From buffers to lever for action: the democratic roles of public servants involved in deliberative processes

The rise of deliberative democracy is shaking up the traditional missions and the role commonly assigned to public servants in the policy-making process. New public management has changed the classical relations between citizen and public servants. The top-down implementation of deliberative processes by public administration may have changed the public servants' roles even more. The aim of this paper is to understand what public servants mean by deliberative processes and if deliberative processes change the way they conceive their role as public servants. Do they think they play a democratic role? To answer the research question, we have interviewed four public servants involved in the organisation of a mini-public on mobility initiated by the Brussels regional parliament in Belgium (and nine other interviews are foreseen).