Democratic innovations for change: Do we need a participatory corrective to deliberative hegemony?

The world is currently entangled in the confluence of social, political, economic and ecological crises, and there is growing doubt that current systems of governance can cope or even survive. Democracies have been constrained to and by a narrow set of institutions and processes anchored in dominant forms of political organization and imagination (e.g. state-market nexus). Power inequalities provide strong foundations for the (re)production of many current ills in social, economic, and democratic life. In this context, what does deliberative democratic thinking have to offer to the task of sociopolitical reimagining and change? The advent of deliberative democracy as a field in the 1980s offered useful correctives to the field of participatory democracy – for example, a deeper understanding of the communicative fabric of the public sphere and public reasoning as a bridge-builder between streets and institutions. However, this paper explores whether deliberative democracy now needs a participatory corrective in order to retain its potential for political legitimation anchored in social change. For this purpose, we will review ongoing critiques levelled at deliberative articulations of democracy and put them in conversation with participatory ideas and practices, with a particular focus on power in/equalities and the political economy of democratic innovations.