Defining and assessing participatory systems

A key challenge of a democratic political system is to reconcile the trade-off between reflexive and responsive decision-making. Representative democracy appeared to resolve this tension, as a degree of reflexivity is ensured by the cognitive independence of representatives, whilst responsiveness is guaranteed through links of accountability to the electorate (Dahl 1989). However, representative systems have been struggling to ensure both reflexivity and responsiveness, engendering a crisis of trust and accountability that is also fuelling populistic responses. This has led to a plethora of democratic innovations that attempted to remedy the deficits in the representative system. Yet many of these processes, for instance deliberative mini-publics, have been criticised on similar grounds; whilst being championed for their reflexiveness, they have been criticised for their lack of responsiveness. This paper investigates whether participatory systems that link together different participatory arenas provide a more promising avenue for democratic reform. The paper first conceptualises a participatory system as sets of participation-facilitating arenas (digital/ analogue; invited/ invented; based on coproduction or agonistic), linked together to connect the different forms of labours they perform. It then develops a framework for understanding these links that goes beyond current theories of "sequencing" and "coupling". This framework is then deployed on real examples of participatory systems to elaborate the ways in which information flows between arenas, in an effort to understand whether participatory systems can successfully reconcile the difficult trade-offs between competing democratic functions.