This book will satisfy quantitative and qualitative researchers alike, and will serve as an exemplar on how to conduct effective and systematic comparative research. It will act as a blueprint for comparative research in other universes of analysis, and finally, I congratulate all editors in producing such a remarkable, scholarly and well-researched tome as a first-rate addition to the field of policy studies.

Local Government Studies

'Deploying a sophisticated multi-method approach, Font, della Porta, Sintomer and their colleagues take the study of participatory possibilities to a new level. A masterful guide to the emerging world of participatory innovation in Southern Europe.'

John S. Dryzek, Australian National University, Distinguished Professor of Political Science

This wonderful book makes welcome and significant contributions to the literature on participatory democracy. The authors offer thoughtful analysis of comparative data on attempts to institutionalize participatory initiatives. But just as significantly, the focus is on Southern Europe: an arena of participatory activity that has been overlooked in the literature for too long.

Graham Smith, University of Westminster, Professor of Politics

This remarkable book represents the best new trends in the studies of politics today: it is empirically very rich without being empiricist; it is theoretically sophisticated; it draws on the logics of both the case study and of the comparison; and it is attentive to culture and context without being reductive. Its authors are each individually important in the landscape of political science, but the book is actually greater than the sum of its parts. I expect it will set the next generation of research agendas.

Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Professor of Individualized Studies and Sociology, New York University

This book represents an indispensable reference for researchers addressing participatory democracy and democratic innovations because it is the first systematic comparative research that analyses top-down participatory experiences in Southern Europe, an area which has always been considered a laboratory of democracy by political scientists.

European Politics and Society

What do we really know about what we call participatory processes? Are the most well-known cases a good representation of the broader universe of experiences developed over the last years? What are they, why do they appear, how do they work and what impacts do they have? These are the main questions that the book addresses … Certainly, these processes required careful and rigorous research that enabled their relevance to be ascertained. And this is what this book ambitiously does, with a determined academic rigor that allows participation to be analysed in a dispassionate way, removed from individual preferences towards these democratic practices … In sum, we can clearly ascertain that this book is the closest we have to a clear picture of the reality of the existing participatory processes developed by public administrations. (In House Translation)

Revista Española de Ciencia Política