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This paper argues that the effect of income inequality on economic growth depends on the level of democracy in a country and whether people believe that redistribution is an essential component of the democratic process. The paper uses the World Values Survey to focus on countries where the majority believe that taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor an essential component of democracy, and on countries where the majority believe that the rich do not buy elections in their country. Using the threshold estimation technique introduced by Hansen (1999), the analysis suggests the presence of a statistically significant threshold income inequality level, below which democracy does not have a statistically significant effect on growth, and above which an increase in the dose of democratization has a statistically significant negative effect on economic growth. The interpretation is that in countries where income inequality is high, and the majority believe that taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor is an essential component of democracy, a higher level of democratic governance allows people to support redistribution policies which can deter investment and economic growth.

How does public participation in planning and environmental governance engender democratic legitimacy? Drawing a distinction between the optimistic and critical participation literature, I argue that both these strands of research have tended to neglect the public's perspective on this question. This oversight has, in effect, produced strongly normative and essentialist understandings of democratic legitimacy that treat legitimicy as intrinsic to either process or substance of participatory governance. Proceeding from an anti-essentialist understanding of democratic legitimacy, which primarily relies on contemporary social perceptions and expectations of democratic institutions, I outline a normatively agnostic framework for exploring how legitimacy is engendered through participation. Using this framework to investigate citizen experiences of participation processes in Sweden, I highlight how democratic legitimacy can gainfully be understood as a multidimensional, provisional, and contingent quality that individual citizen participants "confer" and "retract" in a plurality of ways. Based on this, I conclude by suggesting that sustained research engagement with the public's expectations and experiences of participatory governance can reveal critical insights into the potentials and challenges for realizing democratic planning outcomes.

How does public participation in planning and environmental governance engender democratic legitimacy? Drawing a distinction between the optimistic and critical participation literature, I argue that both these strands of research have tended to neglect the public's perspective on this question. This oversight has, in effect, produced strongly normative and essentialist understandings of democratic legitimacy that treat legitimicy as intrinsic to either process or substance of participatory governance. Proceeding from an anti-essentialist understanding of democratic legitimacy, which primarily relies on contemporary social perceptions and expectations of democratic institutions, I outline a normatively agnostic framework for exploring how legitimacy is engendered through participation. Using this framework to investigate citizen experiences of participation processes in Sweden, I highlight how democratic legitimacy can gainfully be understood as a multidimensional, provisional, and contingent quality that individual citizen participants "confer" and "retract" in a plurality of ways. Based on this, I conclude by suggesting that sustained research engagement with the public's expectations and experiences of participatory governance can reveal critical insights into the potentials and challenges for realizing democratic planning outcomes. ; QC 20200319

"Democracy" is a frequently used concept in the Western planning field. Scholars, practitioners, and citizens alike regularly deploy it to both explain and contest the nature and legitimacy of urban governance. And yet, in the planning literature, the concept of democracy itself is rarely explained or debated. The assumption being made is that its root meaning for planning is self-evident or agreed upon: public participation in, or mobilization against urban governance. However, my argument in this thesis proceeds from the opposite assumption: that far from self-explanatory or accepted, the contested meanings ascribed to democracy play a central role in shaping conflicts and experiences in planning—both in the literature and in practice. My overarching aim is to contribute with knowledge on this role by specifically examining what the substantial meaning of democracy is assumed to be according to actors in the field; that is, among planning scholars, practitioners, and citizens. The thesis is comprised of a cover essay and four empirical papers based on qualitative case study research on local authority planning in Sweden. In the cover essay, I explore the meanings ascribed to democracy among planning actors, first, by conducting a careful reading of key theoretical texts in the field and, second, by analyzing the individual papers' key findings. To help elicit these rarely explained, often implicit democratic meanings among planning actors, I develop a theoretical framework based on the work of historian Pierre Rosanvallon. He understands the democratic project as a ceaseless attempt to resolve the fundamental indeterminacy as to what constitutes its substantial meaning. This perpetual project is nourished by a deep-seated incompatibility between three of democracy's central ideological components: voluntarism, rationalism, and liberalism. Their incompatibility stems from how each of them is regularly mobilized in response to the pathological tendencies ascribed to the other. These responses, in turn, can be ...