Defining and typologising democratic innovations

Abstract

Democratic innovation has become a buzzword. Despite the rapid increase in popularity of the term, amongst academics and practitioners, there is limited agreement about what should be classified as ‘democratic innovations’ and a lack of clarity and precision in the use of the term. This is understandable as it is an emergent field and ‘democracy’ itself is widely regarded as an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie, 1955) while ‘innovation’ is interpreted in a number of different ways across different countries and policy areas (cf. Sørensen, 2017). Moreover, ‘democratic innovations are very different from one another and elude general characterisation’ (Fung and Warren, 2011: 347). Indeed, some time ago Smith (2005) identified 57 types and the number has surely increased exponentially since, including the myriad hybrids that now populate databases like Participedia or LATINNO.1 This chapter surveys the history of the term’s use through a scoping review of the scholarly literature; critically reviewing the different and dominant definitions currently employed, and finding that they are limited and unable to prevent concept stretching and to fully capture this dynamic field. The results of the scoping review further indicate that there is also no widely used typology of democratic innovations. Here we argue that this is hindering comparative analysis and understanding in this field. We define and establish a typology of democratic innovations, which will help identify important similarities across different types while clarifying distinctive features. Therefore, the typology will also enable structural and conceptual differences between types of democratic innovations to be identified. This is useful in its own right, but also because features of particular types of democratic innovation might be more suited to promoting different kinds of democratic goods. In section 1, we provide an overview of the scoping review and its results, highlighting the need for a new definition and typology to prevent concept stretching. In section 2, we explain and justify our definition of democratic innovations: Democratic innovations are processes or institutions that are new to a policy issue, policy role, or level of governance, and developed to reimagine and deepen the role of citizens in governance processes by increasing opportunities for participation, deliberation and influence. In section 3, drawing on Freeden’s (1994) morphological analysis of political concepts, a set of ineliminable (reimagining and deepening the role of citizens), quasi-contingent (participant selection method, mode of participation, mode of decision-making, extent of power and authority) and contextual features (policy area and stage, governance level) of democratic innovations are offered to produce a typology. It is argued that democratic innovations can be seen as a Wittgensteinian ‘family’ of conceptual clusters that include spaces and processes that have certain resemblance, but also differences that are determined by context. We identify four families of democratic innovations: mini-publics, participatory budgeting (PB), collaborative