Chapter 10 analyzes the relationship between citizen participation and citizen expertise, particularly in the political domain. New types of intelligent citizen engagement are emerging like mass deliberation, mass voting, and social media activism. Mass deliberation describes the evolvement of new democratic institutions that aim to recruit citizens in direct participation. Two examples, the Citizens' Council in Ostbelgien and the online ideation platform Better Reykjavik, are part of this new trend. Mass voting is another type of citizen participation that has become increasing popularity because of the internet. Technological platforms make it easy to let everyone vote, such as the Five Star Movement does with its party members in Italy. Social media activism has also become increasingly important. This involves both informal political debate and political activism, which the social movement My Stealthy Freedom exemplifies. All these CI projects build on different conception of participatory diversity. In addition, transparent collective work is important in promoting intelligent engagement between large groups, both in scientific work like crowd peer review or political processes like the Icelandic constitutional experiment. However, there is a concern about the threats against democracy that dysfunctional engagement pose such as fake news and echo chambers in social media.

In this chapter, I shall undertake an in-depth analysis of how in-office Italian populists understand parliaments. Before going into the technicalities of constitutional law however, it is necessary to frame the issue in a broader perspective and mention the kind of politics that the Five Star Movement has in mind.

Democratic backsliding and its effectsare gaining momentum within Public Administration research as populist parties start to implement their political agendas. Despite the increasing relevance of the topic, the local government is seldom mentioned. This gap is especially relevant as many populist parties govern at first and even only at the local level, playing a crucial role in shaping local politics, public services, and administrative reform. This chapter explores the strategies and the impact of technocratic populism on the public administration in three European cities. It investigates how technocratic populist parties and leaders in cities interact with bureaucracy and combine different strategies of democratic backsliding: centralizing of administrative structures, disciplining the bureaucracy, and controlling societal participation. It also examines the role of ICT tools and innovations within the populist strategies. The empirical analysis showed that technocratic populists employ, with varying success, strategies to transform public administration. However, there are also considerable differences among cases that point to heterogeneity within this populist category.

This chapter provides an account of the dynamics of administrative change and bureaucratic resilience under populist governments in Italy, focusing on the first two decades of the 2000s, which have been characterized by the intermittent presence of populist parties in government. A noticeable feature of Italy is that it has displayed both right-wing and left-wing forms of populism. Political parties in Italy have displayed radically different forms of populism, and have also changed their stance over time. Our main argument is that populist governments in Italy have displayed a marked chasm between the level of talk and the level of action when it comes to public administration and the reform of the bureaucracy, and that the level of administrative continuity has been significant.