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What Levels, by Whom, and for How Long? A Look into Key Conditions of Democratic Innovations to Improve Governance

Democracy
Governance
Political Participation
Representation
Comparative Perspective
Political Engagement
Public Opinion
Roberto Falanga
Universidade de Lisboa Instituto de Ciências Sociais
Roberto Falanga
Universidade de Lisboa Instituto de Ciências Sociais
José Duarte Ribeiro
Universidade de Lisboa Instituto de Ciências Sociais
João Moniz
Universidade de Lisboa Instituto de Ciências Sociais

Abstract

Democratic innovations are deemed to enhance democracy in response to current predicaments related to growing citizen disaffection towards political institutions and representatives. Nevertheless, little is known on the key conditions required for democratic innovations to make a difference in current governance systems. Despite participatory and deliberative democrats agreeing on the importance of including citizens in policy and decision-making processes, evidence about their role for improving governance falls short of being consensual. The main literature highlights the role of state and non-state actors as a central issue, but limited investigation has been conducted on actors operating at different levels of implementation, which is key to understanding DIs’ contribution to mainstream governance. Moreover, actors’ capacity to sustain innovations over time is a critical issue for analysing DIs’ impact on governance. In the debate on the longevity of implemented practices, scholars have long advocated for the institutionalisation and embedding of innovations to enhance and multiply their impacts into mainstream governance. Nevertheless, such efforts have been pursued in only a few cases, and the lack of large-N studies continues to constrain comparative understanding of their durations. In this paper, we regard these issues as a serious threat to the future development of these practices. Without a clear understanding of the conditions provided for DIs’ improvement of governance, we are unlikely to advance the scholarly debate. Short sightedness regarding the current landscape of democratic innovations necessitates, therefore, a thorough examination of which levels of governance are expected to be affected, by whom, and for how long. Our paper builds on the analysis of 1,120 identified practices of democratic innovations in Europe from the 1970s to the present. We recently collected this data as part of the EU project INCITE-DEM (2023–2026), aiming to make sense of a large set of factors, including levels of implementation, main actors involved, and the duration of the identified practices. By leveraging this data, we seek to advance research on the role of multiple players within multi-level governance systems implementing innovations with varying temporal scopes. In doing so, we aim to address the emerging knowledge gap regarding what has been achieved, by democratic innovations, over years of experimentation, for the improvement of democratic governance.