Analysis of the Concept of Citizen Participation: Towards Theoretical Organizing

Due to the importance of citizen participation in governance, a lot of research has been done to explain this concept and each of them has looked at it from one angle, and this has caused confusion and dispersion in explaining the concept of citizen participation. The purpose of this study is to provide the conceptual model of citizen participation in order to organize previous studies

This qualitative research has an applied orientation and its approach is deductive and its time horizon is one-section and the data collection method is documentary study and thematic analysis technique has been used to analyze the data.

In this research, in the first stage four overarching themes of “Types of citizen participation", "factors affecting citizen participation", "requirements of citizen participation" and "consequences of citizen participation" were defined through studying the literature of participation and citizen participation. Then the main themes and sub themes of these overarching themes were identified by gathering and analysing the studies about these overarching themes. In consequence the main themes of participation method, degree of concentration, participants, subject, context and time were identifed under the overarching theme of “Types of citizen participation", the main themes of human factors and organizational factors were identifed under the overarching theme of "factors affecting citizen participation", and the similar main themes of related to governance and related to citizens were identifed under the overarching themes of "requirements of citizen participation" and "consequences of citizen participation".

It is expected that this research, while providing a comprehensive picture of the concept of citizenship participation, can theoretically organize it and create a common concept in this field and help to realize it in practice.