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The deficiencies of technocratic approaches to governing emergent risks and technologies in the face of radical uncertainty, political controversy and public distrust, has brought about increasing calls, and in some quarters concerted action, to democratise science across western democracies. This paper discusses some recent Uk examples of participation in contested science and technology decision-making, focusing on a number of high profile cases which are helping policy-political, business and civil society actors gain a better understanding of what precisely may be gained from bringing a much wider range of know ledges and values into the process. The Uk experience suggests that pressures are growing for more "upstream" (i.e. very early) engagement in opening up contentious issues to much wider societal framings than hitherto. The paper explores the contributions being made by an emerging epistemic community of academics and practitioners in the design, implementation and evaluation of participatory processes that are fit-for-purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at answering the following questions: which dimensions best describe governments' decision-making potential in parliamentary democracies? How Italy (1979-2008), Germany (1976-2009), Great Britain (1979-2010) and Spain (1982-2008) can be categorized in terms of such dimensions? I try to achieve these aims by proposing a complex, multidimensional index combining the most important sources of governments' decision-making potential., namely: the ideological cohesion of the executive (the most important feature); the «colour» of the government compared with the previous one (alternation in office); the number of partisan veto-players; the institutional context i.e. the relationship between government and parliament; the size of parliamentary majority (the least important feature). This index fits quite well with qualitative literature on comparative governmental systems, and seems a reliable tool that scholars could use when studying the decision-making potential of parliamentary governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]