Scholars of politics are comfortable theorizing about the parliamentary process and individual political parties, but they are often guilty of ignoring the role of individual citizens except through opinion polls and voting statistics. Even at the local level, the main focus of political theorists has traditionally been on formal systems of government usually lauding representative democracy as the standard for Western government while the importance of participatory action at a local level has been vastly underestimated. Correcting this imbalance, the renowned political scholars who...