The Québec Advisory Council on the Administration of Justice Le Conseil Consultatif de Justice

Among the classical problems of democratic government perhaps few are so continuing in their challenge to the political imagination as the creation of better methods to balance the interests and the strategies of the governors and the governed. While in a loose sense democratic systems posit the notion that 'sovereignty' lies with 'the people' it is not without significance that the New Left and their varied allies now employ "power to the people" as a slogan that becomes a critique of the conventional machinery of representative government. For these reasons there are to be found, increasingly, in many western democratic countries varieties of institutions that attempt to better 'communication' between citizen and officeholder, and perhaps more important than communication, methods that attempt to increase the participatory input into the decision-making sector by the public, or technically competent portions of it.