy areas and
had taken its place as a major feature of democratic administration”
(1991, 406). Other democracies—from Brazil to Mexico to
the Netherlands—experienced similar trends (see Ackerman 2004;Fung and Wright 2001).