Advocacy initiatives for public culture and democratic vision in transition countries: experiences from Romania

This paper seeks to give an account of the contribution of advocacy initiatives for public culture to policy change. Experiences from Romania between 1990 and 2009 are explored through a contrastive theoretical framework of pluralist and deliberative democracy. The paper advances the argument that advocacy initiatives for public culture with a deliberative core can permeate the decision-making configuration and lead to policy change, even in a pluralist democracy participation infrastructure. At the same time, in cases in which a univocal source of legitimation of the narrative storyline of policy-making is mainstreamed within the decision-making discourse, bottom-up participation and deliberative democracy bear the risk of being rendered powerless of any real potential to influence policy-making in culture. Policy implications for current advocacy initiatives for public culture are considered.