Creating Legitimacy for Citizen Initiatives: Representation, Identity and Strategic Networking

Citizen-led initiatives raise practical and theoretical questions about the criteria by which their democratic legitimacy should be judged. While existing analytical and normative frameworks are problematically based on a `state'/`citizen' binary, a network ontology which sees these as strategically-deployed constructs is more practically adequate for analysis. We demonstrate this through a case of a successful citizen initiative, and conclude...