Participation of "Populist Citizens" in Democratic Innovations

This paper briefly outlines the different aspects of the link between democratic innovations and populism. The literature identifies democratic innovations as a group of institutional mechanisms that could help to deepen democracy. They can strengthen democracy by addressing the lack of inclusiveness, popular control, transparency or political trust and providing avenues for citizens to directly engage in decision-making processes and influence policy outcomes. Furthermore, they aim at increasing citizens' involvement in political decision-making and in the design and implementation of public policies, strengthening local communities and ensuring greater legitimacy of existing institutions. Such political innovations are based on the approach of direct or deliberative democracy, where citizens take political decisions through a process of deliberation in the public sphere. The assumption is that popular involvement is normatively desirable as something that enhances the legitimacy as well as democratic quality of policy-making and avoids the sense of lack of responsiveness that often fuels populism. »Ordinary« citizens are still predominantly engaged only in established forms of representative democracy (elections), and even in these, regular participation is rare. Recent research shows that politically excluded citizens and those with populist views, the so-called 'populist citizens', are more likely to support and engage in democratic innovations. Such citizens are generally supportive of democratic principles but dissatisfied with the practice of democracy in their countries. An important possibly populist aspect of democratic innovations is that populist political actors can ‘hijack’ or manipulate these instruments to enforce the ‘will of the majority’ against the checks and balances of liberal democratic systems and to circumvent ‘established’ political parties. In this paper, I will be particularly interested in the link between populist citizens and democratic innovations. Through the literature review, I will try to answer the question whether so-called 'populist citizens' are more engaged in democratic innovations than »ordinary« citizens.