Democracy has been going from triumph to triumph ever since the Second World War. Yet the same trends of development to which the OECD has been drawing attention can be seen also in Finland. (1) Even in stable democracies, polling percentages in elections have been falling. (2) The memberships of political parties have been dwindling, which is weakening one of the central implementers of representative democracy. (3) Opinion polls reveal that citizens’ confidence in the institutions of society is weakening.

In several countries, especially Finland’s Nordic neighbours, the state of democracy and ways of improving it are the subject of an ongoing discourse. In Finland, the matter has been given little attention in recent years. That is why it is now time to subject democracy to a kind of “general checkup”. It would be good at the same time to agree on the central criteria by which the status of citizen participation and democracy can be evaluated on the national and municipal administrative levels. It would be advantageous to have the so called special “democracy audits” at our disposal. In fact, in Finland we are currently developing such tools for the use of the municipalities. The democracy audits provide necessary early warnings of possible problems and help to focus on where improvements are needed.

A second category of reasons stems from the awakening and reassessment that recent decades have seen in relation to civil society and the social capital which it generates. Parallel to this, active citizenship has become a focus of attention in Finland and within international organisation, also as an objective of lifelong learning. Active citizenship does not necessarily come into being on its own; instead, there are knowledge- and skill-related prerequisites for it. We need a renewable understanding of how active citizenship is learned and of our own skill at getting it to grow.

Updated on August 2, 2005