Hybrid Democratic Innovation as Democratic Bricolage? The Case of Participatory Budgeting-New Style

In this paper, I will attempt to understand an emerging practice – hybrid democratic innovation – with an emerging concept in democratic-innovations research – assemblage –, aspiring to find out to what extent and in which way this concept assists our understanding in this realm, and where and when it falls short. Hybrid democratic innovation (HDI) is democratic innovation that connects – proactively planned, more organically developed, or both combined – fundamentally different concepts of democratic betterment in one design – or assemblage in terminology probed here. I am specifically interested here in HDI’s that combine deliberative (talk-centric) and plebiscitary (vote-centric) concepts of innovation in connection to representative democracy. One prominent example is the process that led to the liberalization of abortion legislation in Ireland, connecting a Citizens’ Assembly (a deliberative mini-public) to a constitutional referendum (a plebiscitary maxi-public), closely connected to, and in alternation with, parliamentary process. This process (and the earlier one that legalized same-sex marriage in Ireland) represents one variety of the so-called ‘deliberative referendum’, whereof also other varieties can be distinguished. In this paper, however, I will focus on a variety of HDI not yet covered in the extant literature: the emerging practice of what I call Participatory Budgeting-new style (PB-new style) – the ever more prominent connection of larger-group plebiscitary voting, using the opportunities of broadband internet and smart devices that became widely available in the 2010s, to smaller-group deliberation already developed in more conventional practices of Participatory Budgeting. I will use PB-new style that has emerged in Antwerp, Belgium, as an exemplary case. Compared to deliberative referendums, which usually display a marked sequencing of different elements within the encompassing design (as in the Irish hybrid mentioned: Parliament – Citizens’ Assembly – Parliamentary Committee – referendum vote), PB-new style in Antwerp is characterized by a more pronounced lateral combination of contrasting elements in shared spaces of the process (particularly in stages one and three of the mixed process, or assemblage, which will be analysed hereafter). Another distinguishing element is the local-urban level of practice, which arguably impacts the scope for assemblage as depicted in the relevant literature.