Effects of democratic innovations at the local level

Abstract

It is often argued that contemporary local democracy is essentially hybrid. Different instruments and mechanisms of participatory, deliberative and direct democracy add to their representative counterparts in ever more policy domains. Previous research established the normative and instrumental underpinnings of this evolution. It also discussed the various types of democratic innovations such as participatory budgets, mini-publics, modes of collaborative governance or citizen initiatives and (p)referenda each with their on- and offline variants. Recent studies focused on the effects of such arrangements. Some tried to determine their immediate performance (and the concomitant conditions for success or failure). Democratic innovations allegedly lead to a better inclusion of diverse citizens and/or points of view in the policy process, and are said to induce more rational decisions based on public exchange and reasoning, increase public and political support for specific policy, or encourage civic skills and virtues. Others discerned potential negative effects such as the risk of deepening the gap with non-participants or disappointing those who feel their participation has not been taken sufficiently into account in subsequent decision-making. Meanwhile, attention has grown for the remote or systemic impact of these innovations, e.g. by scrutinizing if and how (and with what contingencies) they affect the legitimacy perceptions, roles and relations of stakeholders in the democratic system such as citizens, civil society, administrators and politicians. This all spurned a line on making democratic innovations more sustainable (maintaining positive and avoiding negative effects, learning from and elaborating upon experiments, recalibrating the position of key stakeholders, etc.) Despite of being a prime site of democratic innovations, evidence on such effects remains relatively scarce and scattered at the local level. Insights need more systematization and integration. This panel aims to help filling that gap. It welcomes papers that focus on different sorts of effects, innovations and/or stakeholders found at the local level. It is open to (cross-national) comparative endeavors as well as cases from specific contexts and likes to include studies with quantitative, qualitative and/or mixed methods.

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