What is driving the increasing presence of citizen participation initiatives?

Nowadays, there is an imperative for governments to be more responsive to community needs and public sector modernization programmes are introducing opportunities for citizen participation. This paper seeks to analyse the diffusion of these initiatives in local governments through the analysis of experiences in OECD and MERCOSUR countries. This paper argues that citizen participation represents the interest of governments in changing either public sector management or the perceived image of government. We also explore whether the administrative culture and other variables contribute to explaining the differences between initiatives. Our results indicate that the search for legitimacy is the rationale to explain the implementation of citizen participation.