Success May Not Always Look the Same: A theoretically Driven Discussion of How to Systematically and Meaningfully Compare New Tools of Democratic Participation Across Contexts

Our research deals with how to compare and assess democratic innovations across contexts. It builds on our scholarly background (from quantitative political communications with an interest in contextual determinants of information effects, to social movements, political participation and new forms of civic engagement) and our rich experience in post-communist new democracies (as scholars and civil society activists) as well as in advanced democracies with what we call fluid party systems but strong party activism (ie Italy). We specify a set of democratic values and a set of criteria that define the process of design and implementation of democratic innovations (initiators, developers, participant selection, regularity of the process, stated goals, resources available). We then theorize and then operationalize what "context" means, what are the different dimensions "context' needs to be broken down into. We then look at contextual characteristics both as enablers of democratic innovations and as their opposites. The challenge of constructing a comparative framework lies in the difficulty to go beyond saying that the choice of democracy-enhancing tools depends on the nature of democracy and what are the specific targeted democratic goals since everything in terms of process and enablers may thus vary.