Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance 2019951313, 9781786433862, 9781786433855

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HANDBOOK OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION AND GOVERNANCE

The editors dedicate this book to Stephen’s parents, Margaret and Peter; and Oliver’s parents, Isabel and Román.

Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance

Edited by

Stephen Elstub Senior Lecturer in British Politics, Department of Politics, Newcastle University, UK

Oliver Escobar Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, UK

Cheltenham, UK

+

Northampton, MA, USA

© Stephen Elstub and Oliver Escobar 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951313 This book is available electronically in the Social and Political Science subject collection DOI 10.4337/9781786433862

ISBN 978 1 78643 385 5 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78643 386 2 (eBook)

02

Typeset by Sparks – www.sparkspublishing.com

Contents

List of figures and tables List of contributors Acknowledgements

viii x xv

Introduction to the Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance: the field of democratic innovation Oliver Escobar and Stephen Elstub

1

SECTION I  TYPES OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION 1. Defining and typologising democratic innovations Stephen Elstub and Oliver Escobar

11

2. Democratic innovations and theories of democracy Ian O’Flynn

32

3. Mini-publics: design choices and legitimacy Clodagh Harris

45

4. Collaborative governance: between invited and invented spaces Sonia Bussu

60

5. The long journey of participatory budgeting Ernesto Ganuza and Gianpaolo Baiocchi

77

6. Referendums and citizens’ initiatives Maija Jäske and Maija Setälä

90

7. Digital participation Hollie Russon Gilman and Tiago Carneiro Peixoto

105

SECTION II DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS AND THE DEMOCRATIC MALAISE 8. Does political trust matter? Gerry Stoker and Mark Evans

120

9. Accountability and democratic innovations Albert Weale

135

10. Anti-politics and democratic innovation Matthew Flinders, Matthew Wood and Jack Corbett

148

11. The impact of democratic innovations on citizens’ efficacy Paolo Spada

161

v

vi  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance

SECTION III  ACTORS IN DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION 12. Facilitators: the micropolitics of public participation and deliberation Oliver Escobar

178

13. Consultants: the emerging participation industry Laurence Bherer and Caroline W. Lee

196

14. Public servants in innovative democratic governance Wieke Blijleven, Merlijn van Hulst and Frank Hendriks

209

15. Experts: the politics of evidence and expertise in democratic innovation Ruth Lightbody and Jennifer J. Roberts

225

16. Advocates: interest groups, civil society organisations and democratic innovation Carolyn M. Hendriks

241

17. The role of elected representatives in democratic innovations Nivek Thompson

255

18. Journalists: the role of the media in democratic innovation Gianfranco Pomatto

269

SECTION IV DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS IN POLICY AND GOVERNANCE 19. Democratic innovations and the policy process Adrian Bua

282

20. Democratic innovation in science and technology Sarah R. Davies

297

21. Democratic innovation in social policy Rikki Dean

310

22. Democratic innovation and environmental governance Jens Newig, Edward Challies and Nicolas W. Jager

324

23. Democratic innovation in constitutional reform Ron Levy

339

24. Democratic innovation in transnational and global governance Mikko Rask, Bjørn Bedsted, Edward Andersson and Liisa Kallio

354

SECTION V  DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS AROUND THE WORLD 25. Democratic innovations in North America Christopher F. Karpowitz and Chad Raphael

371

26. Democratic innovations in Latin America Thamy Pogrebinschi and Melisa Ross

389

Contents vii

27. Democratic innovations in Europe Brigitte Geissel

404

28. Trends in democratic innovation in Asia Naoyuki Mikami

421

29. Democratic innovation in Australasia Lucy Parry, Jane Alver and Nivek Thompson

435

30. Local democratic innovations in Africa Isabel Ferreira and Giovanni Allegretti

449

SECTION VI RESEARCH METHODS FOR THE STUDY OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS 31. Quantitative methods in democratic innovation research Simon Beste and Dominik Wyss

472

32. Qualitative approaches to democratic innovations Julien Talpin

486

33. Mixed methods research in democratic innovation Oliver Escobar and Andrew Thompson

501

34. Using experiments to study democratic innovations Kimmo Grönlund and Kaisa Herne

515

35. From discourse quality index to deliberative transformative moments Maria Clara Jaramillo and Jürg Steiner

527

36. Analysing deliberative transformation: a multi-level approach incorporating Q methodology Simon Niemeyer 37. Comparative approaches to the study of democratic innovation Matt Ryan

540 558

CONCLUDING CHAPTER 38. Reflections on the theory and practice of democratic innovations Graham Smith

572

Index

583

Figures and tables

FIGURES 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 4.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 11.1 11.2 11.3 21.1 27.1 34.1 36.1 36.2 36.3 36.4

Participant selection methods Mode of participation Mode of decision-making Extent of power and influence Framework for democratic innovations A framework of collaborative governance Trust in federal government in Australia The United Kingdom – a steady decliner The steep decliners The basement decliners The modest decliners Folk causal claim Democratic innovations as a system Example of hypothesis of overall effect of group discussion on efficacy: ideation and consensus building have a positive effect that, together, overcome the negative effect of argumentation A typology of four modes of participation Linkage and detachment of democratic innovations to political decision-making The design of the experiment comparing decision-making methods. A theory and method of deliberative reasoning and multi-level transformation Illustration of Q sort distribution and Q sorting Discourses concerning the Bloomfield Track (BT) Discourse migration during the Bloomfield Track citizens’ jury

20 21 21 22 23 64 121 124 125 127 128 162 164 171 314 407 521 542 546 549 551

TABLES 1.1 3.1 4.1 6.1 10.1 11.1

Families of democratic innovations 25 Key features of mini-publics 46 Framework of collaborative governance applied to the case studies 69 The impact of referendums on representative procedures and deliberation 97 Four dimensions of anti-politics 149 Some of the subsystems of DP and PB that might affect efficacy (non-exhaustive list) 166 12.1 Different facilitation foci depending on the form of communication 186 13.1 Consultants’ potential effects on innovation 197 14.1 Five strands of literature compared 220

viii

Figures and tables ix

15.1 The role and format of information, experts and citizens in traditional forums and in democratic innovations 230 15.2 Different roles that experts can fill in deliberative processes 231 15.3 The variety of roles for experts and evidence for a selection of democratic innovations 232 24.1 Transnational and global mini-publics 358 27.1 Democratic innovations in European countries 408 27.2 Patterns of democratic innovations in European countries (selection) 410 27.3 Evaluation of democratic innovation: three-level framework for analysis 412 458 30.1 Democratic Innovations: typology cases and organisations across Africa 33.1 Examples of mixed methods studies of democratic innovations 509 36.1 Tests for significance of change in pre- and post-deliberative preference ranks 543 36.2 Factor scores: Bloomfield Track 548 36.3 Bloomfield Track factor loadings 551

Contributors

Dr Giovanni Allegretti is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of Coimbra University, and visiting fellow at the School of Architecture and Planning of Witwatersrand University in South Africa. Jane Alver is a Research Fellow and PhD candidate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance at the University of Canberra. Edward Andersson is a Dialogue and Participation consultant based in Malmö, Sweden and is an Associate of the Involve Foundation. Dr Gianpaolo Baiocchi is Professor of Individualized Studies and Sociology at NYU, where he directs the Urban Democracy Lab. His most recent book is We, The Sovereign (2018, Polity). Mr Bjørn Bedsted is the Deputy Director of the Danish Board of Technology. Dr Simon Beste is a researcher in the Methods of Political and Social Science Department at the Goethe University Frankfurt, specialising in political communication, discourse analysis and deliberation. Dr Laurence Bherer is Associate Professor of Political Science at Université de Montréal. Wieke Blijleven, MSc. is a PhD candidate at the Tilburg Institute of Governance, Tilburg University. Her research focuses on the role of civil servants involved in public participation processes. Dr Adrian Bua is a Research Associate at the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity, De Montfort University, UK. Dr Sonia Bussu is a Lecturer in Politics and Public Administration, Manchester Metropolitan University. Dr Edward Challies is Senior Lecturer at the Waterways Centre for Freshwater Management, University of Canterbury, New Zealand and Adjunct Research Associate with the Research Group Governance and Sustainability at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. Prof. Jack Corbett is Professor of Politics at the University of Southampton and co-convenor of the Interpretive Political Science Specialist Group. Dr Sarah R. Davies is Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. x

Contributors xi

Dr Rikki Dean is Post-Doctoral Fellow in Democratic Innovations at the Democratic Innovations Research Unit, Goethe University Frankfurt. Dr Stephen Elstub is a Senior Lecturer in British Politics at Newcastle University and CoEditor of Representation: Journal of Representative Democracy. Dr Oliver Escobar is a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the School of Social and Political Science in the University of Edinburgh and Academic Lead for Democratic Innovation at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Prof. Mark Evans is Professor of Governance at the University of Canberra and Director of the Democracy 2025 initiative at the Museum of Australian Democracy (MoAD) at Old Parliament House. Isabel Ferreira is a Ph.D. candidate and researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of Coimbra University, where is part of the team of the EU-funded project “URBINAT”. Prof. Matthew Flinders is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield and Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics. Dr Ernesto Ganuza is Senior Researcher at the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and Editor of Revista Internacional de Sociologia. His most recent book is ¿Por qué la gente odia la política? (2018, Catarata). Prof. Brigitte Geissel is Professor for Political Science and Political Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. Prof. Kimmo Grönlund is Professor of Political Science at Åbo Akademi University and Convenor of the Standing Group on Democratic Innovations at the European Consortium for Political Research. Dr Clodagh Harris is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government and Politics, University College Cork, Ireland. She was a member of the Academic and Legal Advisory group of Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution 2012–2014. Dr Carolyn M. Hendriks is an Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Prof. Dr Frank Hendriks holds a chair in comparative governance at Tilburg University and is currently head of department of the politics & administration division there. He is the author of Vital Democracy (Oxford UP). Prof. Kaisa Herne is Professor of Political Science at Tampere University. Dr Nicolas W. Jager is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department for Ecological Economics at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany.

xii  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance

Dr Maria Clara Jaramillo is Assistant Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Law, Pontifica Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá. Maija Jäske is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Turku and Project Researcher at Åbo Akademi University in a project entitled ‘Participation in Long-Term Decision-Making’. Liisa Kallio MSc, is expert in energy and climate policy. She has worked at the University of Helsinki and Akordi that provides environmental negotiation and conflict management services. Prof. Christopher F. Karpowitz is a Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University. Dr Caroline W. Lee is Associate Professor of Sociology at Lafayette College. Dr Ron Levy is Associate Professor at the Australian National University Law School. Dr Ruth Lightbody is Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University. Dr Naoyuki Mikami is an environmental sociologist and Associate Professor in STS (science and technology studies) and science communication at Hokkaido University. Dr Jens Newig is full professor and head of the Research Group Governance and Sustainability at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. Assoc. Prof. Simon Niemeyer is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra. Dr Ian O’Flynn is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Newcastle University. Dr Lucy J. Parry is a Research Associate at Participedia and the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra, and a Language Tutor at Webster Vienna Private University. Dr Tiago Carneiro Peixoto is a Senior Public Sector Specialist at The World Bank Group. Dr Thamy Pogrebinschi is a Senior Researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Dr Gianfranco Pomatto is a Contract Professor in Public Policy at the University of Torino and Researcher at Ires Piemonte. Prof. Chad Raphael is a Professor of Communication and Faculty Associate for Sustainability across the Curriculum at Santa Clara University.

Contributors xiii

Dr Mikko Rask is Principal Investigator at the University of Helsinki. He studies and develops practices of public deliberation and co-creation in the governance of research, innovation and environment. Dr Jennifer J. Roberts is a Research Fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Strathclyde. Melisa Ross is a doctoral researcher at the BGSS Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences at Humboldt University and associated researcher of the LATINNO Project at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Dr Hollie Russon Gilman is a Lecturer and post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University and a Fellow at New America and the Beeck Center for Social Impact, and co-author of Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis (2019). Dr Matt Ryan is Lecturer in Governance and Public Policy at the University of Southampton. Prof. Maija Setälä is a Professor in Political Science at University of Turku, Finland, and the leader of a multidisciplinary research project entitled ‘Participation in Long-Term Decision-Making’. Prof. Graham Smith is Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. Dr Paolo Spada is a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. Prof. Jürg Steiner is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Bern. Prof. Gerry Stoker is Centenary Research Professor at the University of Canberra and also Chair in Governance at the University of Southampton, UK. Dr Julien Talpin is a political science professor at the University of Lille/CNRS. He is the director of the francophone research network Democracy and Participation. Prof. Andrew Thompson has the Chair in Public Policy and Citizenship at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, with a main focus on health service policy and European public administration. Nivek Thompson is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney, and an Associate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance, University of Canberra and at the Sydney Democracy Network, University of Sydney. Dr Merlijn van Hulst is Associate Professor in the Tilburg Institute of Governance – Tilburg Law School.

xiv  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance

Prof. Albert Weale is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy, University College London. He has written widely on democratic theory and practice. Dr Matthew Wood is Lecturer at the University of Sheffield Department of Politics and Trustee at the UK Political Studies Association. Dr Dominik Wyss is an experimental researcher at the University of Stuttgart and University of Bern with a focus on online deliberation.

Acknowledgements

A project of this nature struggles without a community behind it, and we want to acknowledge first and foremost the love and support of our families, especially Stephen’s partner Lindsey and Oliver’s partner Paula. We also want to express gratitude to our friends and students, whose perspectives on democratic innovation are a constant source of challenge and inspiration. Naturally, we are profoundly indebted to the 60 authors that have so generously contributed to this Handbook, and in particular we thank Graham Smith for his encouragement during the project and his seminal contribution to the field. Two researchers have played a central role in developing this Handbook. Tamara Mulherin has been a fantastic assistant editor in the production of the manuscript, bringing a keen eye and strong drive to the project. In earlier stages, Derry Keohane helped us to conduct the scoping literature review that laid the foundations for Chapter 1. We are grateful for the resources provided by various funders to support key stages of this project. Politics & International Relations at the University of Edinburgh contributed seed money to conduct early research. What Works Scotland, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council UK (ES/M003922/1) and the Scottish Government, contributed Oliver´s time as well as editorial support through Tamara Mulherin. All errors or omissions are, of course, our responsibility. But the quality of the chapters owes much to the internal peer reviews conducted by most of the authors featured in this book. We want to thank also our external peer reviewers: Nicole Beardsworth (University of York), Derek Bell (Newcastle University), Sofie Marien (Leuven University), Michael Morrell (University of Connecticut), Lynne Poole (University of the West of Scotland), William Smith (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Richard Freeman (University of Edinburgh), Andrew Walton (Newcastle University), Magda Pieczka (Queen Margaret University), Harshan Kumarasingham (University of Edinburgh), Mark van Ostaijen (Tilburg University) and Aaron Martin (University of Melbourne). Finally, we are also thankful for the consistent support of an overwhelming number of colleagues and friends who have helped, wittingly or unwittingly, to bring this Handbook to fruition. An exhaustive list is impossible, but we can only try: Ailsa Henderson, Janet Newman, Nicola McEwen, James Mitchell, Charlie Jeffery, Katherine Smith, Fiona Mackay, Claire Bynner, James Henderson, Hayley Bennett, Richard Brunner, Nick Watson, Nick Bland, Alasdair McKinlay, Kathleen Glazik, Victoria Hasson, Alistair Stoddart, Naomi Jurczak, Gillian Baxendine, Kaela Scott, Simon Burall, Tim Hughes, Sarah Allan, Wendy Faulkner, Kevin McDermott, Chris Chapman, Peter Craig, Lynda Frazer, Justine Geyer, Evelyn O’Donnell, Coryn Barclay, Sara Morton, Ailsa Cook, Lucy Janes, Ken Gibb, Fiona Garven, Angus Hardie, Annika Agger, Catherine Durose, Alison Gilchrist, Jez Hall, Patrick Chalmers, Chris Harkins, Ramón Máiz, Antón Losada, Carlos Allones, Milín Pérez, Alex Rodríguez, Heather Rea, Fergus McNeill, Phil Thomas, Alison Urie, Jo Conllinson-Scott, Lucy Cathcart-Frödén, Malcolm Piper, Iwona Jezierska, Dariusz Jezierski and Marcel Zubrzyk. We also want to express our deepest gratitude to the Edward Elgar publishing team. xv

Introduction to the Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance: the field of democratic innovation Oliver Escobar and Stephen Elstub

1  A TIME OF DEMOCRATIC CHALLENGES AND RENEWAL Welcome to this Handbook! You have in your hands the work of 60 authors brought together to offer a comprehensive overview of the field of democratic innovation across the globe. This introductory chapter places the Handbook in context, reflects on what the field has to offer, and outlines the key themes explored in six sections featuring 38 chapters. We live in a time where the ideal of democracy is widely loved, but its practices are broadly criticised. Studies often highlight democratic deficits and the proliferation of a democratic malaise, while there is a growing debate about whether we are entering a period of global democratic recession (Diamond, 2015; Levitsky and Way, 2015). In the last decade there has been a reduction in the number of democratic systems, and established democracies are under increasing pressure due to social, political, environmental and economic factors (Wike and Fetterolf, 2018). Moreover, the gap between the ‘politically rich’ and the ‘politically poor’ is widening in societies across the world (Dalton, 2017). A sobering overview was provided by the 2016 Democracy Index, where the global average score fell, with 72 countries dropping in the ranking from 2015, and just 38 moving up (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2016: 3–6). The number of ‘full democracies’ dropped from 20 to 19, with the US now classed as ‘flawed’. Near half the world’s population (49.3%) live currently in a democracy of some kind, but only 4.5% of people live in a ‘full democracy’ – half as many than in 2015 (ibid). The 2018 Democracy Index, in turn, indicates that growing disillusionment with democratic institutions is accompanied by growing political participation as people are ‘turning anger into action’ (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2018: 4). Recent waves of the World Values Survey suggest increased frustration and authoritarian attitudes, with striking rises amongst the youngest populations of democratic systems around the world (Foa and Mounk, 2016). Although democratic principles still enjoy support, current practices and institutions evoke cynicism: people love democracy, but often despair at how it is practiced. In this context, the field of democratic innovation is growing, in part, to counter the democratic recession. This has interesting parallels with debates that emerged a century ago during arguably the first contemporary wave of democratic innovation. Although debates about participatory democracy, more broadly, can be traced back to Athenian democracy, the narratives about innovation that occupy this Handbook were shaped in the past century1 (Escobar, 2017b). For example, John Dewey was a strong critic of the ‘democratic elitism’ that underpins mainstream narratives of representative democracy (Bernstein, 2010: 74). Dewey saw elitism as central to the demise of democracy and the advance of elite-driven populism and totalitarian regimes. This quote from 1937 remains topical today: 1

2  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance Everywhere there are waves of criticism and doubt as to whether democracy can meet pressing problems… Wherever it has fallen, [democracy] had not become part of the bone and blood of the people in daily conduct of its life. Democratic forms were limited to Parliament, elections and combats between parties. What is happening proves conclusively…that unless democratic habits of thought and action are part of the fiber of a people, political democracy is insecure. It cannot stand in isolation. It must be buttressed by the presence of democratic methods in all social relationships. (Dewey, 1937: 467)

Dewey understood democracy as more than a form of government. He saw it as a way of life and placed at its heart ‘the necessity for the participation of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of [people] together’, thus arguing that this is ‘necessary from the standpoint of both the general social welfare and the full development of human beings as individuals’ (Dewey, 1937: 457). The revival of these participatory imaginaries of democracy started in the 1960s (e.g. Pateman, 1970). They argued for developing a form of democracy that enables extensive participation of citizens in ongoing decision-making, whether it is at national or local level, or within communities or organisations (Saward, 2003: 149). Whereas representative democracy places the emphasis on the work of representatives, advocates and experts, participatory democracy compels all citizens to encounter other citizens without intermediaries, and therefore politics is seen as the art of participating in planning, coordinating and enacting collective action (Barber, 2003: 152–153). Since the 1990s, deliberative theory and practice have built on, and rekindled, some of the ideals of participatory democracy (for an overview see Elstub, 2010, 2018). Indeed, deliberative democracy shares much with its participatory counterpart, but places a stronger emphasis on communication as a central dimension in citizen participation. This discursive focus is underpinned by the claim that ‘political decision-making should be talk-centric rather than voter-centric’ (Elstub and McLaverty, 2014b: 1). Deliberative democrats also highlight the inadequacy of ‘aggregative conceptions’, arguing that democracy is more than just counting heads: ‘it must involve discussion on an equal and inclusive basis, which deepens participants’ knowledge of issues, awareness of the interests of others, and the confidence to play an active part in public affairs’ (Saward, 2000: 5). Democracy is thus seen not as ‘a market for the exchange of private preferences’ but as a discursive forum for the exchange of public reasons and the creation of public agreements (Parkinson, 2004: 379). At the intersection of these models of democracy, the field of democratic innovation has proliferated since the turn of the century, bringing together diverse streams of democratic thought and action. This new field stems from the confluence of a range of practical and theoretical projects advancing the critique and development of democracy throughout the past century. However, the label ‘democratic innovation’ has only recently started to galvanise a burgeoning academic field built on notable publications (Smith, 2009; Hendriks, 2011; Geissel and Newton, 2012; Geissel and Joas, 2013; Grönlund et al., 2014; Lee, 2015; Font et al., 2014; Elstub and McLaverty, 2014a; Sintomer et al., 2016; Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017). A critical component of this development has been the formation of new international research networks, for example, the Standing Group on Democratic Innovations at the European Consortium of Political Research2 or the databases developed by Participedia3 and the LATINNO project4 (see Chapters 26 and 38). Our scoping review of the literature (see Chapter 1) shows that the concept of democratic innovation had limited usage prior to the early 2000s and 75% of the relevant publications are from the year 2010 onwards. At that point, the concept was gaining scholarly currency with

Introduction: the field of democratic innovation 3

milestone publications shaping the field (i.e. Smith, 2005, 2009). The term has been also increasingly used in initiatives by governments and NGOs, such as the Open Government Partnership, which declared at its 2016 Paris summit: ‘The Partnership gathers today 70 member countries and hundreds of civil society organizations that promote transparency, citizen participation and democratic innovation.’5 The initiative connects key actors currently confronting the challenges of democracy across the globe, and illustrates how democratic innovations have concurrently become matters of governmental concern, as well as new sites for civil society mobilisation. As this Handbook shows, democratic innovations are proliferating in all areas of governance, from politics to policy and public administration. These new processes and institutions seek to reimagine and deepen the role of citizens in public governance and collective decisionmaking (see our full definition and typology in Chapter 1). Can these democratic innovations offer an antidote to the democratic recession? Can they help to develop ways of governing that can meet the challenges of the century ahead? These and other fundamental questions are the focus of this emerging field of inquiry.

2  THE FIELD OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION AS POINT OF ENCOUNTER We acknowledge that any endeavour to systematise an emerging field carries risks, not least that of reification as we are not just reflecting but also reproducing and shaping the field. There are reasonable questions about whether the terminology of ‘democratic innovation’ is adequate (see Chapter 38) and whether its areas of inquiry are skewed towards particular types of processes to the exclusion of others (Hendriks and Dzur, 2015, 2018; Hendriks, 2019). We argue, however, that the added value of the term resides in the liminality it provides to bring together, expand and deepen our understanding of the field. In this sense, it functions as a meeting point for a range of ideas, disciplines, traditions, and methodologies. Part of the concept’s appeal is that it carves up space to overcome a series of dualisms inherited from various fields of inquiry and practice: participatory and deliberative democracy. The field of democratic innovation • Between accommodates both participatory and deliberative traditions, thus bridging key groundwork carried out over the last 60 years.

Between representation and other democratic practices. The field seeks to explore and • demonstrate the compatibility of representative, participatory, and deliberative logics in configuring new practices of democratic governance.

Between politics and policy. The field seeks to transcend artificial separations of the • worlds of policy and politics by reintroducing normative judgement (by citizens) to dis-

•

rupt the technocratic impulses of the New Public Management era (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017; Fischer, 2009). Democratic innovations are political sites for collective action bounded by the realpolitik of policy crucibles in the new public governance. Between state and civil society. The field opens space to rethink the oppositional framing of the relationship between state and civil society, by building new processes and

4  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance

•

arenas for citizen participation that try to constitute an interface, or liminal space, between both that is distinct from each (Escobar, 2014). Between normative and empirical concerns. The field has developed as a meeting point for those wrestling with the perennial issue of the practice of the normative. As such, it has contributed to cut across silos to accommodate scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines and fields – from politics to urban studies, public administration, environment, education, health and constitutional reform, to name but a few.

A significant achievement is that the term ‘democratic innovation’ has provided a shared language for researchers and practitioners. The importance of this should not be underestimated. Knowledge exchange and co-production requires a shared vocabulary that helps to generate dialogue between inquiry and practice. The label ‘democratic innovation’ has proven an effective bridge. One may not get an enthusiastic response when inviting someone to discuss ‘new democratic intersections of participatory, deliberative and representative practices’, but talking about ‘democratic innovations’ tends, in our experience, to resonate or at least inspire curiosity. In doing so, it provides a starting point for public understanding and shared inquiry and this can only help to advance a field that benefits from a sustained and creative relationship between research and practice. There is, nonetheless, much work to be done in growing, troubling and developing this field, and we think this Handbook makes a substantial contribution to those endeavours.

3  WHAT IS INCLUDED IN THIS HANDBOOK? In Chapter 1, we differentiate between democratic innovation – the practice – and democratic innovations – the processes that embody the practice. The sections of this Handbook cover both dimensions. People may engage in the practice of democratic innovation through a variety of roles, as activists, designers, sponsors, evaluators, entrepreneurs, supporters, researchers, gate-keepers or facilitators. To understand democratic innovation as a field of practice, this Handbook dedicates Sections 3, 4 and 6, to understanding the myriad actors and contexts that shape the field. In turn, Sections 1, 2 and 5, focus on the study of key types and cases of democratic innovations, as well as critical issues about citizenship and political culture. Section 1 provides theoretical and empirical foundations to understand this field. Despite the rapid increase of democratic innovations employed in governance, policy, and public administration processes around the world, and sustained academic interest and debates about their use, there is little agreement about which governance processes should be classified as democratic innovations. This section offers a critical review of the different and dominant definitions currently in use, in order to provide an analytical typology that can provide greater clarity and coherence to the use of the term (Chapter 1). This is then developed through a discussion of how democratic innovations relate to alternative democratic theories (Chapter 2). Some of the most prominent cases in democratic innovation, including mini-publics (Chapter 3), collaborative governance (Chapter 4), participatory budgeting (Chapter 5), referendums and citizens’ initiatives (Chapter 6) and digital participation (Chapter 7) are then explored at length.

Introduction: the field of democratic innovation 5

Section 2 places democratic innovations in the context of current challenges. It is now widely considered that a democratic malaise is sweeping through established democracies. This malaise is characterised by declining levels of participation in traditional avenues such as, elections and political parties; declining levels of trust in politicians and democratic institutions (Chapter 8); and growing concerns about forms and levels of accountability in representative systems (Chapter 9), which are, in camera, seen as drivers for an emergence of anti-politics (Chapter 10) and affect developments related to social capital and political efficacy (Chapter 11). This is the context in which the increased use of, and attention to, democratic innovation is taking place, and this section analyses the extent to which democratic innovations are helping to cure the various, and related, aspects of the democratic malaise. Section 3 is dedicated to exploring key actors in the field. The world of democratic innovation is populated by a range of actors engaged in the puzzling process of redefining and reinventing ways of doing politics and policymaking. Accordingly, the study of democratic innovation must pay attention to the actions, interactions, motivations, challenges and dilemmas of the agents involved in new democratic practices. The focus on citizens is an overarching theme of the Handbook, therefore in this section other key actors are examined, including the emerging industry of participation (Chapter 13); the role of process designers and facilitators (Chapter 12); the work of institutional entrepreneurs opening official spaces for democratic innovation (Chapter 14); the role of experts and expertise (Chapter 15); and the repositioning of traditional political players such as politicians, advocates and journalists (Chapters 16, 17 and 18). Section 4 offers a guided analytical tour of democratic innovations in a variety of policy and governance contexts. The proliferation of democratic innovations across policy processes and levels of governance can be understood as part of the trend of governance-driven democratisation (Warren, 2009). That is, much democratic innovation has emerged in the context of the alleged transition from hierarchical government to networked governance across liberal democracies and beyond. Therefore, perhaps surprisingly, many spaces for democratic innovation are rooted in policymaking processes rather than in the more traditional arenas of political decision-making. This section examines the role of democratic innovations in the policymaking process (Chapter 19); the range of policy areas where democratic innovations have been prominent, including science and technology, social policy, environmental governance and constitutional reform (Chapters 20, 21, 22 and 23); and their development across multiple levels, including transnational and global governance (Chapter 24). Section 5 zooms out in order to provide insights into democratic innovations around the globe. The deployment of democratic innovations is increasingly becoming a global phenomenon as they are utilised in established democracies, countries undergoing democratic consolidation and transition, authoritarian states and in transnational governance. However, the types of democratic innovations used, the manner in which they have been developed, and the effects they have produced, vary considerably around the world. This section therefore provides a global perspective on the use of democratic innovations in each continent, from North and Latin America (Chapters 25 and 26), to Africa (Chapter 30), Europe (Chapter 27), Asia (Chapter 28) and Australasia (Chapter 29). The work undertaken by these authors represents the first attempt to carry out state-of-the-art continental surveys. Section 6 introduces a wide range of strategies and methods for the study of democratic innovations. New fields of research tend to accommodate a variety of approaches to scholarly

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inquiry. The field of democratic innovation is no exception and is thus characterised by multiple paradigms and methodologies. This pluralism is to be welcomed as theories of democratic innovation try to develop empirical grounding. However, it can result in piecemeal approaches that prevent systematic comparison and methodological rigour. This section takes on the challenge of providing an overview of key approaches to research on democratic innovations, as well as exploring current and future options for methodological development. It includes chapters on quantitative (Chapter 31), qualitative (Chapter 32) and mixed methods (Chapter 33), as well as the use of experiments (Chapter 34), new developments in the Discourse Quality Index (Chapter 35), multi-level approaches using Q methodology (Chapter 36) and comparative work (Chapter 37). Finally, the concluding chapter is penned by a key steward of the field, whose work has provided strong foundations for a new generation of scholarship. We are thankful to Graham Smith for his support of this Handbook as well as for the thought-provoking chapter (Chapter 38) that closes this volume by taking the pulse of the field, looking back to draw critical learning, and looking forward to advance research.

4  THE END OF THE BEGINNING? Prominent post-war theorists constructed a narrative of democracy that emphasised leadership, competition, aggregation and minimalist citizenship (Böker and Elstub, 2015; Escobar, 2017b). This understanding of representative democracy became so influential that many subsequent scholars felt no need to justify it. Indeed, it became the mainstream narrative, and the benchmark by which democracy was to be understood, measured and analysed. Accordingly, as Saward (2003: 42–47) explains, important ideological assumptions were built into that narrative and presented as mere descriptions of the ‘reality’ of democratic politics. Amongst the critics of this narrative, however, were participatory democrats who since the 1960s rekindled the pre-war ashes of Dewey’s vision for democracy and participation. Participatory democracy grew, in theory and practice, thus permeating mainstream narratives with strong arguments about pluralism, inclusion, and citizen empowerment. Since the 1990s, deliberative democrats built on participatory ideals, but also developed distinct normative and practical dimensions around the communicative fabric of democracy (Elstub, 2018). In the last two decades, there have been robust theoretical and empirical critiques of participatory and deliberative democracy, and the challenges of turning ideals into practices have become apparent. This has rekindled debates over whether citizens are willing and capable of participating and deliberating (e.g. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, 2002; Neblo et al., 2010); how to ensure inclusion and diversity, and their effects on group dynamics (e.g. Young, 2000; Mutz, 2006; Sunstein, 2009); whether participation and deliberation are feasible in the face of interest-based politics (e.g. Forester, 1988, 2009; Shapiro, 1999; Hendriks, 2011); whether participatory processes seek enrolment and co-option rather than empowerment (e.g. Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Cornwall and Coelho, 2007); whether emancipatory practices are giving way to technocratic or depoliticised participatory processes (Lee, 2015; Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017); and the challenge of scaling up deliberation to develop large deliberative systems (Parkinson and Mansbridge, 2012; Owen and Smith, 2015). These areas of research are work in progress, but the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate how scholars are taking these challenges seriously by developing an ambitious agenda of

Introduction: the field of democratic innovation 7

theoretical and empirical work. Democratic innovation, as a field, is still in its developmental stages and it is important to chart a course that is critical without being cynical. This Handbook seeks to go beyond the uncritical optimism of some advocates of democratic innovation, while avoiding the complacency of those who think that the status quo is acceptable. The Handbook highlights two significant trends that are expanding and deepening the field in both theory and practice. On the one hand, there is a clear move towards hybridisation, with processes and institutions that combine the principles and practices of various democratic innovations (see Chapter 1; also Sintomer, 2018; Hendriks, 2019). On the other hand, there is also a move towards institutionalisation, seeking to append or embed democratic innovations as part of the formal institutional landscape in various polities (e.g. Bua and Escobar, 2018; Weakley and Escobar, 2018; Escobar et al., 2018; Escobar, 2017a; Ravazzi, 2016; Font et al., 2014; Nabatchi et al., 2012; Wampler, 2012; Lewanski, 2013). These are fruitful areas for research in this Handbook and in years to come, with new opportunities offered by underexplored connections to fields such as social innovation and the commons (Coote, 2017; Brandsen et al., 2016; Henderson et al., 2018). Following the continuing dispersion, in breadth and depth, of a democratic malaise, accompanied by the move from government to governance and the increasing intensity of globalisation, democracy in the 21st century is widely considered to be suffering a legitimation crisis, along with problems of efficiency and efficacy. Despite this, citizens’ faith in the ideal of democracy as the best form of governance seems undiminished and indeed it is suggested that a post-material ethos is flourishing, leading citizens around the world to demand more opportunities for meaningful participation in public affairs. This situation presents a challenge for democracies, but also the opportunity for change. The development of democratic innovations is increasingly taking hold around the world in governance, policy, and public administration processes in order to address this crisis. Despite increased academic attention to this burgeoning field, no Handbook has yet been published to provide a global analysis of democratic innovations in theory and practice. Consequently, this volume seeks to advance understanding of democratic innovations by bringing together international experts in the field to critically review and assess the importance of different types of democratic innovations conceptually and contextually, through empirical and normative analysis. The Handbook therefore offers a definitive overview of existing research on democratic innovations, while it also sets the agenda for future inquiry by providing cutting-edge insight into critical issues, illustrative cases, alternative methods and diverse impacts. We share with our co-authors the hope that this volume will satisfy curiosity and inspire action.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Parts of this chapter draw on Escobar (2017b), with thanks to the journal Contemporary Pragmatism. See http://standinggroups.ecpr.eu/democraticinnovations/. See https://participedia.net. See www.latinno.net/en/. The Open Government Partnership summit involved: ‘3000 representatives from 70 countries: Heads of State and governments, ministers, public servants, members of parliament, local authorities, civil society representatives, start-ups and digital innovators, civic techs, developers, researchers, journalists will gather in Paris to share their experiences and push forward the open government agenda in light of the global challenges.’ See https:// en.ogpsummit.org/osem/conference/ogp-summit.

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REFERENCES Baiocchi, G. and E. Ganuza (2017), Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Barber, B.R. (2003), Strong Democracy. Participatory Politics for a New Age (20th Anniversary Edition ed.), London: University of California Press. Bernstein, R.J. (2010), The Pragmatic Turn, Cambridge: John Wiley & Sons. Böker, M. and S. Elstub (2015), ‘The possibility of critical mini-publics: Realpolitik and normative cycles in democratic theory’, Representation, 51 (1), 125–144. Brandsen, T., S. Cattacin, A. Evers and A. Zimmer (2016), Social Innovations in the Urban Context, Cham: Springer International Publishing. Bua, A. and O. Escobar (2018), ‘Participatory-deliberative processes and public policy agendas: Lessons for policy and practice’, Policy Design and Practice, 1 (2), 126–140. Cooke, B. and U. Kothari (eds) (2001), Participation. The New Tyranny?, London: Zed Books. Coote, A. (2017), Building a New Social Commons: The People, the Commons and the Public Realm, London: New Economics Foundation. Cornwall, A. and V. Schattan P. Coelho (2007), Spaces for Change? The Politics of Citizen Participation in New Democratic Arenas, London: Zed. Dalton, R.J. (2017), The Participation Gap: Social Status and Political Inequality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dewey, J. (1937), ‘Democracy and educational administration’, School and Society, 45, 457–467. Dewey, J. (1984), The Later Works, 1925–1927, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Diamond, L. (2015), ‘Facing up to the democratic recession’, Journal of Democracy, 26 (1), 141–155. Elstub, S. (2010), ‘The third generation of deliberative democracy’, Political Studies Review, 8 (3), 291–307. Elstub, S. and P. McLaverty (2014a), Deliberative Democracy: Issues and Cases, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Elstub, S. and P. McLaverty (2014b), ‘Introduction: Issues and cases in deliberative democracy’, in S. Elstub and P. McLaverty (eds), Deliberative Democracy: Issues and Cases, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1–16. Elstub, S. (2018), ‘Deliberation and participatory democracy’, in A. Bächtiger, J.S. Dryzek, J. Mansbridge and M.E. Warren (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Escobar, O. (2014), Transformative Practices: The Political Work of Public Engagement Practitioners, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, accessed 10 August 2019 at www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/9915, Edinburgh. Escobar, O. (2017a), ‘Making it official: Participation professionals and the challenge of institutionalizing deliberative democracy’, in L. Bherer, M. Gauthier and L. Simard (eds), The Professionalization of Public Participation, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 141–164. Escobar, O. (2017b), ‘Pluralism and democratic participation: What kind of citizen are citizens invited to be?’, Contemporary Pragmatism, 14, 416–438. Escobar, O., F. Garven, C. Harkins, K. Glazik, S. Cameron and A. Stoddart (2018), ‘Participatory budgeting in Scotland: The interplay of public service reform, community empowerment and social justice’, in N. Dias (ed.), Hope for Democracy: 30 Years of Participatory Budgeting Worldwide, Vila Ruiva, Cuba; Faro, Portugal: Epopeia Records & Oficina, pp. 311–336. Fischer, F. (2009), Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foa, R.S. and Y. Mounk (2016), ‘The danger of deconsolidation’, Journal of Democracy, 27 (3), 5–17. Font, J., D. della Porta and Y. Sintomer (2014), Participatory Democracy in Southern Europe: Causes, Characteristics and Consequences, London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Forester, J. (1988), Planning in the Face of Power, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Forester, J. (2009), Dealing with Differences: Dramas of Mediating Public Disputes, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geissel, B. and M. Joas (2013), Participatory Democratic Innovations in Europe: Improving the Quality of Democracy?, Berlin and Toronto: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Geissel, B. and K. Newton (2012), Evaluating Democratic Innovations. Curing the Democratic Malaise?, London: Routledge. Grönlund, K., A. Bächtiger and M. Setälä (eds) (2014), Deliberative Mini-Publics: Involving Citizens in the Democratic Process, Colchester, UK: ECPR Press. Henderson, J., P. Revell and O. Escobar (2018), Transforming Communities? Exploring the Roles of Community Anchor Organisations in Engaging with, Leading and Challenging Public Service Reform, Edinburgh: What Works Scotland. Hendriks, C. (2011), The Politics of Public Deliberation: Citizen Engagement and Interest Advocacy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hendriks, C. and A.W. Dzur (2015), Innovating in the Mainstream? Enhancing Public Deliberation in Conventional Politics, paper presented at the European Consortium of Political Research Annual Conference, Montreal.

Introduction: the field of democratic innovation 9 Hendriks, C. and A.W. Dzur (2018), Citizen Agency in Democratic Reform: Towards Substantive and Sustainable Democratic Innovation, paper presented at the European Consortium of Political Research Joint Sessions, Nicosia. Hendriks, F. (2019), ‘Democratic innovation beyond deliberative reflection: The plebiscitary rebound and the advent of action-oriented democracy’, Democratization, 26 (3), 444–464. Hibbing, J.R. and E. Theiss-Morse (2002), Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, C.W. (2015), Do-it-yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry, New York: Oxford University Press. Levitsky, S. and L. Way (2015), ‘The myth of democratic recession’, Journal of Democracy, 26 (1), 45–58. Lewanski, R. (2013), ‘Institutionalizing deliberative democracy: The “Tuscany laboratory”’, Journal of Public Deliberation, 9 (1), Article 10. Mutz, D.C. (2006), Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nabatchi, T., J. Gastil, G. Michael Weiksner and M. Leighninger (2012), Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement, New York: Oxford University Press. Neblo, M.A., K.M. Esterling, R.P. Kennedy, D.M.J. Lazer and A.E. Sokhey (2010), ‘Who wants to deliberate – and why?’, American Political Science Review, 104 (3), 1–18. Owen, D. and G. Smith (2015), ‘Survey article: Deliberation, democracy, and the systemic turn’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 23 (2), 213–234. Parkinson, J. (2004), ‘Why deliberate? The encounter between deliberation and new public managers’, Public Administration, 82 (2), 377–395. Parkinson, J. and J. Mansbridge (eds) (2012), Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pateman, C. (1970), Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ravazzi, S. (2016), ‘When a government attempts to institutionalize and regulate deliberative democracy: The how and why from a process-tracing perspective’, Critical Policy Studies, 11 (1), 79–100. Saward, M. (ed.) (2000), Democratic Innovation: Deliberation, Representation, and Association, London: Routledge. Saward, M. (2003), Democracy, Cambridge: Polity in association with Blackwell. Shapiro, I. (1999), ‘Enough of deliberation: Politics is about interests and power’, in S. Macedo (ed.), Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 28–38. Sintomer, Y. (2018), ‘From deliberative to radical democracy: sortition and politics in the 1st century’, Politics and Society, 46 (3), 337–357. Sintomer, Y., A. Röcke and C. Herzberg (2016), Participatory Budgeting in Europe: Democracy and Public Governance, Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, G. (2005), Beyond the Ballot. 57 Democratic Innovations from Around the World – A report for the POWER Inquiry, accessed 25 August 2011 at www.powerinquiry.org/. Smith, G. (2009), Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sunstein, C.R. (2009), Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Economist Intelligence Unit (2016), Democracy Index 2016. Revenge of the ‘Deplorables’, London: The Economist. The Economist Intelligence Unit (2018), Democracy Index 2018: Me Too? Political Participation, Protest and Democracy, London: The Economist. Wampler, B. (2012), ‘Entering the state: Civil society activism and participatory governance in Brazil’, Political Studies, 60 (2), 341–362. Warren, M. (2009), ‘Governance-driven democratization’, Critical Policy Studies, 3 (1), 3–13. Weakley, S. and O. Escobar (2018), Community Planning after the Community Empowerment Act. Edinburgh: What Works Scotland. Wike, R. and J. Fetterolf (2018), ‘Liberal democracy’s crisis of confidence’, Journal of Democracy, 29 (4), 136–150. Young, I.M. (2000), Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

SECTION I TYPES OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION

1.

Defining and typologising democratic innovations Stephen Elstub and Oliver Escobar

1 INTRODUCTION 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

11

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governance and referenda and citizens’ initiatives, while highlighting the proliferation of hybrids often aided by digital participation.

2  A SCOPING REVIEW OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS We conducted a scoping review2 of the academic literature on democratic innovations. The purpose of the review was not to provide an overview of the rich literature that now exists in this area, but rather to analyse the conceptual confusion that exists. We found that the concept of democratic innovations had limited usage prior to the early 2000s and 75% of the relevant entries were from the year 2010 onwards. Despite the increasing popularity of democratic innovations, our scoping review found very few efforts to provide a consistent definition of the concept or to develop a coherent typology. Most publications (85%) covered in our review used the term ‘democratic innovations’ without defining it. The scoping review included a final sample of 48 publications that met the inclusion criteria (e.g. featuring democ* innov* in title, abstract or topic). The sample included 3 articles from the 1990s, 10 from the 2000s and 35 from 2010 onwards. The dramatic increase in usage of the term ‘democratic innovations’ coincides with Graham Smith’s eponymous book in 2009 (see Chapter 38 of this Handbook for Smith’s latest reflections on democratic innovations), which provided a definition that is now widely used (e.g. Bua, 2012; Mattijssen et al., 2014; Trettel, 2015): ‘institutions that have been specifically designed to increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision-making process’ (Smith, 2009: 1). This definition foregoes attention to democratic innovation as a practice and focuses instead on democratic innovations as the processes that embody that practice. This makes the object of study less elusive and opens space for the investigation of a range of exemplars – which are the foundation of an applied discipline (Flyvbjerg, 2004: 432). It also galvanises a shared terminology, which was more ambiguously used before. Indeed, before Smith, democratic innovation was generally used interchangeably with social innovation, institutional innovation or participatory innovation. As part of our scoping review of the literature on democratic innovations, we explored existing typologies in order to map the range of relevant processes and institutions. Only 10% of the articles offered specific typologies. Of those that did, about half separated ‘direct’ (sometimes ‘binding’) and ‘deliberative’ innovations, reflecting the differentiation that appeared in some definitions. In most articles it was difficult to discern types and how they were determined. Michels (2011: 280), for example, explicitly argues that ‘four types of democratic innovation can be distinguished: referenda, participatory policy-making, deliberative surveys, and deliberative forums.’ This typology suffers from omission and also lacks conceptual distinctiveness, for instance: citizen juries and deliberative polls might be categorised together as deliberative innovations, or separately as deliberative surveys and deliberative fora. Smith (2009) offers the clearest typology, which includes popular assemblies, mini-publics (see Chapter 3 of this Handbook), participatory budgeting (see Chapter 5 of this Handbook), direct legislation (i.e. binding referenda) (see Chapter 6 of this Handbook) and e-democracy (see Chapter 7 of this Handbook). But there is limited use of this typology in the literature, and instead most papers tend to focus on a specific democratic innovation. The term ‘minipublic’ was fairly rare (mentioned in 19% of the publications), while ‘deliberative arena’,

Defining and typologising democratic innovations 13

‘deliberative institutional innovation’ or ‘deliberative forums’ often featured before a list of recurrent examples, including citizens’ juries (41%), planning cells (19%) and citizens’ assemblies (17%). Participatory budgeting received the most mentions (60%), while referenda and citizen initiatives were name-checked fairly often (43%) although usually mentioned in passing rather than in-depth. The terms ‘collaborative governance’ or ‘co-governance’ were used rarely (see Chapter 4 of this Handbook). They were, however, frequently described, usually in the form of a specific case (e.g. Olvera, 2010; Fung, 2015; Peruzzoti, 2012). When ‘digital participation’ was mentioned, often it was either as ‘e-democracy’ or the application of existing forms of participation (innovative or otherwise) online (e.g. Smith, 2009; Trettel, 2015; Kersting, 2016). However, also included as democratic innovations were compulsory voting and quotas (Newton and Geissel, 2012), the instigation of new elected offices, such as mayors (Quirk, 2006; Van Cott, 2008), postal ballots (Smith, 2005; Stewart, 1996), changing the day of voting (Stewart, 1996), co-operatives (Hendriks, 2019), associations and political parties (Saward, 2003). This really highlights the huge diversity of things the term is being used for and the concept stretching that is occurring. All in all, there were few explicit typologies and there is not yet a widely used typology. This is to be expected in an emerging field that is driven by the study of exemplars that function as a point of encounter for democratic theory and applied social science. Therefore, it is typical to find lists of examples rather than typologies: Democratic innovations cover a wide range of instruments: participatory budgets, citizen juries, deliberative surveys, referenda, town meetings, online citizen forums, e-democracy, public conversations, study circles, collaborative policy making, alternative dispute resolutions, and so on. (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017: 39)

In contrast, Geissel’s (2013) classification of new participatory practices has three broad categories: collaborative governance, deliberative procedures and direct democracy. We are interested in finding a middle point between the two approaches above – a typology that is not just a long list of formats nor simply an abstract set of overlapping headings. On the one hand, Baiocchi and Ganuza offer a list that mixes formats and processes; for example, alternative dispute resolution approaches and study circle formats could be used within a citizens’ jury process; by the same token, participatory budgeting can be a subset of collaborative policymaking and vice versa. On the other hand, Geissel’s categories somewhat overlook the hybridity of practices across democratic innovations– thus collaborative governance processes, for instance the paradigmatic case of NHS Citizen (see Chapter 4 of this Handbook) can have deliberative components; likewise, direct legislative mechanisms can be used as part of a broader deliberative system (see Chapter 3 and 6 of this Handbook for a discussion of the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review). Alternative democratic principles and practices can be combined purposefully to assemble a democratic innovation. Therefore, we maintain that despite the increasing use of the term ‘democratic innovations’, further work on defining and typologising the field are required for analytical consistency and to aid comparative research (see Chapter 37 of this Handbook). Without this there is a severe danger of concept stretching and if a concept ‘is used by scholars to mean completely different things, it is basically a useless concept – it confuses more than it illuminates’ (Ekman and Amnå, 2012: 284). If democratic innovations are to be part of the solution to the current problems of democracy3 then we need greater clarity on what they are.

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3  A DEFINITION OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS For the purposes of this Handbook, democratic innovations are defined as: 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 this section we explain and justify this definition, dealing with each element in turn. In doing so we draw and on our scoping review and a critical review of existing definitions. 3.1  ‘Processes or Institutions’ As highlighted in the previous section, there seems to be little agreement on what type of object democratic innovations are. Saward (2003: 4) mentions ‘solutions’, which is rather vague, and for Geissel (2012) democratic innovations are ‘practices’, which is less vague, as it indicates that ‘implementation’ is required (Newton, 2012: 4) but still remains very encompassing, and ontological debates about the nature of ‘practice’ further complicate the concept (Schatzki et al., 2000; Schatzki, 2002). Baiocchi and Ganuza (2017: 39) make it more specific by mentioning ‘instruments’ but perhaps muddle important distinctions between formats, techniques and approaches that may be combined as part of a democratic innovation process. In turn, Smith (2009: 1) has provided a more specific and concrete institutional focus, which reduces the variety of things considered as democratic innovations and therefore renders finding a suitable encompassing definition less challenging. However, we consider it to be too restrictive, as institutions have some level of stability and continuity over time (Warren, 2017) that many democratic innovations still lack in most contexts. Moreover, it excludes innovative processes within established mainstream institutions that can be an important aspect of democratic innovation (Hendriks and Dzur, 2015). Consequently, we suggest that democratic innovations may be institutions or processes. We also want to heed the empirical basis that is reshaping the field and broaden the scope from ‘political decision-making’ to ‘governance’ processes, as democratic innovations tend to stem from ‘governance-driven democratisation,’ and to a great extent it has been policy-making, rather than politics, that has ignited this field of practice and inquiry (Warren, 2009). 3.2  ‘That Are New to a Policy Issue, Policy Role, or Level of Governance’ A key theme highlighted by the scoping review is that democratic innovations are, above all, contextual. As Crouzel (2014: 1) puts it: ‘Democratic innovation flows from the synergies generated between different types of actor (public institutions, civil society organizations, private sector, citizens, the media)’. A democratic innovation can therefore only be considered ‘innovative’ in relation to its context. This recognises that, as Åström et al. (2013: 27) suggest, ‘democratic innovations, just as any innovation, are more than ideas and designs; they are ideas in action’. Context provides the cornerstone of democratic innovations and, for instance, makes referenda or mini-publics novel in some places today, while having been used elsewhere for decades. We see this firmly acknowledged in the definition of democratic innovations offered by Geissel (2012: 164): ‘as new practice consciously and purposefully introduced in order to

Defining and typologising democratic innovations 15

improve the quality of democratic governance in any given state, irrespective of whether the innovation in question has already been tried out in another state.’ The problem is that due to the enormity of the contexts, we end up with myriad practices that could be defined as democratic innovations. For example, in authoritarian regimes democratic innovations are viewed differently than in established democracies (Almen, 2016: 478). The limitation of Geissel’s definition is that ‘context’ is interpreted rather narrowly and limited to states i.e. if a practice has not been used in a specific state before, and meets certain democratic criteria, it constitutes innovation.4 This might make characterisation and definitions of democratic innovations more achievable, but at the expense of some vital nuance. For example, it ignores the democratic innovations that are occurring in transnational and global governance (Rask and Worthington, 2015; Rask et al., 2012) (see Chapter 24 of this Handbook). Moreover, we believe that other contexts must be considered in this assessment, such as, policy area, level of governance, stage in the policy process and function in the policy process (Elstub, 2014a). The premise being that if a practice is new to these contexts it could still be classed as a democratic innovation, even if it had been implemented elsewhere within the same state (Sørensen, 2017). These contexts are integral to the typology that we develop in the next section and are covered in more detail there. 3.3  ‘Developed to Reimagine and Deepen the Role of Citizens in Governance Processes’ This is a defining feature and ineliminable core of the concept of democratic innovation. It is the ability to promote this reimagining that renders a process a democratic innovation, it is what they all have in common.5 A recurring theme in the literature was about legitimacy and how democratic innovations do not merely happen to increase legitimacy, but are designed and developed specifically to do so. Moreover, democratic innovations not only ‘deepen the role of citizens’ (Smith, 2009: 1) but also reimagine it. It is about more than deepening citizens’ current role as voters or activists, it entails alternative imaginaries of citizens as co-producers and problem-solvers. The ‘reimagine’ bit is important because it brings in contextual elements and establishes that a democratic innovation gives citizens roles that are new in that given policy context, and in doing so, it deepens citizenship by recasting the parameters of participation and influence. In this sense, democratic innovations seek to enhance democracy first and foremost by reimagining the role that citizens can play in governance processes. This then narrows the understanding of what democratic innovations are, although not necessarily what they can be. For example, in the previous section, it was noted how compulsory voting and quotas (Newton and Geissel, 2012), the instigation of new elected offices, such as mayors (Quirk, 2006; Van Cott, 2008), postal ballots (Smith, 2005; Stewart, 1996), changing the day of voting (Stewart, 1996), co-operatives (Hendriks, 2019), associations and political parties (Saward, 2003) have all been labelled democratic innovations. But they do not reimagine the role of citizens, but rather are standard forms of participation in representative democracies. Furthermore, democratic innovations ‘directly engage citizens’, rather than only ‘individuals who represent organised groups’ (Smith, 2009: 2). In this sense, ‘democratic innovations change the political subject and widen the political boundaries to include lay citizens’ (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017: 45). In contrast to consumerist models of citizenship advanced in the New Public Management era, or traditional associational models based on collective representation, democratic innovations open space for the reconstruction and influence of the

16  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance

deliberative citizen in the context of the ‘New Public Governance’ (Osborne, 2010). This challenges minimalist versions of democracy for citizen-consumers, as well as traditional associations’ claims to being representative while struggling to be inclusive. In effect, democratic innovations do not suppress the influence of organised interests, advocacy groups and associational life, but they place alongside it a ‘universal subject of participation’ that enacts politics by prioritising deliberation over protest, or representation (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017: 95). This notion of the deliberative citizen is therefore mobilised to provide a political subject that can legitimately engage in the myriad theatres of the New Public Governance (Newman and Clarke, 2009; Mahony et al., 2010; Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003). 3.4  ‘By Increasing Opportunities for Participation, Deliberation and Influence’ Democratic innovations have been significantly informed by two democratic theories (see Chapter 7 in this Handbook) that have emerged in the last 50 years as critiques of representative democracy, namely participatory democracy and deliberative democracy (Davidson and Elstub, 2014; Kössler, 2015). Both theories aim to reform, rather than replace, representative democracy and democratic innovations are therefore also seen in this light (Trettel, 2015: 88; see also Fung, 2006). However, there are important differences between these two theories, which has consequently led to a variety of designs of democratic innovations to promote the various norms of each (Elstub, 2018), which again makes defining democratic innovations challenging. Floridia (2014: 305) sums up the differences between these two theories of democracy: ‘participatory democracy is founded on the direct action of citizens who exercise some power and decide issues affecting their lives, while deliberative democracy is founded on argumentative exchanges, reciprocal reason giving, and on public debates which precede decisions’. Robin Leidner (1991) was the first scholar to use of the term ‘democratic innovation’ with respect to democratic governance in the National Women’s Studies Association (NSWA), where she argues that one-person-one-vote majority electoral processes contradict core feminist principles of giving voice to minority groups. In this first use we see key themes identified that would prove central to subsequent discussions of democratic innovations, most notably a critique of representative democracy, but also links to deliberative democracy, as Leidner (1991) suggests that in the NSWA all arguments should have equal weight regardless of numbers of supporters. However, no definition of ‘democratic innovation’ is offered by Leidner. A few years later John Stewart (1996: 32) defines ‘innovations in democratic practice’ as processes ‘designed to bring the informed views of ordinary citizens into the processes of local government.’ The debates on democratic innovations have since moved well beyond local government to include national and even transnational governance too. However, again we see a nod to deliberative democracy in this definition with the requirement of ‘informed views’. In addition to the continued theme of democratic innovations offering something new in comparison to the orthodoxy of representative democracy, we see an explicit link to participatory democracy emerging a few years later in a definition of democratic innovation offered by Saward (2003: 4): ‘The phrase “democratic innovation” expresses a critical commitment to democratic values of popular participation and political equality, allied to an urgent imperative for theorists to articulate and analyse new solutions to the problems of democracy.’ Smith’s (2009: 1) definition further cements the influence of participatory democracy. There is still a

Defining and typologising democratic innovations 17

potential influence here from deliberative democracy too if ‘deepen’ is interpreted as making participation more meaningful, and improving citizens’ opinions, either prudentially or epistemically; that interpretation seems warranted given that ‘considered judgement’ is one of the evaluative criteria Smith proposes to assess democratic innovations. As we saw above, Geissel (2012: 164) suggests that the aim of democratic innovations is to ‘improve the quality of democratic governance.’ This improvement could be informed by participatory and/or deliberative democracy, or indeed any other democratic theory. However, in specifying that democratic innovations ‘involve citizens in the decision-making process’ (Geissel, 2012: 163), we see the influence of participatory democracy, while elsewhere it is made clear that deliberative democracy also underpins a strand of democratic innovations (Geissel, 2012: 166). While the theories of participatory democracy and deliberative democracy are clearly related, and often entangled in the complexity of practice, they are not the same, and aspire to promote related, but ultimately different, values (Elstub, 2018), and this distinction has led to different types of democratic innovations, aiming at the enactment of different and potentially conflicting democratic goods, as Fishkin (2012: 71) notes: ‘Democratic Innovations have tended to move in two conflicting directions. Some aspire to increase inclusion and some to increase thoughtfulness.’ Cohen (2009: 257) suggests that ‘social complexity and scale limit the extent to which modern polities can be both deliberative and participatory’ and consequently if we expand participation, deliberative quality will be reduced. The point is that different types of democratic innovations are likely to be required to promote participatory democracy to a deliberative version, and vice versa. The influence of these two different democratic theories on democratic innovations therefore results in making characterisation more elusive. However, participatory and deliberative democracy can and do overlap in practice, despite theoretical differences and tensions between them. Consequently, they can potentially be reconciled in practice through appropriately configured processes that blend participatory and deliberative principles following, for instance, the pragmatist approach of democratic innovators, such as John Dewey (1927; Escobar, 2017). Democratic innovations, through the prism of the deliberative systems approach (Parkinson and Mansbridge, 2012), can combine participatory and deliberative logics by sequencing them as part of an overarching process that realises crosscutting democratic goods, such as inclusion, deliberative quality, popular control and so on. In this light, exemplars like the pioneering British Columbian Citizens’ Assembly illustrated how mini-publics, public forums and referenda can be combined to realise both participatory and deliberative ideals as part of a hybrid democratic innovation (Warren and Pearse, 2008). Although not all democratic innovations are hybrids, the number of hybrid processes developing around the world is staggering.6 Cases like the Icelandic constitution-making process combined digital participation, mini-publics and referenda in an arrangement that blended logics, such as sortition, election, crowdsourcing and deliberation (Gylfason, 2013). Another example is the global spread of participatory budgeting and its often uneasy fit with local innovations in collaborative governance, including established associations (Sintomer et al., 2016; Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017). There are recent influential cases, such as the Melbourne Citizens’ Panel or the Irish Constitutional Convention, which demonstrated the elasticity and porosity of mini-publics, overcoming limits of scale or compatibility with representative democracy (Suteu, 2015; Farrell et al., 2018). Hybridity and experimentation are the hallmarks of an applied theoretical discipline, and deliberative qualities have come to be expected as one of the systemic properties of most

18  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance

democratic innovations – even in those, like referenda or citizens’ initiatives, firmly anchored on aggregative logics. Consequently, we place deliberation, alongside participation and influence, as a key crosscutting dimension present to some degree in all democratic innovations. Democratic innovations also can provide citizens with influence in governance. Critical observers of the field have noted that democratic innovations often reflect a compromise between emancipatory and governmental logics, an interface that generates new forms of citizen participation but also accommodates the imperatives of the state and other powerful stakeholders (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Gaventa, 2006; Cornwall and Coelho, 2007; Lee et al., 2015). This has given place to a critique of the limits of democratic innovations that offer participation but not empowerment (Böker and Elstub, 2015; Lee, 2015). Baiocchi and Ganuza (2017: 50) question ‘empowerment processes that take place within the limits set by administrators’; they argue that the ‘contradiction of democratic innovations is that they invite participation to debate the common good but do not endow ordinary citizens with the power to determine outcomes. This is empowerment, but within limits’. Democratic innovations represent a compromise between the aspirations of participatory democracy from the 1960s (Pateman, 1970; Barber, 2003) and a revived pragmatism regarding current challenges in public governance and the need for new modes of collective action (Fung, 2012; Dewey, 1927).

4  A TYPOLOGY OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS In his seminal discussion of political concepts and ideologies, Freeden (1994: 146), claims that political concepts ‘consist of both ineliminable features and quasi-contingent ones.’ In this section we make the case that the concept of ‘democratic innovations’ contains both these features too and we set out which elements fall into which category, in order to develop a typology which will facilitate comparative analysis. We define ‘typology’ as ‘conceptually derived interrelated sets of ideal types’ (Doty and Glick, 1994: 232) and believe they are useful for ‘describing complex organizational forms and for explaining outcomes’ (Doty and Glick, 1994: 230). Typologies also enable us to identify hybrids of the ideal types as we do here. As Hendriks (2019: 458) suggests, ‘a challenge for next-generation research into democratic innovation is to get a more encompassing understanding of the hybridization that occurs’, and we think this typology can make a valuable contribution to this. 4.1  Ineliminable Features of Democratic Innovations According to Freeden (1994: 146), ineliminable features ‘are not intrinsic or logically necessary to the meaning of the word to which they attach, but result from actual linguistic usage.’ The features are ineliminable because they are present in all usages of the word, which would therefore be meaningless without this feature present. If concepts do not have ineliminable features, then this would mean the word employed to represent the concept applies to more than one concept. As argued above, in the case of democratic innovations, we see the ineliminable feature as ‘reimagining and deepening the role of citizens in governance processes’. However, this is not sufficient for a political concept, as the concept itself is not reducible to the ineliminable feature. Rather ineliminable features are minimum components of political concepts, that need to be elaborated and given complexity by the presence of additional

Defining and typologising democratic innovations 19

non-random, although contingently variable, components that are ‘locked in to that vacuous “de facto” core in a limited number of recognisable patterns’ (Freeden, 1994: 149). The presence of these quasi-contingent components are required to give the core substance, by furnishing it with a specific range of categories. Here we are looking for options which come into play when we consider a concrete example of a democratic innovation where some aspect of each will be relevant. Quasi-contingent components are therefore logically adjacent to the ineliminable features. 4.2  Quasi-Contingent Features of Democratic Innovations Our quasi-contingent features are largely derived from the three dimensions of Fung’s (2006) framework for institutional possibilities for public participation, which include who participates (inclusion), how they participate (mode of participation) and the effect of the participation on policy (influence). However, Fung’s scope is broader than ours in the sense that ‘possibilities for public participation’ overlap with, but are not necessarily the same as, democratic innovations. These possibilities might not be innovative or new at all. Therefore, our framework differs from Fung’s in some important ways. With respect to who participates, we use the same scale of inclusiveness, but narrow and reorder the elements included (see Figure 1.1). On how citizens participate, Fung combines ‘communication mode’ with ‘decision-making’, but we consider these to be separate features. We retain Fung’s scale of intensity for mode of participation, expanding it slightly to include observation (see Figure 1.2). Decision-making is then dealt with separately and placed on Fung’s (2006) scale of intensity (see Figure 1.3), while ‘power and authority’ for the effect on policy is adopted with minor variation (see Figure 1.4). Moreover, we agree with Fung (2006: 67) that analytical tools should separate empirical and normative criteria. The quasi-contingent features therefore present criteria through which to categorise and analyse different types of democratic innovations. Whether these combinations of features provided by a democratic innovation are normatively desirable will depend on the approach to democracy favoured, and the particular context the innovation occurs in. The first quasi-contingent component relevant to democratic innovations is ‘which citizens participate’ and therefore the way participants are selected is relevant (Fung, 2006). There are a number of options here including, self-selection, sortition, purposive selection, election and hybrid combinations of some or all of these that can occur in any specific democratic innovation. Following Fung (2006), these can be placed on a scale of inclusiveness as demonstrated in Figure 1.1. Self-selection, which in principle means open participation, has the potential to be the most inclusive as there are no formal restrictions to participation. However, we know from studies on public participation that in reality this leads to skewed participation, as social and economic cleavages affect equality of participation (Ryfe and Stalsburg, 2012; Verba et al., 1995). In sortition, only a limited number of citizens are permitted to participate, but as they are randomly selected, all citizens have an equal chance of being selected (Carson and Martin, 1999). This method of selection can reduce the skewed nature of self-selection (Fishkin, 2009). Participants can also be elected. For Fung (2006: 68) election is seen as selecting professional politicians as representatives, but this need not be the case. For example, in some participatory budgeting programmes, citizens elect lay citizens as budget delegates (e.g. Baiocchi, 2005) and in Iceland the Constitutional Assembly comprised 25 citizens selected by direct

20  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance

personal election (Gylfason, 2013). In elections participation is exclusive, but all get a say in who the participants will be. However, in addition to considering how citizens elect fellow participants within a democratic innovation, the election element does enable us to consider professional and elected politicians who may also participate in democratic innovations alongside lay citizens. Citizens can be purposively selected in other ways too, i.e. selection by invitation – for example, for their interest or knowledge in the topic, because of the impact the decision will have on them, because of their employment, or because they represent, or are representative of, a particular interest or identity group or community. This is less inclusive, in principle, as not all citizens have an equal chance to participate or to determine who the participants will be. The potential hybrid combinations of the elements are vast and, while they clearly affect the inclusiveness of the democratic innovation, cannot be comfortably delineated to be placed on the scale. The second quasi-contingent component is the ‘mode of participation’, which relates to how the participants communicate with each other in the democratic innovation. There are a number of options here including observation, listening and expression, which can be placed on a scale of intensiveness of participation, as depicted in Figure 1.2.7 Firstly, participants can just observe proceedings. For example, they may be restricted to watching other participants vote on an issue. This is the least intense as it requires some, but negligible, engagement. Secondly, participants can be required to listen to other participants give speeches, negotiate or deliberate, which is potentially more active than observation. In addition, participants can be afforded the opportunity to express their views and opinions themselves through voting, or discursively, through asking questions, making comments or engaging in deliberation. Discursively expressing a view is more demanding than registering a vote. Once again, there are numerous hybrid combinations of these too. Our third quasi-contingent component is mode of decision-making in the democratic innovation, and the decision-making options can be assessed according to the intensity of work expected from participants. The options here include no decision required, decision made through aggregation of preferences, decision made through bargaining and negotiation, and decision made through deliberation, with additional hybrid combinations of all of these as depicted in Figure 1.3. On the most intense side of the scale we find deliberation and bargaining/negotiation, which in practice may overlap and represent similarly intensive forms of Figure 1.1 Participant selection methods interaction.

Source: Based on Fung, 2006.

(based on Fung, 2006)

Figure 1.1  Participant selection methods

Figure 1.2 Mode of participation

Defining and typologising democratic innovations 21

Source: Based on Fung, 2006.

(based on Fung, 2006)

Figure 1.2  Mode of participation

A further quasi-contingent component is ‘authority and power’. This relates to the influence the participants have over what public authorities do. Here the options are personal benefits, communicative influence, advise and consult, co-governance and direct authority and can be placed on a scale of degree of influence as depicted in Figure 1.4. Firstly, even when there is no influence over formal decision-making processes, citizens may gain personal benefits, such as, self-development or fulfilment from performing civic obligations. In this sense, there is some influence over the participants themselves, who constitute the demos, which public authorities must reflect and serve. Secondly, the institution or process can be a mechanism to provide ‘advice and consultation’ for public authorities who retain decision-making power, but are open to citizen input via certain avenues. Thirdly, public opinion can be expressed or transformed through the participatory process, and even where no formal decision-making influence is exerted, there can be ‘communicative influence on members of the public or officials who are moved by the testimony, reasons, conclusions, or by the probity of the process itself’ (Fung, 2006: 69). The level of impact of ‘advise and consult’ vs. ‘communicative influence’ is variable depending on context, so here we alter Fung’s order. Fourthly, we have ‘co-governance’, where citizens join public officials to make decisions via a democratic innovation. Finally, we Figure 1.3 Mode of decision-making

Source: Adapting Fung, 2006. (adapting Fung, 2006)

Figure 1.3  Mode of decision-making

Figure 1.4 Extent of power and influence

22  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance

Figure 1.4  Extent of power and influence

have democratic innovations that have direct authority to make a decision. Once again, there can be hybrid combinations of these elements.

5  CONTEXTUAL FEATURES OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS The options of the various patterns made available by the quasi-contingent components that will be present in any specific democratic innovation will be determined by the context the democratic innovation is imbedded in. These contextual features therefore relate to Freeden’s notion of cultural adjacency, ‘which imposes further constraints on the structure of political concepts’ (Freeden, 1994: 149). The cultural context thereby reduces the number of quasicontingent components that are applicable in a given application of democratic innovations. Ultimately, they help make democratic innovations relevant to the context in question and determine whether it is a democratic innovation. We highlighted the key contextual features in the definition we provided above, but here we explain them in more detail. The first key contextual element that can influence the relationship between the quasi-contingent and ineliminable features in democratic innovations, is the type of policy area or issue that the particular case of the democratic innovation is addressing. This is still applicable even where the democratic innovation does not produce a decision, or has little or no power and authority in the policy process. Indeed, the type of issue at hand can influence these factors. Some policy areas have been more open to democratic innovations than others (Fischer, 2009, 2003). Therefore, even if a democratic innovation has been used repeatedly in the particular political system, it can be seen as an innovation if it is used in a policy area where it has not been used before. Secondly, the level of governance that the democratic innovation is embedded in will influence the choices made between the array of quasi-contingent features available, which in turn influences the realisation of the ineliminable core. These levels include local, regional/ subnational, national, transnational and global (Elstub, 2014a). Therefore, if a democratic innovation is not new to the political system it can still constitute innovation if it is used at a level of governance within that system where it has not been used regularly. Democratic innovations can also be used at different stages of the policy-making process which can also influence the choices in design options between the quasi-contingent features (Elstub, 2014a). These include agenda-setting, options-mapping, debate and discussion, decision-making, implementation

Defining and typologising democratic innovations 23

and review. Once again, if a democratic innovation is adopted at a different stage of the policy process to how it is usually used in a political system, it can still constitute innovation. The ineliminable core, the quasi-contingent features and the contextual features can all be combined in a framework to assess and characterise any particular instance of a democratic innovation, as illustrated in Figure 1.5. At the heart of a democratic innovation is the ineliminable feature shared by all, i.e. that they change the role of citizens in governance processes (see core white circle in Figure 1.5). How they do this is determined by the quasi-contingent features of how they select their participants, how the citizens participate, how decisions are reached, and the extent those decisions influence policy. Depicted here by the grey segments surrounding the core circle. The context effects the relationship between the quasi-contingent features and the ineliminable core. These include the policy area, the level of governance and the stage in the policy process, as depicted by the outer sections. A holistic analysis of democratic innovations requires consideration of all of these features and the relationships between them. Only then can we understand the contribution a specific democratic innovation makes to the shared ineliminable core of reimagining the role of citizens. Freeden proceeds to apply this morphological analysis to ideologies to glean further unFigure 1.5 Framework for democratic innovations derstanding of their meaning. This is not relevant for our purposes as specific democratic

Figure 1.5  Framework for democratic innovations

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innovations are attempts to enact varying combinations of the quasi-contingent components, in specific contexts, in order to reimagine the role of citizens in governance processes. In this respect, unlike ideologies, democratic innovations do not compete with each other, although they are evaluated differently. Despite these important differences, the contention here is that specific democratic innovations, as with political concepts and ideologies, have core, adjacent and peripheral components. It is these combinations that makes them an instance of a certain type of democratic innovation rather than another. The quasi-contingent components discussed above, remain the same, but as they get combined in discrete ways, in specific democratic innovations, they can morph due to the proximity of different components. Different democratic innovations can therefore be distinguished by how they combine these different components, while no component is necessarily exclusive to anyone type of democratic innovation. There’s also a degree of fluidity with types of democratic innovations, for example, there are numerous forms of mini-public (Elstub, 2014b; Chapter 3 in this Handbook), participatory budgeting (Sintomer et al., 2016; Chapter 5 in this Handbook) and referenda (Setälä and Schiller, 2012; Altman, 2011; Chapter 6 in this Handbook). Moreover, as noted earlier, there are hybrid types that combine salient features associated with different types of democratic innovation. If it is accepted that types of democratic innovation do have core, adjacent and peripheral components, then it is possible for them to be seen as Wittgensteinian families.

6  FAMILIES OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS As in any applied field, a typology must be guided by the core characteristics of a range of exemplars, while allowing clear distinctions. The core characteristics of democratic innovations stem from the ineliminable features of the concept, while the distinctions emerge from putting to use the analytical framework introduced above (contingent and contextual components). Each family of democratic innovations has some combination of quasi-contingent and/ or contextual elements that distinguishes it from other families. While all quasi-contingent categories are relevant to all the families, some define a certain type of democratic innovation, to the extent that they form the ineliminable core for that particular family. At the same time, these ineliminable cores of each family are relatively loose with a number of options in participant selection method, mode of participation, mode of decision-making, extent of power and authority, policy area, level of governance and stage in policy process. As a result, there is inevitably a good deal of hybridisation across and within these families. The combination of these features across these design options determines a specific instance or case of the democratic innovation family. In turn, these clusters can be understood as united by characteristics that gives them a certain ‘family resemblance’ (Wittgenstein, 1953: 31). Family resemblances are those ‘salient resemblances which are fairly common to, or distinctive of, the members of a kind, and which we often use to identify members of that kind’ (Gert, 1995: 183). A Wittgensteinian understanding of concept formation allows for fuzziness without rejecting distinction. In this way, different processes may be related while remaining unique. For example, mini-publics can be very different (e.g. planning cells, consensus conferences, citizens’ juries and assemblies, deliberative polls, etc.) but there are some features that make them unmistakably part of the family of mini-publics (e.g. use of sortition; deliberative engagement) (Elstub, 2014b).

25

Sortition

Discursive expression, voting and listening

Deliberation and aggregation

Self-selection Voting

Aggregation

Discursive expression, voting, listening and observation

Deliberation, bargaining and negotiation, aggregation, no decision

Diverse

Variable: Personal benefits, advise and consult, communicative influence, co-governance and direct authority Diverse

Diverse Variable: Personal benefits, advise and consult, communicative influence, co-governance and direct authority

Advise and consult and direct authority

Local, regional, national and transnational

Local, regional, national and transnational

Local, regional and national

Local

Various (crowdsourcing, prioritising and scrutiny)

Multiple

Decisionmaking

Formulation and decision-making

Various (agenda-setting, formulation and scrutiny)

Stage of policy process

Notes: 1  Quasi-contingent features and contextual features of each type of democratic innovation denote ineliminable features of this family. 2  By our analysis this does not qualify as a family of democratic innovation, but is included here to show its lack of an eliminable core and also its contribution to hybridisation.

Digital participation2

Self-selection, sortation, election and purposive selection

Collaborative Self-selection, Discursive Deliberation, governance and expression and bargaining purposive and listening and negotiation selection

Referenda and citizen initiatives

Level of governance

Diverse (e.g. health, Local, regional, environment, national, and transnational social policy and constitutional reform)

Co-governance and direct Public spending authority

Variable: Personal benefits, advise and consult, communicative influence, co-governance and direct authority

Policy area

Mode of Extent of power and decision-making authority

Participant selection method

Mode of participation

Contextual features

Quasi-contingent features

Participatory Self-selection, Voting, Aggregation budgeting election and discursive purposive expression selection and listening

Mini-publics

Democratic innovation family

Table 1.1  Families of democratic innovations1

26  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance

Using this strategy, the result reflects Smith’s (2009) starting point, and generates a series of clusters of democratic innovations exemplified throughout the scoping review, namely: mini-publics, collaborative governance, participatory budgeting, and referenda and citizens’ initiatives. What makes all of these democratic innovations is their ineliminable core of being processes and institutions that seek to reimagine and deepen the role of citizens in governance processes. But the contingent (inclusion, participation, decision-making, influence) and contextual features (policy area, policy stage, governance level) provide myriad variations in design and implementation. Therefore, unlike Smith (2009) and others (e.g. Trettel, 2015; Kersting, 2016), we do not classify digital participation as a family of democratic innovations, as we cannot identify an ineliminable core. We conclude this section by highlighting the key components in each family of democratic innovations that guide this Handbook. For each of them we consider the contingent and contextual features that vary between, and within, families of democratic innovations, which are summarised in Table 1.1. We still cover digital participation here, and in the Handbook more generally, for two reasons. Firstly, to enable us to establish that it does not meet our criteria for a family of democratic innovations and secondly, due to its importance for hybridisation. 6.1 Mini-Publics There are two quasi-contingent features that form the core of the family of mini-publics. These are the participant selection, where some form of sortition is crucial to this approach to democratic innovation. The second, is that the mode of decision-making is based on deliberation, but it can combine with others in hybrids, particularly including decision-making through aggregation of preferences. The level of power and influence is very variable, with cases across the scale in Figure 1.4. In terms of contextual features, mini-publics have been used in diverse policy areas (e.g. health, environment, social policy, constitutional reform), at various stages of the policy process (from policy formulation to scrutiny) and across local, regional, national and transnational levels of governance. 6.2  Participatory Budgeting This is a process where citizens can participate in deciding the allocation of public expenditure. The process tends to be open to anyone in the relevant constituency, and self-selection is often the main mode, although election and purposive selection are also present in many cases. A common mode of participation is voting, and listening and discursive expression also play an important role, but ultimately it is by aggregation that decisions are made and it is therefore this quasi-contingent component that distinguishes it from the other families. Here the contextual feature of policy area also becomes an ineliminable feature, as PB processes are used for public spending decisions. In terms of level of influence, participatory budgeting tends to place citizens as decision makers, either with direct authority, or in partnership as part of a cogovernance arrangement. In terms of contextual features, participatory budgeting is typically at work at a local level and attached to the formulation and decision-making on urban policies and initiatives.

Defining and typologising democratic innovations 27

6.3  Referenda and Citizen Initiatives With respect to referenda and citizens’ initiatives, it is a combination of the method of participant selection being self-selection, mode of participation being voting and mode of decisionmaking being aggregation that characterises this family. The level of influence is variable, but most oscillate between advisory and binding plebiscites. There is no theoretical limit in terms of the level of governance where it takes place, but it tends to be used at the final stage of policy-making and on issues of national import. This cluster of democratic innovations includes multiple cases of direct democracy worldwide (Altman, 2011) and reflects the more recent emphasis on new processes of direct legislation initiated by citizens i.e. citizen’ initiatives (Setälä and Schiller, 2012). 6.4  Collaborative Governance This fourth family is perhaps one of the most internally diverse, including public forums to collaborative partnerships and various participatory arrangements that seek to enable cooperation and coproduction between citizens, public authorities and stakeholders. The ineliminable elements of collaborative governance8 would be purposive or self-selection of participants, mode of participation based on discursive expression, and mode of decision-making based on consensus building articulated through either bargaining/negotiation or deliberation. Collaborative governance innovations tend to entail self-selection and/or purposive selection of participants. The level of influence can vary greatly, covering the full spectrum in Figure 1.4. These new governance arrangements can be found across multiple policy areas and stages, as well as across local, regional, national and transnational levels. 6.5  Digital Participation Every single quasi-contingent option and every contextual feature can relate to digital participation. Consequently, it is hard to make the case that this is a distinguishable family of democratic innovation. Rather, it is one of the main sources of hybridisation within the other families. For example, although a mini-public selects its participants through sortition, this can be supplemented by a self-selected set of participants making comments on the issue through an online platform. Online platforms can provide participants with the opportunity to observe, listen, provide discursive expression, and to vote in a participatory budgeting process. Digital participation in a referendum, or citizens’ initiative campaign, can enable discursive expression and listening of differing opinions around the issue. A digital crowdsourcing exercise can also, for instance, be built into the early stages of a collaborative governance process. Clearly there are other elements of democratic innovation that contribute to hybridisation, but digital participation elements of specific cases of democratic innovations are a key contributor. Digital participation should not be seen as inferior to the families of democratic innovation considered here, simply because it is does not qualify as a family in itself. Its contribution to hybridisation can be very valuable to these democratic innovations, as described above.

28  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance

7 CONCLUSION This chapter has grappled with the challenge of defining democratic innovations by unpacking key conceptual components in order to offer a synthesis of existing definitions and typologies. It is unsurprising that conceptual and typological issues arise when a new field emerges. The field of democratic innovation will remain one of exemplars and hybrids. But it is because of the unique interfaces they generate – between participatory and deliberative democracy, between civil society and the state, between policy and politics – that democratic innovations have become rich sites for the exploration of contemporary governance and citizenship. Building on the development of the field so far, we have settled on defining democratic innovations as 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. Having surveyed the literature, and conducted a morphological analysis, we have concluded that there are at least four emblematic conceptual families of democratic innovations – namely, minipublics, participatory budgeting, collaborative governance, and referenda and initiatives. We have noted that while the concept of democratic innovations has ineliminable features, these processes can take very different forms by virtue of variations in contingent (inclusion, participation, decision-making, influence) and contextual (policy area and stage, governance level) features. A mix across these features leads to high levels of hybridity, often driven by digital participation. This Handbook gives space to both the practice and practitioners of democratic innovation, as well as the processes and institutions that embody the field. We believe our definition of democratic innovations can reduce concept stretching and that our typology will enable comparative analysis.

NOTES 1. See http://participedia.net and www.latinno.net/en. 2. We would like to thank Derry Keohane for his research contribution to the review. The review was conducted between May and July 2016. Given that this is an emerging field we decided that a scoping review would be the most effective way of surveying the field. Scoping studies ‘differ from systematic reviews because authors do not typically assess the quality of included studies’ (Levac et al., 2010: 1). They also differ from narrative or literature reviews ‘in that the scoping process requires analytical reinterpretation of the literature’ (ibid). We conducted a scoping review of peer-reviewed journal articles as well as book chapters, based on systematic searches of two databases (Web of Science and DiscoverEd) and pre-specified inclusion criteria (i.e. key search terms: variations of democ* innovat*; no date limit; range of search filters: title, abstract, topic). The largest search yielded 860 results, which were checked for relevance in stages by reading titles, abstracts and conducting in-text keyword searches. The final shortlist that met the criteria included 48 publications and each paper was coded to locate both definitions and typologies of democratic innovations. 3. See https://soc.kuleuven.be/centre-for-political-research/demoinno/about. 4. There is also the issue of the criteria for what constitutes ‘new.’ For example, how many times might a process have to be used in a state for it to cease to be new and consequently no longer innovative. 5. This point will be developed further in the next section. 6. See for example the databases developed by Participedia (http://participedia.net) and the LATINNO project (www. latinno.net/en). 7. Again our scale is inspired by Fung (2006), but we add some additional elements e.g. observation. Fung also combines communication mode with decision-making, but we consider these to be separate, although related, components. As Fung (2006: 68) himself acknowledges in many democratic innovations, ‘there is no attempt to translate the views or preferences of participants into a collective view or decision.’ That translation is therefore for us a distinct element on which to categorise democratic innovations.

Defining and typologising democratic innovations 29 8. Conceptually, collaborative governance is a particularly challenging type of democratic innovation because it encompasses a wide range of arrangements, from temporary public forums to ongoing stakeholder partnerships. The conceptual challenge is partly due to how these arrangements are assembled according to the context and history of a particular policy/governance arena. They are democratic innovations because direct citizen participation is added to a context previously populated by individual representatives of organised interests. Collaborative governance thus brings both direct (citizen) and associative (stakeholder representatives) models of democratic engagement into new governance processes.

REFERENCES Almen, O. (2016), ‘Local participatory innovations and experts as political entrepreneurs: The case of China’s democracy consultants’, Democratization, 23 (3), 478–497. Altman, D. (2011), Direct Democracy Worldwide, New York: Cambridge University Press. Åström, J., H. Hinsberg, M.E. Jonsson and M. Karlsson (2013), ‘Crisis, innovation and e-participation: Towards a framework for comparative research’, in M.A. Wimmer, E. Tambouris and A. Macintosh (eds), Electronic Participation – 5th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference, ePart 2013, Koblenz, Germany. Proceedings: Springer. Baiocchi, G. (2005), Militants and Citizens. The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Baiocchi, G. and E. Ganuza (2017), Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barber, B.R. (2003), Strong Democracy. Participatory Politics for a New Age (20th Anniversary Edition ed.), London: University of California Press. Böker, M. and S. Elstub (2015), ‘The possibility of critical mini-publics: Realpolitik and normative cycles in democratic theory’, Representation, Advance Online: DOI: 10.1080/00344893.2015.1026205. Bua, A. (2012), ‘Agenda setting and democratic innovation: The case of the Sustainable Communities Act (2007)’, Politics, 32 (1), 10–20. Carson, L. and B. Martin (1999), Random Selection in Politics, Westport, CT.: Praeger Publishers. Cohen, J. (2009), ‘Reflections on deliberative democracy’, in T. Christiano and J. Christman (eds), Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 247–263. Cooke, B. and U. Kothari (eds) (2001), Participation. The New Tyranny?, London: Zed Books. Cornwall, A., V. Schattan and P. Coelho (2007), Spaces for Change? The Politics of Citizen Participation in New Democratic Arenas, London: Zed. Crouzel, I. (2014), ‘Democratic innovations: Reshaping public governance?’, Field Actions Science Reports, Special Issue 11. Davidson, S. and S. Elstub (2014), ‘Deliberative and participatory democracy in the UK’, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 16 (3), 367–385. Dewey, J. (1927), The Public and its Problems, Denver: A. Swallow. Doty, H.D. and W.H. Glick (1994), ‘Typologies as a unique form of theory building: Toward improved understanding and modeling’, The Academy of Management Review, 19 (2), 230–251. Ekman, J. and E. Amnå (2012), ‘Political participation and civic engagement: Towards a new typology’, Human Affairs, 22, 283–300. Elstub, S. (2014a), ‘Deliberative pragmatic equilibrium review: A framework for comparing institutional devices and their enactment of deliberative democracy in the UK’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 16 (3), 386–409. Elstub, S. (2014b), ‘Minipublics: Issues and cases’, in S. Elstub and P. McLaverty (eds), Deliberative Democracy: Issues and Cases, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 166–188. Elstub, S. (2018), ‘Deliberation and participatory democracy’, in A. Bächtiger, J.S. Dryzek, J. Mansbridge and M.E. Warren (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Escobar, O. (2017), ‘Pluralism and democratic participation: What kind of citizen are citizens invited to be?’, Contemporary Pragmatism, 14, 416–438. Farrell, D.M., J. Suiter and C. Harris (2018), ‘Systematizing constitutional deliberation: The 2016–18 citizens’ assembly in Ireland’, Irish Political Studies, 1–11. Fischer, F. (2003), Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fischer, F. (2009), Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fishkin, J.S. (2009), When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

30  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance Fishkin, J.S. (2012), ‘Deliberative polling: Reflections on an ideal made practical’, in B. Geissel and K. Newton (eds), Evaluating Democratic Innovations. Curing the Democratic Malaise?, London: Routledge, pp. 71–89. Floridia, A. (2014), ‘Beyond participatory democracy, towards deliberative democracy: Elements of a possible theoretical genealogy’, Rivista Italiana Di Scienza Politica, 3, 299–326. Flyvbjerg, B. (2004), ‘Five misunderstandings about case-study research’, in C. Seale, G. Gobo, J.F. Gubrium and D. Silverman (eds), Qualitative Research Practice, London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, pp. 420–434. Freeden, M. (1994), ‘Political concepts and ideological morphology’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 2 (2), 140–164. Fung, A. (2006), ‘Varieties of participation in complex governance’, Public Administration Review, 66, 66–75. Fung, A. (2012), ‘Continuous institutional innovation and the pragmatic conception of democracy’, Polity, 44 (4), 609–624. Fung, A. (2015), ‘Putting the public back into governance: The challenges of citizen participation and its future’, Public Administration Review, 75 (4), 513–522. Fung, A. and M.E. Warren (2011), ‘The Participedia Project: An introduction’, International Public Management Journal, 14 (3), 341–362. Gallie, W.B. (1955), ‘Essentially contested concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56, 167–198. Gaventa, J. (2006), ‘Finding the spaces for change: A power analysis’, IDS Bulletin-Institute of Development Studies, 37 (6), 23–33. Geissel, B. (2012), ‘Impacts of democratic innovations in Europe: Findings and desiderata’, in B. Geissel and K. Newton (eds), Evaluating Democratic Innovations. Curing the Democratic Malaise?, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 163–183. Geissel, B. (2013), ‘On the evaluation of participatory innovations – A preliminary framework’, in B. Geissel and M. Joas (eds), Participatory Democratic Innovations in Europe: Improving the Quality of Democracy?, Berlin; Toronto: Barbara Budrich Publishers, pp. 8–31. Geissel, B. and K. Newton (eds) (2012), Evaluating Democratic Innovations: Curing the Democratic Malaise?, London: Routledge. Gert, H.J. (1995), ‘Family resemblance and criteria’, Synthese, 105 (2), 177–190. Gylfason, T. (2013), ‘Democracy on ice: A post-mortem of the Icelandic Constitution’, 19 June, accessed 26 April 2019 at www.opendemocracy.net/thorvaldur-gylfason/democracy-on-ice-post-mortem-of-icelandic-constitution. Hajer, M.A. and H. Wagenaar (eds) (2003), Deliberative Policy Analysis Understanding Governance in the Network Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hendriks, C.M. and A.W. Dzur (2015), ‘Innovating in the mainstream? Enhancing public deliberation in conventional politics’. Paper presented at the European Consortium of Political Research Annual Conference, Montreal, 26–29 August, 2015. Hendriks, F. (2019), ‘Democratic innovation beyond deliberative reflection: The plebiscitary rebound and the advent of action-oriented democracy’, Democratization, 26 (3), 444–464. Kersting, N. (2016), ‘Participatory turn? Comparing citizens’ and politicians’ perspectives on online and offline local political participation’, Lex Localis – Journal of Local Self-Government, 14 (2), 251–263. Kössler, K. (2015), ‘Laboratories of democratic innovation? Direct, participatory, and deliberative democracy in Canadian provinces and municipalities’, in C. Fraenkel-Haeberle, S. Kropp, F. Palermo and K.-P. Sommermann (eds), Citizen Participation in Multi-Level Democracies, Leiden; Boston: Brill Nijhoff, pp. 286–308. Lee, C.W. (2015), Do-it-yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry, New York: Oxford University Press. Lee, C.W., M. McQuarrie and E.T. Walker (eds) (2015), Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation, New York and London: New York University Press. Leidner, R. (1991), ‘Stretching the boundaries of liberalism – democratic innovation in a feminist organisation’, Signs – Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16 (2), 263–289. Levac, D., H. Colquhoun and K.K. Brien (2010), ‘Scoping studies: Advancing the methodology’, Implementation Science, 5 (1), 69–78. Mahony, N., J. Newman and C. Barnett (eds) (2010), Rethinking the Public: Innovations in Research, Theory and Politics, Bristol: The Policy Press. Mattijssen, T.J.M., J.H. Behagel and A.E. Buijs (2014), ‘How democratic innovations realise democratic goods. Two case studies of area committees in the Netherlands’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 58 (6), 997–1014. Michels, A. (2011), ‘Innovations in democratic governance: How does citizen participation contribute to a better democracy?’, International Review of Administrative Sciences, 77 (2), 275–293. Newman, J. and J. Clarke (2009), Publics, Politics and Power: Remaking the Public in Public Services, Los Angeles, CA; London: SAGE. Newton, K. (2012), ‘Curing the democratic malaise with democratic innovations’, in B. Geissel and K. Newton (eds), Evaluating Democratic Innovations. Curing the Democratic Malaise?, London: Routledge, pp. 3–20.

Defining and typologising democratic innovations 31 Olvera, A.J. (2010), ‘The elusive democracy: Political parties, democratic institutions, and civil society in Mexico’, Latin American Research Review, 45 (4), 78–107. Osborne, S. (ed.) (2010), The New Public Governance? Emerging Perspectives on the Theory and Practice of Public Governance, London; New York: Routledge. Parkinson, J. and J. Mansbridge (eds) (2012), Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pateman, C. (1970), Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peruzzotti, E. (2012), ‘Broadening the notion of democratic accountability: Participatory innovation in Latin America’, Polity, 44 (4), 625–645. Quirk, B. (2006), ‘Innovation in local democracy: The London borough of Lewisham’, Local Government Studies, 32 (3), 357–372. Rask, M. and R. Worthington (eds) (2015), Governing Biodiversity through Democratic Deliberation, London and New York: Routledge. Rask, M., R. Worthington and L. Minna (eds) (2012), Citizen Participation in Global Environmental Governance, Abingdon; New York: Earthscan. Ryfe, D. and B. Stalsburg (2012), ‘The participation and recruitment challenge’, in T. Nabatchi, J. Gastil, M. Leighninger and G.M. Weiksner (eds), Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 43–58. Saward, M. (ed.) (2003), Democratic Innovation: Deliberation, Representation, and Association, London: Routledge. Schatzki, T.R. (2002), The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schatzki, T.R., K. Knorr-Cetina and E. Von Savigny (2000), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, New York ; London: Routledge. Setälä, M. and T. Schiller (2012), Citizen’s Initiatives in Europe: Procedures and Consequences of Agenda-Setting by Citizens, Lomdon: Palgrave Macmillan. Sintomer, Y., A. Röcke and C. Herzberg (2016), Participatory Budgeting in Europe: Democracy and Public Governance, Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, G. (2005), Beyond the Ballot. 57 Democratic Innovations from Around the World, London: The POWER Inquiry, accessed 25 August 2011 at www.powerinquiry.org/. Smith, G. (2009), Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sørensen, E. (2017), ‘Political innovations: Innovations in political institutions, processes and outputs’, Public Management Review, 19 (1), 1–19. Stewart, J. (1996), ‘Innovation in democratic practice in local government’, Policy and Politics, 24 (1), 29–41. Suteu, S. (2015), ‘Constitutional conventions in the digital era: Lessons from Iceland and Ireland’, Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, 38 (2), 251–276. Trettel, M. (2015), ‘The politics of deliberative democracy. A comparative survey of the “Law in action” of citizen participation’, Revista de Derecho Político, 94 (1), 87–114. Van Cott and D. Lee (2008), Radical Democracy in the Andes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verba, S., K.L. Schlozman and H.E. Brady (1995), Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Warren, M. (2009), ‘Governance-driven democratization’, Critical Policy Studies, 3 (1), 3–13. Warren, M. (2017), ‘A problem-based approach to democratic theory’, American Political Science Review, 111 (1), 39–53. Warren, M.E. and H. Pearse (eds) (2008), Designing Deliberative Democracy. The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1953), Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: B. Blackwell.

2.

Democratic innovations and theories of democracy Ian O’Flynn

1 INTRODUCTION As the name suggests, democratic innovations are both innovative and democratic. Yet of the two, there is an important sense in which democracy has got to have priority. Referendums, deliberative polls, citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting and the like do not matter in and of themselves. They are not intrinsically valuable. Rather, they matter if and because they help improve the quality of democracy. Of course, this supposes that we already know what democracy is or how it ought to be defined. In the absence of a clear definition, it would be hard to see what we could be aiming towards – or why an innovation should be regarded as an improvement on the status quo. In its most basic sense, democracy means ‘rule by the people’. This basic meaning stems from the Greek words demos (meaning ‘the people’, ‘polity’ or ‘citizen body’) and kratia (meaning ‘rule’ or ‘authority’). Yet because the range of possible meanings that can be attributed to the terms ‘rule’ and ‘people’ are so numerous, a literal approach to defining democracy does not help us very much. For example, ‘The People’s Republic of China’ suggests that the people rule, whereas in reality we know that China is a highly authoritarian state (cf. He and Warren, 2011; Warren, 2009: 4–8). A second strategy for defining democracy is to examine political systems commonly called, or that call themselves, ‘democracies’ and to define the concept according to the core features of those systems. For example, having observed a wide range of cases, one might conclude that democracies are characterised by respect for the rule of law, free and fair elections, a plural media environment, freedom of speech and association, independent courts and other related institutions. Yet the problem with empirical approaches is that they can be highly arbitrary. Since each researcher is likely to have their own ideas (or preconceptions) about what to look for, each is likely to come up with their own list of features. The definition of democracy will vary, therefore, depending on whom you ask (Saward, 1998: 8). There is, in fact, a more fundamental problem with empirical approaches to defining democracy. Empirical approaches can tell us a great deal about how democracy works (or does not work) in practice. But what they cannot tell us, or at least cannot tell us directly, is why democracy is worth pursuing in the first place. As part of that, they cannot tell us which conception of democracy (liberal, republican, participatory, deliberative etc.) we should take as our normative model or ideal. For example, elections can be organised in different ways. Most obviously, there are different types of electoral system. Yet while empirical considerations are obviously relevant when it comes to deciding which system to adopt, what ultimately matters are the larger goals and purposes we want our choice to serve (Goodin, 1982: 4–7). At that level, the choice is fundamentally about the normative theory of democracy we adhere to, and not merely about what is likely to happen on the ground.

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Democratic innovations and theories of democracy 33

Exactly the same point holds for democratic innovations. We cannot decide which innovation to adopt without first deciding on the larger democratic goals and purposes we want that innovation to serve. The choice of democratic innovation is always implicated, therefore, in larger normative issues of democratic theory. It is curious, however, that some prominent writers on democratic innovations have sought to resist this conclusion. Indeed, some writers seem positively sceptical. For example, Ken Newton (2012: 4) defines a democratic innovation as ‘a new idea that is intended to change the structures or processes of democratic government and politics in order to improve them’. This definition is clearly circular: a democratic innovation is defined as an institution that brings about a democratic improvement. Yet to a person who does not already know what democracy is, the definition says nothing: it fails to inform. For such a person, the claim that institutional innovations can improve democracy turns out to be empty. In principle, the problem of emptiness can be solved by defining democracy in terms of some other words or concepts and, as part of that, by spelling out the normative or evaluative standards that are entailed. With those standards to hand, we can then make sense of the idea that innovations can improve democracy. Just as importantly, we can make sense of the fact that democratic innovations sometimes go wrong or fail to deliver on what they promise (cf. Spada and Ryan, 2017: 774). Yet according to Newton (2012: 4), definitional exercises of this sort are pointless because, as he puts it, ‘democracy is an essentially contested concept’. Granted, there is a great deal of disagreement about what democracy means. But accepting that democracy is an essentially contested concept does not imply, as Newton thinks, that normative definitions should be dispensed with; rather, what it implies is that our understanding of what constitutes an innovative improvement will be relative to our chosen definition of democracy.1 In fairness, Newton’s ‘contested concept’ claim appears briefly in an introductory chapter to an edited collection on democratic innovations (Geissel and Newton, 2012). We can, however, find a much more sustained critique of democratic theory in the work of Graham Smith (2009;, 2011). It is to that critique that we will turn in the next section. As we will see, Smith thinks that it is unhelpful, and perhaps even counter-productive, to spell out in detail what exactly we mean by democracy or to say which model of democracy we think is best. Yet as we will also see, Smith’s own ‘ecumenical’ approach turns out to be far from theory-free. He may wish to dispense with theory, but his own definition of ‘democratic innovation’ is far from normatively neutral. It is exclusive rather than ecumenical. The third section of this chapter shows how different democratic theories prescribe or commend different innovations. More specifically, I focus on three of the best known models – minimal, deliberative and participatory – and explore each of their implications for the choice of two of the best known innovations – deliberative polls and referendums. The chapter concludes by reinforcing just why it is that democratic theory is so important to the study of democratic innovations.

2  THE RETREAT FROM DEMOCRATIC THEORY In my introductory remarks, I made that point that, in order to make sense of the idea that democratic innovations can improve democracy, we must first clarify what we take ‘democracy’ to mean. In other words, we need a definition or, more elaborately, a theory that serves as

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our normative or evaluative guide. Of course, our ideas about what democracy is, or should be, can change or evolve over time (Offe, 2017: 146). Yet the fact that our ideas may change only serves to accentuate the need for democratic theory: it is only when we have spelled out those new ideas and defended them that we can sensibly begin to talk about what sorts of innovation might actually be required. In recent years, a number of prominent writers on democracy and democratic innovations – among them, Michael Saward (2000), Graham Smith (2009, 2011) and Mark Warren (2002, 2009, 2017) – have argued against this line of thought. Since Smith in particular has written a great deal on the topic on democratic innovations (see also Chapter 1), let us take a detailed look at what he has to say. In what follows, I focus mainly (though not exclusively) on the argument as he presents it in his major book, Democratic Innovations (2009). According to Smith, the dominant, theoretical approach to democratic innovations is ‘deductive’ (Smith, 2009: 9). On this approach, democratic principles are deduced from religious or contractarian foundations, and democratic institutions are then deduced from those principles.2 For example, one might (à la Rousseau (1973 [1762])) start from the foundational assumption that people are naturally free. From there, one might arrive at the principle that legitimate government exists only if citizens determine for themselves (i.e., directly) the laws and policies under which they are to live. And from there one might conclude, finally, that innovations that enable citizens to assemble together and decide on the content of laws and public policy without the mediation of political representatives (e.g., town hall meetings, initiatives and referendums etc.) are to be preferred over innovations that merely seek to improve the transparency or accountability of representative institutions (e.g., parliamentary ombudsmen, freedom of information legislation etc.). Now, as Smith (2011: 897) points out, because the deductive approach ‘gives priority to the articulation of a set of normative foundations or principles for a particular theory of democracy’, the choice of democratic innovation will be a secondary matter. In short, on the deductive approach, the important question is not which innovation to adopt, but which principles or theory of democracy to subscribe to in the first instance. Once that question has been answered, the choice of innovation should follow naturally. So what, one might wonder, is the problem? To begin with, Smith (2009: 10) thinks that the deductive approach ‘is likely to do disservice to the range of actually existing democratic institutions’. Since the approach is mainly focused on foundational principles and theories, ‘there is little comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of different types of innovation and how they might be combined to complement and overcome the deficiencies of particular designs’ (Smith, 2009: 10). There is an important point here. Theories of democracy are often couched in highly abstract terms and hence may offer little in the way of ‘real world’ institutional guidance (cf. Mason, 2004). They may fail to specify which institutions exactly we need to build or explain how tensions between different institutions are best resolved. For practitioners interested in designing democratic innovations, this is obviously a major shortcoming of the deductive approach. But there is more. As Smith sees it, the problem is not just that the deductive approach fails to provide a sufficient degree of practical guidance, but also that it tends to produce theories that are importantly incomplete. More specifically, it tends to result in theories that foreground certain institutions while pushing other, equally important democratic institutions into the background – perhaps even discounting them altogether (Smith, 2009: 10).3 For example, the

Democratic innovations and theories of democracy 35

deliberative model of democracy is based on the idea that political decisions ought to be decided on their merits. To that end, people engage in a free and open exchange of reasons in a shared endeavour to arrive at an agreed view or judgement (Miller, 1992: 55). Yet by placing so much weight on the importance of exchanging reasons – by, in effect, making it central to their definition of democracy – deliberative democrats minimise the value of other, equally important, democratic institutions, such as bargaining or voting. This is problematic since, in practice, an agreed view or judgement is likely to be out of reach and so bargaining and voting will almost inevitably be required (see Goodin, 2008: 108). Of course, this is not to suggest that deliberative theory has nothing to offer. But it is to suggest that no one theory ‘can offer us all the necessary resources to evaluate different democratic innovations’ (Smith, 2009: 11). According to Smith, then, what is required is a more ‘ecumenical’ (Smith, 2009: 12) approach to democratic innovations. Central to that approach is the development of ‘an analytic framework that allows for comparison of innovations based on the manner and extent to which they realise desirable qualities or goods that we expect of democratic institutions’ (Smith, 2009: 12). That framework is founded upon four democratic goods in particular: inclusiveness (or, as Smith defines it, the degree to which each person has an equal right to participate and have their voice heard), popular control (or the degree to which people are able to influence the different stages of decision making), considered judgement (or the degree to which people are able to both understand the issues and see them from other people’s perspectives) and transparency (or the degree to which the proceedings are open to public view) (cf. Dahl, 2000: 37–38; Geissel, 2012: 210).4 Now, as Smith (2009: 12) sees it, ‘these four goods are particularly apposite for evaluating the democratic qualities of innovations because, arguably, they are fundamental to any theoretical account of the democratic legitimacy of institutions’. Yet while he acknowledges that different democratic theories will interpret and order these four goods in different ways, he insists that no ‘reasonable’ account could do without them (Smith, 2009: 12). On the face of it, Smith’s framework is highly attractive. It has the virtue of simplicity or parsimony. It is also pitched at a level general enough to cover just about any democratic innovation and hence facilitate comparison. However, while it may have broad reach, it seems not to have much in the way of depth. For instance, using Smith’s framework, one might conclude that Facebook has uncertain implications for considered judgement. However, that conclusion presupposes that we already know what considered judgement means. According to Smith, considered judgement is the degree to which people are able to understand the issues and see them from other people’s perspectives. However, that definition does not distinguish between strategic and cooperative behaviour (a savvy market trader will, after all, seek to understand your perspective in order to better undercut you). Smith might say that this is entirely within the ecumenical spirit of his approach. But the greater the range of possibilities that we allow in under the rubric of considered judgement, the harder it becomes to discriminate good from bad, better from worse. That is, the harder it becomes to offer a telling evaluation. Contrary to what Smith suggests, the four democratic goods that he identifies – inclusiveness, popular control, considered judgement and transparency – are not self-evident. Each can be defined in different ways, which, in turn, has important implications for evaluating democratic innovations. We therefore need to be clear about what exactly we take these terms to mean. We also need to be clear about the priority that we ascribe to them. After all, different goods can easily conflict (inclusiveness and considered judgements are obviously in tension:

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the more people we include, the harder it becomes to appreciate everyone’s perspective) and so we need some means of deciding which good is more important and why. It is only when we have settled such questions that we can decide whether or not a given innovation constitutes an improvement. What is true in theory is often true in practice. To take a somewhat stylised example, both France and Britain are democracies. However, they are also very different (see, e.g., Laborde, 2000; Koopmans et al., 2005). Each has its own political traditions of inclusiveness, popular control, considered judgement and transparency. For instance, while both countries seek to cultivate an inclusive public sphere, the British approach is (or at least traditionally has been) far more pluralistic than the French. And so, an innovation that might win favour in Britain might, from a French perspective, have little if anything to recommend it. The upshot is that we need democratic theories to guide us on our way. Those theories may be incomplete and contestable. But the alternative is a reliance on tacit assumptions smuggled into the analysis. Smith may want to resist this conclusion, but his own words count against him. Take, again, considered judgement. While Smith initially defines this good in fairly general terms, he introduces a more substantive definition later on. As he explains, considered judgement is not simply about learning facts, though learning facts is obviously important. Rather, it is also about our appreciating: the views of other citizens with quite different social perspectives and experiences. Hannah Arendt offers one of the most compelling accounts of considered judgement, which she terms ‘enlarged mentality’. This requires a capacity to imaginatively place ourselves in the positions of others, distancing ourselves from private circumstances that limit and inhibit the exercise of judgement (Smith, 2009: 24).

If this is what considered judgement means, then there is nothing particularly ecumenical about it. One could argue over whether this description is cast in the language of deliberative democracy or the language of civic republicanism (the reference to Arendt suggests the latter). But it is certainly not cast in the language of liberal democracy with its emphasis on the right of each individual to decide for herself where her interests lie or, more obviously still, in the language of minimal or Schumpeterian democracy with its emphasis on ordinary people’s limited capacity for political understanding (Schumpeter, 1942). Nor, for that matter, does is seem particularly compatible with the language of agonistic democracy with its emphasis on perpetual conflict and radical oppositional politics. So, while Smith might say that it is a mistake to rely on democratic theory, it seems that democratic theory is not that far below the surface of his own thinking. This is, in fact, obvious from the definition of ‘democratic innovations’ that he provides on the opening page of Democratic Innovations: democratic innovations are ‘institutions that have been specifically designed to increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision-making process’ (Smith, 2009: 1). But since ‘deepening citizen participation’ is a strongly normative, and indeed contentious, goal, he really should have spelt out what it is that this definition presupposes. Should Smith be worried, therefore, about doing a ‘disservice to the range of actually existing democratic institutions’? I do not think so. As I said at the very beginning, in themselves, innovations are neither good nor bad. What matters is whether they shift us towards or away from our larger democratic goals.

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3  WHICH DEMOCRATIC THEORY? In the last section, I explained why democratic innovations cannot be understood or evaluated without enlisting the help of democratic theory. We need theory to make sense of the idea that innovations are meant to bring about improvements in the quality of democracy. Of course, different theories of democracy will have different things to say about which improvements are required. That is to say, different theories will prescribe or commend different innovations (though naturally there may be some overlaps too). Unfortunately, we currently lack a major study detailing how different democratic theories bear on different democratic innovations – though badly needed, the task would, admittedly, be huge (see Fung, 2007 for an important step in this direction). Nevertheless, it is possible to get a sense of how such a study might proceed by considering some stylised examples. While there is an indeterminate number of candidates, let us consider three widely known, but also strongly contrasting, democratic models by way of illustration: minimal democracy, deliberative democracy and participatory democracy. For reasons of space, I will also confine my remarks to the implications of these models for referendums and deliberative polls only. 3.1  Minimal Democracy As mentioned earlier, the minimal model is often associated with Schumpeter’s (1942) writing on democracy.5 Famously, Schumpeter (1942: 269) defined democracy, or the democratic method, as ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’. Of course, the idea that individual leaders and parties should compete for votes is, in itself, unremarkable. Yet on this model, ‘the purpose of making government depend upon popular elections is not to guide the government in the choice of policies, but instead to provide an incentive for rulers not to become tyrannical’ (Weale, 2007: 45). According to Schumpeter (1942: 262) the fact that ordinary people are prone to ‘irrational prejudice and impulse’ means that elections cannot express a popular will. But what elections can express, nevertheless, is a view on who should govern. On the face of it, this model might be thought to support the use of deliberative polls on the ground that polls effectively turn ordinary (irrational) people into (rational) leaders.6 Yet on closer inspection, this argument does not hold. On average, participants in deliberative polls learn a fair amount of policy relevant, factual information (Luskin et al., 2009; cf. O’Flynn and Sood, 2014: 49). Yet the point of deliberative polls is not to create leaders, but to discover what ordinary people might think if they had gone through the same process. In other words, deliberative polling assumes not just that meaningful popular will-formation is a theoretical possibility, but that under the right conditions (including balanced briefing materials, moderated discussions and access to experts during plenary sessions) ordinary people can, in fact, engage to just that end. The logic of deliberative polling jars, therefore, with the logic of the minimal model. Consequently, supporters of the minimal model would be unlikely to adopt this particular innovation. But what about referendums? Is there any reason to think that an advocate of the minimal model might support their use? On the face of it, the answer would appear to be no. For example, in an explicitly Schumpeterian vein, Ian Shapiro (2017) argues that the best democratic system is

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one in which two parties compete with one another for the largest share of the vote. When the system is working normally, the party that appeals most to the middle of the political spectrum will win the election and become the government. However, referendums are far from ‘normal’ in that they ‘enfranchise intense single-issue voters who turn out at disproportionately high rates’ (Shapiro, 2017: 82; cf. Lupia and Johnston, 2001). Consequently, they draw parties’ attention away from the middle ground by making them compete for votes at the extreme ends of the political spectrum. Be that as it may, one has got to remember that referendums are not all of a kind (see, e.g., Setälä, 2006: 705–707). One might not expect an advocate of the minimal model to call for the introduction of the referendum (a vote of the electorate on an issue of public policy, such as a constitutional amendment) or the initiative (a procedure which allows a certain number of electors to initiate a popular vote or to place it on the legislative agenda). However, the recall (which allows a certain number of electors to demand a vote on whether an elected official should be removed from office) seems far more congruent. As already noted, the democratic element in the minimal model lies in people’s capacity to ‘throw the rascals out’ (Weale, 2007: 45). Since the recall serves this purpose, it might well be the sort of innovation that an advocate of the minimal model would praise or support. Granted, the recall would need to be used sparingly, since otherwise it might open up party platforms to capture by vested interests (Shapiro, 2017: 81). But, in principle, the recall coheres with the logic of the model in a way that the referendum or initiative do not. 3.2  Deliberative Democracy Turning, then, to deliberative democracy. Unlike the minimal model, the deliberative model starts from the assumption that irrationality and prejudice are not a permanent or ineliminable feature of political life. On the contrary, as long as ordinary people have access to balanced information and the opportunity to reason about that information with people from different walks of life, the judgements that they reach can be both well thought out and considerate of the views of others (see, e.g., Fishkin, 2009). This might be taken to suggest that deliberative democracy is an empirical theory – a theory that tells us about the conditions under which various cognitive distortions can be overcome.7 Yet while deliberative theorists are alive to the ways in which empirical evidence can, and indeed should, inform normative thinking, deliberative theory is in the first instance a normative theory of legitimate decision making (Habermas, 1996; Manin, 1987; Thompson, 2008). According to that theory, decisions are legitimate not when people have the power to throw the rascals who make the decisions out, but when the decisions are determined solely by ‘the force of the better argument’ (Habermas, 1984: 25). Now, on one level, it will hardly come as a surprise to learn that deliberative theory supports deliberative polling (the clue is in the name). Deliberative polls use random sampling, which in turn means that participants tend to be statistically representative (Fishkin and Luskin, 2005: 288). This matters since it means that people from different backgrounds, who might otherwise never meet, get to listen to and learn from one another. As such, participants are exposed to a broader range of reasons than might otherwise be the case. Moreover, they are sent balanced briefing materials in advance and also have the chance to put their questions to a panel of policy experts and policymakers. The result is that participants tend to learn a lot and opinion change tends to be information-driven (Fishkin and Luskin, 2005: 291; cf. O’Flynn and Sood,

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2014: 49–50). Of course, this means that participants will no longer be representative of the general public at the end of the process (they will be better informed, will have engaged with a broader range of reasons etc.). But the point of the process is to permit that (cf. Parkinson, 2012: 156). As indicated above, deliberative polls give us some insight into what people in general would think if everyone could be put through the same process – and that is something that is surely worth knowing. On another level, however, the most serious problem with deliberative polls concerns ‘the “scaling up” dimension’ (Bächtiger and Wegmann, 2012: 127). For one thing, policy ‘uptake’ is rare; policy makers tend not to act on polls’ results (Dryzek, 2010: 170). There are many reasons why this is so – for example, policymakers may find the results inconvenient, or they may worry about the general public’s objecting to having its views and opinions pushed to one side. Perhaps more significantly, deliberative polls are individual events. To date, we have little idea about their place in the broader ‘deliberative system’ (Mansbridge et al., 2012) or ‘deliberative network’ (Cinalli and O’Flynn, 2014). More specifically, we do not know much about how deliberative polls affect (or are affected by) the quality of deliberation in other forums or in society more generally (cf. Niemeyer, 2014; Warren and Gastil, 2015). So, while it is tempting to assume that deliberative theory will straightforwardly support deliberative polling, that assumption needs to be handled carefully. The relationship, therefore, of deliberative theory to deliberative polls is not as settled as one might presume. In time, one would expect it to be settled positively, but much work remains to be done. By contrast, the relationship of deliberative theory to referendums is much clearer – and generally much more negative. For example, James Fishkin (2008) argues that referendums are fine so long as they are preceded by a national day of deliberation: the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigns start by laying out their stalls in a national televised debate, and then small groups of citizens dotted around the country deliberate about what they have just heard. In other words, Fishkin thinks that referendums are fine so long as they are undergirded by multiple concurrent deliberative polls. It is entirely plausible that a scheme of this sort would lead to more informed decision making. And Fishkin’s argument also represents a contribution to more systemic thinking. Yet the basic problem remains that standard referendums preclude something that is intrinsic to, and vital for, deliberation – when people are faced with choosing between two options, they cannot shape solutions that are considerate of one another’s views.8 Standard referendums crystallise divisions rather than transcend them.9 Indeed, as Maija Setälä argues, this can be true not just for ordinary people, but also for elected representatives. As she (2006: 714) puts it, ‘opportunities for parliamentary deliberations are pre-empted by the populist demands that parliamentarians should simply follow the result of the referendum’ (cf. Weale, 2017). 3.3  Participatory Democracy Finally, then, what might be said about participatory democracy and its implications for the choice of democratic innovation? Much like deliberative democracy, participatory democracy is an outlook comprising many different strands. Yet for present purposes, it will suffice to focus on Carole Pateman’s (2012) widely discussed conception of the model. According to that conception, participatory democracy has a ‘politically active citizenry’ at its centre (Pateman, 2012: 7). Of course, participatory democracy is not unique in this respect – as we have already

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seen, deliberative democracy is also concerned with giving ordinary people a greater say in decision making. Yet what marks participatory democracy out as a distinct model of democracy is its emphasis on deep structural change. Participatory democracy is not fundamentally about reforming representative government. Rather, it is about the deep structural changes that are needed to create a truly participatory society – that is, a society in which ordinary people are empowered to make political decisions directly for themselves in their everyday lives as well as in the broader political system (Pateman, 1970: 20;, 2012: 10; see also Barber, 1984: 151, 261–311). As Pateman (2012: 10) recently put it, participatory democracy is about ‘democratising democracy’. It is about democratic transformation up, down and across. There are probably enough hints in what I have just said to recognise that a participatory conception of democracy in the Pateman mould would be unlikely to agitate for the use of deliberative polls – and this notwithstanding the fact that some deliberative democrats claim that deliberative democracy is a form of participatory democracy (e.g., Goodin, 2008: 266; Thompson, 2008: 511–512). According to Pateman (2012: 10), the basic problem with deliberative democracy is its emphasis of ‘the process of deliberation inside deliberative forums’. As a result, deliberative democrats tend not to be concerned with structural features of the wider society and the relationships of power they embody. One could dispute this claim – for instance, Nicole Curato and her colleagues (2017: 31) argue that, far from neglecting the question of power, deliberative democrats have a nuanced view of it – as they note, deliberative democrats ‘recognise that coercive power pervades social relations but that certain kinds of power are needed to keep order in a deliberative process, to address inequalities, and to implement decisions’. Nevertheless, the point remains that, from a participatory perspective, deliberative polls are not radical enough. While they allow some people to participate, they do not allow everyone literally to participate. More fundamentally, while they may sometimes influence policy, they are not a vehicle of radical democratic transformation. They leave too much of the existing structure of authority in place. In short, participatory democracy is a theory about the conditions under which ordinary people are able ‘to “control” the social forms and spheres in which their lives take place, thereby guaranteeing their equal condition’ (Floridia, 2017: 34). One such sphere is the workplace, about which Pateman (1970) has much to say. However, it is not hard to imagine an advocate of a position like hers supporting the use of referendums – a major instrument of direct democracy. Of course, referendums are open to abuse, particularly to ‘capture’ by politicians and vested interests. But as another leading participatory democrat remarks, ‘it is foolish to think that a nation can be rescued from the manipulation of elites by reducing the potentially manipulable public’s input into the democratic process. One might as well combat crime in the subways by keeping the public at home’ (Barber, 1984: 283). Of course, in the light of what was said above, the participatory democrat is unlikely to endorse referendums on their own. No single institution is capable, on its own, of securing the pervasive social and political transformations that Pateman calls for. Instead, what is required is an entire suite of participatory-inspired democratic innovations – along with the change of democratic mindset that such institutions would require. Yet while these requirements might lead one to conclude that participatory democracy is the least feasible of the models considered here, the point remains that the model has distinct implications for the choice of democratic innovation, whatever one might think about the merits – normative and empirical – of the model itself.

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4  CONCLUDING REMARKS In this chapter, I have sought to make the case that democratic theory has a vital, indeed inescapable, role to play in discussions about democratic innovations. We need a democratic theory to make sense of the claim that an innovation has brought about an improvement in the quality of a democracy. After all, an improvement is not just any old change away from the status quo, but a change in a normatively desirable direction. Of course, democratic innovations are not normally invented or designed by democratic theorists. Instead, they tend to be sponsored by governments, local authorities or political parties seeking to cultivate greater levels of public engagement in policymaking (Warren, 2009; Weale, 2011; cf. Núñez et al., 2017). Perhaps most famously, participatory budgeting was first developed in Porto Alegre in the 1980s by the Brazilian Workers’ Party, partly in response to demands by the Union of Neighbourhood Associations for a greater say in the municipal budget (Baiocchi, 2001: 45–46). Yet the fact that democratic innovations are not normally designed by democratic theorists should not be viewed as signalling a radical divorce between the two (cf. Smith, 2009: 10;, 2011: 899). While democratic theory can be pitched at a very abstract level, this is not true across the board. In particular, some democratic theorists are very much alive to the importance of learning from practical experience. For example, Dennis Thompson draws our attention to the ways in which empirical research can expose tensions within a democratic theory, and in particular between its core values, that otherwise might not be obvious (Thompson, 2008: 511). At the same time, however, Thompson (2008: 513) insists that while empirical research may ‘pose some challenging questions, and even offer some provocative answers … it does not have the last word’. On the contrary, if democratic values stand in conflict, ‘we still have to decide under what conditions which value should have priority, and which combination of the values is optimal. That decision depends partly on considerations that are not primarily empirical’ (Thompson, 2008: 513; cf. Smith, 2011: 898). In other words, decisions about how to reconcile conflicting values are never merely practical or pragmatic, but inevitably bring larger normative questions and concerns into play. Of course, there is an indeterminate number of democratic theories and in this chapter we have only been able to consider a small number of them – three, to be precise. Much less have we addressed the question of which democratic theory one ought to favour and strive, in practice, to achieve. My own sense is that most people who write on democratic innovations have something like deliberative democracy in mind, even if this commitment is never made explicit (or, in some cases, explicitly denied). This is a real shame since it hinders discussion about the larger goals and purposes democratic innovations are meant to serve. Every democracy tends to form, and probably must form, a conception of its own identity – how it understands democracy, how it sees itself as differing from others, the direction in which it sees itself developing etc. Some conceptions may be located towards the Schumpeterian end of the spectrum, while others may be located towards the participatory end. There are real differences here – differences that are likely to endure (cf. Fung, 2007: 456). But since there are real differences, it is vital that we spell them out. Failure to do so is likely to hinder the cause of democratic innovation.

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NOTES 1. Of course, this leaves open the question of why one definition should be preferred to another. This question may inevitably have a subjective dimension to it (some people may simply find some definitions congenial and others not). But, as an intellectual endeavour, the point of democratic theory is to show that some arguments are more rationally compelling than others. 2. Smith attributes this description of the deductive approach to Saward (1998: 162). 3. For a recent major statement of this view, see Warren (2017). 4. To these four goods, Smith (2009: 13) adds two further requirements, namely efficiency (or the degree to which an institution is feasible) and transferability (or the degree to which an institution can operate in different social and political contexts). Since these are not uniquely democratic goods (efficiency also matters to dictators, including those who would like to spread the word), I will say no more about them here. 5. ‘Minimal democracy’ goes by a number of different names, including ‘leadership democracy’ (Mackie, 2009), ‘competitive democracy’ (Shapiro, 2017) and ‘protective democracy’ (Weale, 2007: 45-46). 6. As Gerry Mackie (2009: 135) notes, ‘Schumpeter holds that the judgement of a qualified leader is generally better than the pooled judgement of lesser beings, which is one reason why he so emphasises individual leadership’. 7. One of the more widely discussed distortions is ‘motivated reasoning’ (Kahneman et al., 1982) which occurs when people let their desires and emotions get the better of their critical faculties. 8. The distinction between referendums, initiatives and recalls seems to make no difference in this respect. For example, while the wording of an initiative might be arrived at through a deliberative process, from that point on voters are forced to choose between two exclusive options, foreclosing further opportunities for mutual accommodation or compromise. 9. See also Offe (2017: 19); Parkinson (2001: 136); cf. Henderson and Tierney (2018).

REFERENCES Bächtiger, A. and A. Wegmann (2012), ‘“Scaling up” deliberation’, in S. Elstub and P. McLaverty (eds), Deliberative Democracy: Issues and Cases, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 118–135. Baiocchi, G. (2001), ‘Participation, activism, and politics: The Porto Alegre experiment and deliberative democratic theory’, Politics and Society, 29 (1), 43–72. Barber, B. (1984), Strong Democracy: Participatory Democracy for a New Age, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cinalli, M. and I. O’Flynn (2014), ‘Public deliberation, networks analysis and the political integration of Muslims in Britain’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 16 (3), 428–451. Curato, N., J. Dryzek, S. Ercan, C. Hendriks and S. Niemeyer (2017), ‘Twelve key findings in deliberative democracy research’, Daedalus, 146 (3), 28–38. Dahl, R. (2000), On Democracy, New Haven: Yale University Press. Dryzek, J. (2010), Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fishkin, J. (2008), ‘A better way with referendums’, Financial Times, June 17, accessed 31 August 2017 at www. ft.com/content/2e27cb88-3c63-11dd-b958-0000779fd2ac. Fishkin, J.S. (2009), When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fishkin, J.S. and R.C. Luskin (2005), ‘Experimenting with a democratic ideal: Deliberative polling and public opinion’, Acta Politica, 40 (3), 284–298. Floridia, A. (2017), From Participation to Deliberation: A Critical Genealogy of Deliberative Democracy, Colchester: ECPR Press. Fung, A. (2007), ‘Democratic theory and political science: A pragmatic method of constructive engagement’, American Political Science Review, 101 (3), 443–458. Geissel, B. (2012), ‘Democratic innovations: Theoretical and empirical challenges of evaluation’, in B. Geissel and K. Newton (eds), Evaluating Democratic Innovations: Curing the Democratic Malaise?, London: Routledge, pp. 209–214. Goodin, R.E. (1982), Political Theory and Public Policy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Goodin, R.E. (2008), Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodin, R.E. and J. Dryzek (2006), ‘Deliberative impacts: The macro-political uptake of mini-publics’, Politics and Society, 34 (2), 219–244. Habermas, J. (1984), The Theory of Communicative Action Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society, trans. T. McCarthy, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Democratic innovations and theories of democracy 43 Habermas, J. (1996), Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. He, B. and M. Warren (2011), ‘Authoritarian deliberation: The deliberative turn in Chinese political development’, Perspectives on Politics, 9 (2), 269–289. Henderson, A. and S. Tierney (2018), ‘Can referendums foster citizen deliberation? The experience of Canada and the United Kingdom’, in M. Keating and G. Laforest (eds), Constitutional Politics and the Territorial Question in Canada and the United Kingdom: Federalism and Devolution Compared, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 159–177. Kahneman, D., P. Slovic and A. Tversky (eds) (1982), Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koopmans, R., P. Statham, M. Giugni and F. Passy (2005), Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Laborde, C. (2000), ‘The concept of the state in British and French political thought’, Political Studies, 48 (3), 540–557. Lupia, A. and R. Johnston (2001), ‘Are voters to blame? Voter competence and elite manoeuvres in referendums’, in M. Mendelsohn and A. Parkin (eds), Referendum Democracy: Citizens, Elites and Deliberation in Referendum Campaigns, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 191–210. Luskin, R., G. Sood, J. Fishkin and N. Kim (2009), ‘Deliberation and learning: Evidence from the deliberative polls’, paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Conference, Chicago, 2009. Mackie, G. (2009), ‘Schumpeter’s leadership democracy’, Political Theory, 37 (1), 128–153. Manin, B. (1987), ‘On Legitimacy and political deliberation’, Political Theory, 15 (3), 338–368. Mansbridge, J., J. Bohman, S. Chambers, T. Christiano, A. Fung, J. Parkinson, D. Thompson and M.E. Warren (2012), ‘A systemic approach to deliberative democracy’, in J. Parkinson and J. Mansbridge (eds), Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–26. Mason, A. (2004), ‘Just constraints’, British Journal of Political Science, 32 (2), 251–268. Miller, D. (1992), ‘Deliberative democracy and social choice’, Political Studies, 40 (s1), 54–67. Núñez, L., C. Close and C. Bedock (2017), ‘Changing democracy? Why inertia is winning over innovation’, Representation, 52 (4), 341–357. Newton, K. (2012), ‘Curing the democratic malaise with democratic innovations’, in B. Geissel and K. Newton (eds), Evaluating Democratic Innovations: Curing the Democratic Malaise?, London: Routledge, pp. 3–20. Niemeyer, S. (2014), ‘Scaling up deliberation to mass publics: Harnessing mini-publics in a deliberative system’, in K. Grönlund, A. Bächtiger and M. Setälä (eds), Deliberative Mini-Publics: Involving Citizens in the Democratic Process, Colchester: ECPR Press, pp. 177–202. Offe, C. (2017), ‘Referendum v. institutionalised deliberation: What democratic theorists can learn from the 2016 Brexit decision’, Daedalus, 146 (3), 14–27. O’Flynn, I. and G. Sood (2014), ‘What would Dahl say? An appraisal of the democratic credentials of deliberative polls and other mini-publics’, in K. Grönlund, A. Bächtiger and M. Setälä (eds), Deliberative Mini-Publics: Practices, Promises, Pitfalls, Colchester: ECPR Press, pp. 41–58. Parkinson, J. (2001), ‘Deliberative democracy and referendums’, in K. Dowding, J. Hughes and H. Margetts (eds), Challenges to Democracy: Ideas, Involvement and Institutions, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 131–152. Parkinson, J. (2012), ‘Democratizing deliberative systems’, in J. Parkinson and J. Mansbridge (eds), Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 151–172. Pateman, C. (1970), Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pateman, C. (2012), ‘Participatory democracy revisited’, Perspectives on Politics, 10 (1), 7–19. Rousseau, J.-J. (1973 [1762]), The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole, London: J.M. Dent and Sons. Saward, M. (1998), The Terms of Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Saward, M. (2000), ‘Less than meets the eye: Democratic legitimacy and democratic theory’, in M. Saward (ed.), Democratic Innovation: Deliberation, Representation and Association, Colchester: ECPR Press, pp. 66–77. Schumpeter, J.A. (1942), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper. Setälä, M. (2006), ‘On the problems of responsibility and accountability in referendums’, European Journal of Political Research, 45 (4), 699–721. Shapiro, I. (2017), ‘Collusion in restraint of democracy: Against political deliberation’, Daedalus, 146 (3), 77–84. Smith, G. (2009), Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, G. (2011), ‘Democratic innovations: Bringing theory and practice into dialogue’, Philosophy Compass, 62 (12), 895–901. Spada, P. and M. Ryan (2017), ‘The failure to examine failures in democratic innovation’, PS: Political Science and Politics, 50 (3), 772–778. Thompson, D. (2008), ‘Deliberative democratic theory and empirical political science’, Annual Review of Political Science, 11, 497–520. Warren, M. (2002), ‘Deliberative democracy’, in A. Carter and G. Stokes (eds), Democratic Theory Today: Challenges for the 21st Century, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 173–201.

44  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance Warren, M. (2009), ‘Governance-driven democratisation’, Critical Policy Studies, 3 (1), 3–13. Warren, M. (2017), ‘A problem-based approach to democratic theory’, American Political Science Review, 111 (1), 39–53. Warren, M. and J. Gastil (2015), ‘Can deliberative minipublics address the cognitive challenges of democratic citizenship?’, The Journal of Politics, 77 (2), 562–574. Weale, A. (2007), Democracy (2nd Edition), Basingstoke: Palgrave. Weale, A. (2011), ‘New modes of governance, political accountability and public reason’, Government and Opposition, 46 (1), 58–80. Weale, A. (2017), ‘The democratic duty to oppose Brexit’, The Political Quarterly, 88 (2), 170–181.

3.

Mini-publics: design choices and legitimacy Clodagh Harris

1 INTRODUCTION Modern systems of governance, which have depoliticised political life, privatised public resources, outsourced service provision, and so on, have served to distance citizens from the loci of power. These developments and others have contributed to the ‘democratic malaise’ evident in many industrialised democracies today and are comprehensively analysed by the co-editors in the introductory chapters (see Introduction and Chapter 1). One response to this ‘malaise’ has been the creation of democratic innovations that aim to enhance (that is, widen and deepen) citizen participation in political decision making. The mini-public is one such innovation. Aiming to harness the views and ideas of citizens, mini-publics consist of groups of citizens that engage in facilitated deliberations on an issue, and make public recommendations. Bridging the gap between deliberative democratic theory and practice, they have the potential to give citizens deeper levels of engagement at the agenda-setting, decision-making, and implementation stages of political processes. They may therefore contribute to more innovative policy solutions, and more legitimate politics, as those affected by the decision have an input. Mini-publics may also improve implementation strategies, enhance democratic skills, and political education. Their success in achieving some or any of these hinges on their design, and their links to ‘empowered spaces’, that is, the institutions and actors that make political decisions (Dryzek, 2010). Referring to a wide range of international examples, this chapter seeks to provide a definition of what is meant by a mini-public, and critically examines both normatively and empirically, the micro and macro design choices available to those involved in establishing them with regard to input, throughput, and output legitimacy.

2  MINI-PUBLICS: WHAT ARE THEY? The term ‘mini-public’ stems from Dahl’s discussion of a deliberative ‘minipopulus’. In his seminal work Democracy and its Critics (1989), he asks us to suppose an advanced democratic country were to create a ‘minipopulus’ consisting of: perhaps a thousand citizens randomly selected out of the entire demos. Its task would be to deliberate, for a year perhaps, on an issue and then to announce its choices... One minipopulus could exist for each major issue on the agenda. A minipopulus could exist at any level of government – national, state or local. It could be attended ...by an advisory committee of scholars and specialists and by an administrative staff. It could hold hearings, commission research, and engage in debate and discussion… In these ways...the democratic process could be adapted once again to a world that little resembles the world in which democratic ideas and practices first came to light’ (Dahl, 1989). 45

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Much of what Dahl argued for in the minipopulus has come to pass, albeit in a variety of formats, on diverse issues, and with varying degrees of success. Few, however, have achieved the scale he envisaged: some notable exceptions include 21st Century Town meetings (see Lukensmeyer, 2013) and Deliberative Opinion Polls (DOP) (see Fishkin, 2009). It is argued that advances in technology, growing levels of digital literacy, and internet access can also help achieve this (Farrar et al., 2010; Liston et al., 2013). Mini-publics are a contested entity, with multiple and often competing definitions. Goodin and Dryzek describe them as a group of citizens that is ‘small enough to be genuinely deliberative, and representative enough to be genuinely democratic’ (2006) while Grönlund refers to them as ‘forums in which lay citizens representing different viewpoints are gathered together to deliberate on a particular issue in small groups’ (2016). In their extensive review of the literature on mini-publics, Ryan and Smith (2014) note that definitions range from the expansive (Fung, 2003) to the restrictive (Fishkin, 2009), and offer their own ‘intermediate’ definition that characterises them as inclusive, representative ‘sub-groups’ that involve structured, facilitated deliberation (2014). Citizens’ assemblies, citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, DOPs, and planning cells are all types of mini-public (see Elstub, 2014; Escobar and Elstub, 2017). They vary in size; DOPs are usually the largest and citizens’ juries the smallest, as summarised in Table 3.1, which also outlines how they differ in duration, selection method, activity, and output. Their use has become increasingly diffuse in recent decades, and they can be found as far afield as Finland and Australia. Moreover, they haven’t been confined to liberal democracies, as witnessed in the emergence of ‘authoritarian deliberation’ in China (He and Warren, 2017). The increased use of deliberative polls (both offline and online) at the lower levels of Chinese government have addressed a range of topics from ‘soft’ ones, like tourism development, to ‘hard’ ones, like land appropriation, and scholarship in the field discusses the DOPs potential to contribute Table 3.1 Key features of mini-publics

Citizens’ juries Planning cells

Consensus conferences

Dop

Citizens’ assemblies

No. of citizens

12–26

100–500

10–25

100–500

100–160

No. of meetings

4–5 days

4–5 days

7–8 days

2–3 days

20–30 days

Selection method

Random selection

Random selection

Random selection + self-selection

Random selection

Random selection + self-selection

Activities

Information + Deliberation

Information + Deliberation

Information + Deliberation

Information + Deliberation

Information + Consultation + Deliberation

Collective position report

Survey opinions + Collective Collective position report position report Survey opinions

Result

Source: Adapted from Elstub (2014).

Detailed recommendations

Mini-publics: design choices and legitimacy 47

to democratisation there (see Fishkin et al., 2010; Jiang, 2010; He and Warren, 2017). Regardless of location or regime type, mini-publics have in praxis, taken a variety of forms on a wide range of issues at different levels of government (local, regional, national, supranational), and with varying degrees of impact. They have also differed in terms of initiation, agenda, processes, and powers. Some have deliberated on policy. Citizens’ juries, arguably the most widely used mini-public, have been used in a variety of policy contexts, ranging from public health policy to environmental issues (see Timotijevic and Raats, 2007; Street et al., 2014; Roberts and Escobar, 2015). Others have discussed institutional, or wider issues, of what Olsen (2003) might refer to as ‘constitutional gardening’, for example the Dutch Burgerforum (2006), Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution (2012–2014) and Citizens’ Assembly (2016–2018) (see Fournier et al., 2011; Farrell et al., 2017; Farrell et al., 2018). Some have taken a bottom-up approach, for example Iceland’s national forum (2009) and Estonia’s Citizens’ Assembly (2012) (see Landemore, 2015; Jonsson, 2015). Others have been more top-down, for example Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution, Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly and the Canadian Citizens’ Assemblies (see Fournier et al., 2011; Farrell et al., 2017; Farrell et al., 2018). They have also experienced differing levels of impact. Some, primarily those that are established ‘outside’ the political system, have faced challenges in having their recommendations responded to or acted upon, while government-initiated processes, such as the Canadian Citizens’ Assemblies, have had their recommendations put straight to the wider citizenry in referendums, creating a more legitimate democratic process, by blending deliberative and direct democracy, and overcoming, as Saward argues, the deficiencies of each model (2001). Despite their differences, mini-publics do have some features in common when it comes to format and process. All involve information gathering (this may include presentations from academic/legal experts, stakeholders, witnesses) and small group-moderated deliberations that lead to some form of publicly presented opinion or recommendation. All include some form of random sampling to recruit participants, as they endeavour to act as a microcosm of society (see Table 3.1). In this way they differ from democratic innovations such as participatory budgeting, direct initiatives and so forth. DOPs, the largest minipublic, tend to use simple random sampling. Smaller mini-publics, such as citizens’ juries, employ stratified random sampling techniques to ensure that the sub-group of lay citizens is broadly reflective of wider society in terms of gender, age, region, socio-economic status and so on. Some have mixed, stratified random sampling with targeted recruitment, for example Belgium’s G1000 (2011) to ensure inclusive representation (see Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2016). Reflecting on the various definitions and how they’ve developed in praxis, this chapter defines mini-publics as a democratic innovation, in which a sub-group of citizens (some of whom may be randomly or quasi-randomly selected) engage with experts, witnesses, advocates, stakeholders and one another, in facilitated informed deliberations on a given matter, and publicly present their opinions and/or recommendations to their commissioning body and wider society.

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3  MINI-PUBLICS AND DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY Mini-publics have been described by Elstub as ‘the most advocated method to institutionalise deliberative democracy’ (2014), where deliberative democracy (this is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7 of this Handbook) is a theory of political legitimacy that argues that citizens should be given a more ‘central role’ in political processes (Goodin and Dryzek, 2006). It contends that a political decision can be deemed legitimate if it can withstand scrutiny by those bound by it (Dryzek, 2007; Beetham, 2012), and involves equal participation, mutual respect, and reasoned argument (Rosenberg, 2007). There is no commonly agreed definition of deliberative democracy (Mutz, 2008; Niemeyer and Dryzek, 2007). Yet despite their differences, theorists broadly agree on deliberative democracy’s standard set of normative principles, equality, popular control, reasonableness, and publicity (Held, 2006; Mansbridge et al., 2010; Parkinson, 2016). Deliberations are inclusive to the extent that they are open to those affected by a decision, and should not advantage the politically engaged, the more educated, and the better off. It is also argued that participants should have equal opportunities, and resources to influence the process and exercise popular control (Smith, 2009; Mansbridge et al., 2010). Another defining feature of deliberative democratic processes is the focus on ‘reasonableness’, where participants justify their positions in a truthful and respectful manner, and are open to changing their preferences when faced with the ‘forceless force of the better argument’ (Habermas, 1975: 108). Finally, these processes should be conducted publicly.1 The focus on public ‘reasonableness’ by participants is what differentiates deliberative democracy from other forms of democratic practice, such as party competition, participatory democracy, and elite deliberation by political representatives and policy experts (Fishkin, 2009). Deliberative democratic theory focuses on ‘how people arrive at the “right” preferences and conceptions of interest – preferences, that is, that are adequately considered and have passed the test of controversial argument and dialogue’ (Offe, 2014: 435). It requires ordinary citizens to consider the arguments of differently situated and opinionated others, to present reasons for their own preferences, weigh up the arguments in ‘a context of good information’ (Isernia and Fishkin, 2014) and to be ‘amenable to changing their minds and their preferences as a result of reflection induced by deliberation’ (Dryzek, 2000). Arguably, mini-publics are not exclusively deliberative; rather, they endeavour to blend participatory and deliberative approaches to democracy, as reflected in their efforts to ensure inclusion, equality of voice, and ‘reasonableness’. Both participatory and deliberative norms are captured in analyses of input, throughput and output legitimacy (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2015; Suiter and Reuchamps, 2016), where: legitimacy is determined by who deliberates, what they deliberate on, and epis• input temic completeness (access to information); legitimacy is influenced by the processes of participation, the decision-mak• throughput ing rules and contextual independence; and legitimacy hinges on the link between the mini- and maxi-publics. It examines: • output political uptake of the recommendation(s); feedback loops between the ‘empowered space’ and the mini-public; and social uptake of the process.

Mini-publics: design choices and legitimacy 49

4  MINI-PUBLICS: MICRO DESIGN CHOICES AND LEGITIMACY To what extent can we say that mini-publics enable genuine deliberation and achieve input, throughput, and output legitimacy? The answer lies partly in how they are designed. How participants are selected, how they participate, and how they develop recommendations determine their success in achieving input and throughput legitimacy. This involves micro design choices, such as recruitment, the communication mode, decision-making rules, agenda-setting powers, the subject and scope of deliberation, group composition, how experts are chosen, facilitation methods used, and framing (Fung, 2003; Bächtiger et al., 2014). Input legitimacy hinges on who has been recruited, and how they’ve been selected. Recruitment can involve sortition, stratified random sampling, discursive representation (often referred to as opinion representation), target groups, or a mixture of the above. The method chosen tends to depend on the size of the mini-public. Deliberative opinion polls typically recruit 100–500 participants (see Elstub, 2014). Sortition/random sampling for larger groups such as these have a greater probability of being a representative microcosm of wider society. Smaller mini-publics, such as citizen juries and consensus conferences that typically have 12– 26 members, tend to employ quasi-random sampling techniques, such as stratified sampling. To facilitate inclusion and political equality, a mini-public may also decide to target a particular group, usually a minority, that would not in all probability be picked up through random or stratified sampling. For example, the British Columbian Citizens’ Assembly (BCCA), having randomly recruited 158 participants (one male and one female per electoral district), realised that the process had produced no first nations’ representative and added one male and one female member from this community (Fournier et al., 2011). Belgium’s G1000 specifically allocated 10% of its seats to those identified as ‘difficult to reach’, and worked with grassroots organisations to ensure that ethnic minority groups and homeless people were included (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps, 2016). All of these techniques assume that those participating in a given mini-public are representative in a descriptive sense. However, there are others who advocate for discursive representation, the inclusion of all the relevant discourses on a matter. This employs Q method (discussed in Chapter 36 in this Handbook) to identify the various discourses, and may involve the random selection of discourse leaders to ‘represent’ them (Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2008). Interestingly, the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit (2017) blended both demographic and opinion representation in terms of how members had voted in the referendum on Britain’s exit from the EU (Renwick et al., 2017). Whatever method chosen, there is always an element of self-selection to the extent that there is no compulsion to attend. Some mini-publics have been more successful than others at providing facilities that encourage and support attendance namely honoraria, free travel and accommodation, as well as childcare. It is customary that participants’ travel and accommodation expenses are covered. Payment of honoraria, on the other hand, seems to vary from minipublic to mini-public. Both the Scottish citizens’ juries on wind farms (Roberts and Escobar, 2015) and the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit paid members small stipends in recognition of their work (Renwick et al., 2017.) No such payment was offered to lay citizen members of the Irish Convention on the Constitution, or the Irish Citizens’ Assembly. Inclusion and political equality are not just about bringing someone to the table. They are also about ensuring equality of voice at that table, in keeping with Young’s concepts of internal and external exclusion (2000). The communication mode, the role of the facilitator, the group

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composition, decision-making rules, the choice of experts, framing, and the use of technology (Bächtiger et al., 2014) all have important roles in this regard. Successful deliberation does not require each person to speak for the same amount of time. Such rules would place a heavy burden on participants. Instead it requires that participants have opportunities to speak, to communicate with respect, to listen to differing opinions, to justify their own views, and to be open to changing their minds. Also, as Curato et al observe, deliberative theory has ‘moved in the direction of recognising the plurality of speech cultures’ (2017: 30). It can include narratives and rhetoric, but it should also include reasoning and justification at some stage in the process. Facilitators have a vital role to play in such small group deliberations. They can ensure that all members have the opportunity to contribute, that the tone of the discussions remains respectful, and that no one member dominates the proceedings. It is the facilitator who can assist the group to ‘reach its own goals’ and in so doing ensure ‘internal inclusion and pluralism’ (Landwehr, 2014). Good practice sees participants rotated over the course of the small group deliberations. This involves them moving from group to group to facilitate exposure to different views and experiences to avoid group think and potential individual dominance. The small group composition and the decision-making rules within them can have implications for voice within the process. For example, women are one cohort that may be disadvantaged in such processes, as they tend to speak less than men, thereby having less influence and authority (Hansen, 2006; Karpowitz et al., 2012; Karpowitz and Mendelberg, 2014; Gerber, 2015). Karpowitz and Mendelberg highlighted the gendered aspects of deliberation in small group settings, finding that women are disadvantaged, and that this affects ‘everything from how long they speak, to the respect they are shown, to the content of what they say, to the influence they carry, to their sense of their own capacity, and to their power over group decisions’ (2014). Using controlled experiments, they assessed the impact of group composition and formal procedures, such as decision-making rules on female participation (Mendelberg and Karpowitz, 2007; Karpowitz et al., 2012; Karpowitz and Mendelberg, 2014). They discovered that group composition has an impact on gender deliberations, and if a process wishes to ‘to avoid maximum inequality, avoid groups with few women and majority rule’ (2012: 545). Interestingly, recent empirical work on women’s rates of participation in mini-publics disproves aspects of the ‘gender gap’ argument (Gerber et al., 2016; Siu, 2017; Harris et al., 2018). Alternatives to majority rule include supermajorities and consensus. Traditionally, deliberative theorists have argued that deliberative processes should strive for consensus decisions. However, ‘deliberative democrats have rarely endorsed consensus as an aspiration for realworld decision-making’ (Curato et al., 2017), recognising that a focus on consensus may prevent minority inclusion, and restrict the scope for discourse (Young, 2000). More recently, theorists claim that deliberation should strive for meta-consensus (Niemeyer and Dryzek, 2007; Curato et al., 2017), where meta-consensus is an outcome of authentic deliberation, and is defined as agreement on the domain of reasons and considerations relating to the issue at hand, as well as the nature of the available choices (Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2006). How the experts are identified and chosen, and the way in which their ‘expertise’ is presented, can have consequences for input and throughput legitimacy. Inclusive procedures give the members a role in identifying and selecting those they chose to present to them, for example

Mini-publics: design choices and legitimacy 51

Danish Consensus Conferences (Smith, 2005). Those who provide expert evidence to minipublics tend to come from the academic, legal, medical, and/or public policy arenas. Inclusive deliberations require that information is presented in clear plain language. Also, participants should be given the opportunity to question those sharing their expertise. Minipublics can use different formats to facilitate this. For the larger mini-publics, for example in mini-publics of circa 100 or more members, participants can ask questions in the plenary sessions, and in some cases, experts can be invited to join members during their private roundtable discussions, for example, Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution. This allows additional time for expert questioning, and facilitates expert input as deliberations progress. It also gives those reluctant to speak up in a crowded room an opportunity to pose their question(s). Possible disadvantages to this approach are that one table/group in the room has more information than others, and the risk of expert ‘manipulation’ is increased in a more informal, in camera setting. Ways of mitigating the disadvantages may involve the expert interrupting the small group deliberations briefly, to publicly share the additional information with the wider group, and incorporating feedback from the small group discussions to the wider plenary sessions into the programme. Considering the role that diverse forms of speech can play in deliberations, it is not unusual for advocacy groups, and individual lay citizens who can share their stories of the ‘lived experience’ of a particular issue, to bring other perspectives to bear. As Young notes, narrative, rhetoric, and the use of greetings can facilitate inclusion, particularly of women and minorities, and in some cases a move from discussion to decision (2000). Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution and Citizens’ Assembly processes included evidence from advocacy groups and lay citizens. The Convention’s discussion on marriage equality involved a panel discussion that included representatives of different churches, as well as human rights and LGBT campaigning organisations. Those advocating for marriage equality invited the adult children of same sex couples to discuss their experiences, and to highlight their concerns about the lack of protection for their family under the Constitution.2 Similarly, young people under 18 were invited to address the Convention, the weekend they discussed reducing the voting age,3 and members of the Irish diaspora highlighted their wish to have the right to vote in Irish elections via Panopto, the weekend that topic was addressed. Testimony was also part of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly’s deliberations. When considering the highly sensitive topic of abortion, its members requested that women who had terminated pregnancies were invited to share their experiences with them anonymously.4 Embedding expertise in sometimes tight schedules can prove a challenge for those designing mini-publics. The balance between providing sufficient, relevant, and competing information in a concise, accessible manner, and allowing time for questions and small group deliberations can be tight (see Roberts and Escobar, 2015). It can be difficult for one-day or indeed weekend events to achieve this, particularly if the topic for consideration is weighty and/or sensitive. An example of best practice is the BCCA. It involved a learning phase, where over the course of six weekends, the members heard evidence from a range of experts. This was followed by the public hearing phase that involved 50 public meetings across the province to gather public opinion on the issue, with the final phase focusing on small group deliberations (Fournier et al., 2011). Another crucial issue when considering invited expertise, in terms of throughput legitimacy, is the diversity of the perspectives presented to ensure competing arguments are included.

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The need for a greater plurality of expert views was highlighted by international observers of Belgium’s G1000 process, who found that ‘the experts who introduced the three themes approached the matter from a somewhat ‘left-wing’ oriented perspective. Therefore, their input did not necessarily represent the full diversity of the viewpoints on these themes’.5 However, they concluded that the results on the day did not indicate any undue influence from the experts.6 Other issues that can impact on the deliberation’s framing are the topic(s) for discussion, how they are worded, and the degree to which the mini-public may deviate from or reframe that issue to explore supplementary issues, or indeed request more time in which to do so. How technology is employed can also impact framing, for example the algorithms used to synopsise online deliberations (Liston et al., 2013). Technology can play a crucial role in up-scaling deliberation and has been used innovatively in a number of mini-publics. The G1000 Belgian citizens’ summit is an excellent example of an approach that blended online and face-to-face engagement. Beginning with a website to gather Belgian’s views on the political issues that mattered most to them, it then clustered them into themes and asked people to vote on them. The top three were discussed at a one-day citizens’ summit in Brussels that included over 700 randomly selected citizens. On the same day, people who were not selected to attend the event in Brussels could participate online either at home (G-homes), or offsite at civil society organised meetings (G-offs), using the interactive software Synthetron.7 Their opinions and recommendations were fed back into the main hall. Also, members of the G-homes and the G-offs were part of the G32, the group of 32 members that took the recommendations from the one-day summit and developed them further over a number of weekends. The Estonian Citizens’ Assembly process similarly combined online and offline approaches to deliberation and participation, using a crowdsourcing website to gather information and opinion on five pre-selected topics. It received 2000 original proposals and 4000 comments on them (Jonsson, 2015). These were categorised and deliberated upon by citizens, political representatives and experts in deliberative seminars, that culminated in 18 proposals that were ‘handed over for further deliberation on the Rahvakogu (deliberation day)’, at which 314 randomly selected citizens participated (Jonsson, 2015). Concerns have been expressed that the use of the internet for political purposes can reinforce existing inequalities and the dominance of the technologically competent (Albrecht, 2006). There is also a gendered dimension, as men are more likely to participate in online political discussions (Miller et al., 1999). Bua finds that when it comes to online participation, ‘flooders’ tend to be men, while women are more likely to lurk and not participate (2009). Another challenge is securing the inclusion of young people in knowledge creation, as policy making and sources of information become more complex (Margetts, 2009). Liston et al advocate an approach to inclusion in e-deliberations, and highlight the specific role for the designer to ensure that the means used to engage the crowd are collaborative, transparent, intuitive, and relevant to people’s needs and capacities (2013). The discussion to date has focused on what has been termed the micro design aspects of mini-publics and how they relate to input and throughput legitimacy by considering who participates, how they participate and how they develop recommendations looking at both internal (voice) and external (representation) inclusion. It now turns to output legitimacy: the mini-public’s relationship with the maxi-public, namely decision makers and wider society. This involves addressing what has been referred to as ‘macro design choices’, namely: who

Mini-publics: design choices and legitimacy 53

initiates the mini-publics; who sets the agenda; levels of empowerment; responsiveness of the ‘empowered’ space; levels of dissemination to the wider citizenry; and monitoring and reiteration (Fung, 2003; Bächtiger et al., 2014).

5  MINI-PUBLICS: MACRO DESIGN CHOICES AND LEGITIMACY Mini-publics have been established by a variety of actors, including: (a) supranational organisations, for example, EuroPolis DOP (2009), (Gerber, 2015; Gerber et al., 2016); (b) national governments, for example, Iceland’s national gathering (2010), (Landemore, 2015); (c) regional governments, for example, the Canadian Citizens’ Assemblies; (d) local governments, for example, the City of Greater Bendigo citizens’ jury (2016),8 Australia; (e) public sector bodies, for example, the NHS Citizens’ Assembly9 (2015) (Farmer, 2016); (f) civil society organisations, for example, the Citizens’ Forum Portugal10 (2016) (Serrano and Jardim de Oliveria, 2017); (g) academics, for example, Finnish mini-publics, (see Grönlund, 2016): and (h) a mixture, for example, Australia’s Citizens’ Parliament (Dryzek, 2009). The initiator usually determines the agenda, and may decide how tightly the group need to adhere to it. Belgium’s G1000, Estonia’s Citizens’ Assembly, and Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution show how technology can be used, to a greater or lesser extent, to crowdsource the agenda (Jonsson, 2015; Jacquet et al., 2016; Suiter et al., 2016). The initiator also determines the resources available to achieve many of the micro design elements, such as, the length of the mini-public, honoraria, childcare facilities, technology used, facilitator training, international expertise, the quality of the materials produced, regional meetings, public relations professionals, marketing, and so on.11 These can influence the maxipublic’s awareness of the process and their perceptions of its openness, inclusivity, and power. Studies of mini-publics are also concerned with their impact in wider political systems, that is, their relationship with the institutions that actually make political decisions12 (empowered spaces), and the public at large (Newton, 2012; Bächtiger et al., 2014; Hendriks, 2016). There is always the concern that mini-publics may be used as tokenistic consultative exercises, where decision makers cherry-pick those recommendations that suit/are politically acceptable (Böker and Elstub, 2015), and may be a way of deferring a decision on a contentious issue. Goodin and Dryzek note, that in terms of wider impact, mini-publics ‘at most, and very rarely,…have a politically (but not constitutionally) guaranteed place in policy making on a particular issue. The more usual case is that mini-publics lack formal power or authority in the macro-political system’ (2006). They outline pathways of influence that include: actual policy making, being taken up in the policy process, informing public debate, shaping policy/market testing, legitimating policy, confidence/constitution building, oversight, and resisting co-option. Mini-publics have enjoyed varying degrees of success from the perspective of output legitimacy. In some cases, governments have pledged to put a forum’s recommendations directly to the people, in the form of a referendum. This was the case for the Canadian Citizens’ Assemblies. However, the regional government as initiator also determined the thresholds for success. In the case of the BCCA, its recommendation faced the challenge of achieving double supermajorities in the subsequent referendum. It achieved a simple majority in 77 of the Province’s 79 ridings, but it only won 57.4% of the total vote, falling short of the required 60%. In contrast, many of the Irish Constitutional Convention’s recommendations have been

54  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance

or are due to be implemented (Farrell, 2018).13 It led to the achievement of two world firsts. On May 22nd 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to support the introduction of marriage equality by popular vote. It was also the first time a recommendation from a deliberative mini-public resulted in Constitutional change.14 More recently the Irish Citizens’ Assembly’s recommendation to repeal and replace the 8th amendment to the Irish Constitution (the amendment relating to the abortion) passed a popular referendum.15 The Estonian case is also interesting, as its Parliament implemented 3 of the 15 proposals that stemmed from the citizens’ assembly process (Jonsson, 2015). Other mini-publics that have been less successful in terms of recommendation implementation have achieved impact in terms of increasing awareness of their process, and the uptake of that process by other groups, nationally and internationally. Belgium’s G1000 process has influenced similar smaller deliberative mini-publics in Belgium and the Netherlands (Jacquet et al., 2016). Interestingly, Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution and the subsequent Citizens’ Assembly were heavily influenced by the ‘We the Citizens’ pilot Citizens’ Assembly, which essentially proved to the political classes that deliberation could work in an Irish context (We the Citizens, 2011). Research on deliberative democracy and deliberative mini-publics has developed an array of tools to measure deliberation, and its impact on those who participate in such processes. The most notable is the Discourse Quality Index (DQI), which aims to operationalise and measure the core features of Habermasian discourse ethics, by coding discourses on participation, levels of justification for demands, respect, and constructive politics (Steenbergen et al., 2003; Steiner et al., 2004). It has been amended in recent years to storytelling (Steiner, 2012). Some other approaches to empirical analysis of deliberation include: Fishkin’s deliberative opinion poll (2009), and Stromer-Galley’s measurement of deliberative content (2007). Research in the field shows that citizens, as a consequence of deliberation, become more informed, and as a result more likely to change their positions on a given policy issue. They also find that deliberation has led to changes in opinion, voting intentions, interest in public dialogue, collective consistency, civic capacities, and efficacy (Fishkin, 2009; Farrar et al., 2010; Farrell et al., 2013; Offe, 2014). Similarly, studies of small-group deliberations in mini-publics revealed high levels of deliberative quality in terms of respect, empathy, reason-giving, and orientation towards the common good (Gerber et al., 2016), as well as increased trust in politicians and democratic institutions, and satisfaction with democracy (Grönlund, 2016,). This research has primarily, and often exclusively, focused on the impact the mini-public has on its members. Fewer findings exist on their impact on the wider citizenry. In their work on the Canadian citizens’ assemblies, Fournier et al. (2011) found that few people knew something about the assemblies, and many were misinformed about their composition and processes. While Elkink et al’s (2017) study of the Irish marriage equality referendum campaign found that respondents from the wider citizenry had good levels of awareness of the convention’s composition, and a significant majority of them (77 per cent) knew that the convention had recommended a referendum on marriage equality. Interestingly, ‘voters who were knowledgeable about the convention and the role that it played in bringing about the referendum were more likely to vote yes’ (Elkink et al., 2017). Although examined separately in this chapter, primarily for ease of discussion, micro and macro design choices are in fact interlinked. For example, who initiates them and how prescriptive they are may impact on: recruitment; modes of discussion; group composition;

Mini-publics: design choices and legitimacy 55

decision-making rules; resources; empowerment; and responsiveness to recommendations. This analysis begs the question as to whether it is realistic or even fair to expect high levels of impact from a mini-public. It is, after all, but one part of a wider democratic system of governance. It is widely recognised that all deliberative norms cannot be met in any one institution at the same time and in the same place (Goodin, 2005; Parkinson, 2005; Warren, 2007; Smith, 2009; Mansbridge et al., 2012; Felicetti et al., 2015). This is captured in recent systemic analyses of deliberative democracy that recognise that ‘the entire burden of decision-making and legitimacy does not fall on one forum or institution but is distributed among different components in different cases’ (Mansbridge et al., 2012), where deliberation may be sequential across complementary institutions, at different stages in a policy process (Goodin, 2005; Parkinson, 2005; Warren, 2007). This systemic approach is not without its critics, who argue that it risks being elitist and losing its ‘normative moorings’ (Owen and Smith, 2015: 218).

6 CONCLUSION Deliberation is ‘fragile’ (Warren, 2007). In praxis it has to work within real-world systems, marked by asymmetries in power, wealth, knowledge, access to information, and so on. As Bohman argues, it ‘cannot assume that citizens are similarly situated or similarly capable of making use of their opportunities and resources’ (1997). Consequently, deliberative processes must be designed in such a way to satisfy the demanding requirements of political equality. Acknowledging that a mini-public is but part of a wider democratic system of governance, it can nonetheless play a role in overcoming some of these asymmetries, through careful and considered design choices that embed inclusion and popular control at all stages in the process. Actors ‘in and around deliberative processes’ can play a part in addressing inequalities (Curato et al., 2017) through careful attention to recruitment (mixed methods that include some random sampling and targeted approaches might work best for inclusion), as well as serious consideration of the tone, format and procedures of deliberative processes and system responsiveness. For mini-publics to achieve their participatory and deliberative potential in terms of input, throughput and output legitimacy, political elites need to empower them by: properly resourcing them; permitting open agenda setting; committing to prompt and constructive responses to their output; and monitoring them. This will require the ‘empowered space’ itself to engage deliberatively with mini-publics.

NOTES   1. Scholars note that publicity can have perverse effects (Gutmann and Thompson, 1996; Chambers, 2004), an argument reflected to some extent in the examples discussed where closed, small-group discussions facilitated open and frank engagement as well as affording privacy for participants to transform their opinions should that be the case.   2. See footage of the GLEN et al presentation to the Convention, accessed 18 December 2017 at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LRcu-Qr0Xxk.   3. See footage of the NYCI presentations accessed 18 December 2017 at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=YF3EXxc8OzE.

56  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance   4. See the Feedback from the roundtable brainstorming session at the first weekend of the Citizens’ Assembly www. citizensassembly.ie/en/Meetings/Feedback-on-Member-Brainstorming-in-First-Weekend1.pdf , accessed 19 September 2018.   5. The author was a member of the international observer team.   6. The International observers’ report, accessed 18 December 2017 at www.g1000.org/ documents/7_The_G1000_report_by_international_observers_EN.pdf.   7. See w , accessed 19 September 2018.  8. For more information, accessed 13 February 2017 at www.bendigo.vic.gov.au/your-say/Have-your-say/ Citizens-Jury.   9. For more information, see Farmer (2016), accessed 13 February 2017, at www.involve.org.uk/blog/2016/02/04/ full-reports-of-nhs-citizen-assembly-and-citizens-jury-now-published. 10. For more information, see Serrano, M. and L. Jardim de Oliveria (2017), accessed 13 February 2017, at www.opendemocracy.net/democraciaabierta/manuel-nunes-ramires-serrano-louren-o-jardim-de-oliveira/ citizens-forum-revisiting. 11. For example, the Irish Convention on the Constitution had a limited budget (approximately €900,000) when compared with similar bodies such as the British Columbian Citizens’ Assembly (Can$ 5.5 million) and the Dutch Burgerforum (€5.1 million). 12. The concept of coupling – that is to say, the relationship between different parts of the deliberative system (see Mansbridge et al., 2012) – has emerged in academic analyses of the impact of mini-publics with a discussion of how ‘loose’ or ‘tight’ these links between the mini-public and other sites, particularly empowered ones, within the deliberative system should be (see Hendriks, 2016; Setälä, 2017). 13. Including a third popular referendum on the removal of the offense of blasphemy from the Irish Constitution that successfully passed on October 26th 2018. 14. On the same day a referendum was held to reduce the age of presidential candidates. In the midst of the deliberation over marriage equality it had received little attention and following a lacklustre campaign was defeated by 73.1% against to 26.9% in favour. 15. For background to the referendum see Harris (2018). For information on the referendum see RTE exit poll at www.rte.ie/news/2018/0525/965899-eighth-amendment/ accessed 19 September 2018.

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Mini-publics: design choices and legitimacy 57 Dryzek, J.S. (2007), ‘Theory, evidence and the tasks of deliberation’, in S.W. Rosenberg (ed.), Deliberation, Participation and Democracy, Can the People Govern? Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 236–250. Dryzek, J.S. (2009), ‘The Australian Citizens’ Parliament: A world first’, Journal of Public Deliberation, 5 (1), 1–7. Dryzek, J.S. (2010), Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dryzek, J.S. and Niemeyer, S.J. (2006), ‘Reconciling pluralism and consensus as political ideals’, American Journal of Political Science, 50 (3), 634–649. Dryzek, J.S. and Niemeyer, S.J. (2008), ‘Discursive representation’, American Political Science Review, 102 (4), 481–493. Elkink, J.A., D.M. Farrell, T. Reidy and J. Suiter (2017), ‘Understanding the 2015 Marriage Referendum in Ireland: Constitutional convention, campaign, and conservative Ireland’, Irish Political Studies, 32 (3), 361–381. Elstub, S. 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Siu (2010), ‘Deliberative democracy in an unlikely place: Deliberative polling in China’, British Journal of Political Science, 40 (2), 435–48. Fournier, P., H. van der Kolk, R.K. Carty, A. Blais and J. Rose (2011), When Citizens Decide: Lessons from Citizen Assemblies on Electoral Reform, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fung, A. (2003), ‘Recipes for public spheres: Eight institutional design choices and their consequences’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 11 (3), 338–67. GLEN (Gay and Lesbian Equality Network) et al. (2013), presentation to the Irish Convention on the Constitution, 13 April, accessed 18 December 2017 at www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRcu-Qr0Xxk. Gerber, M., A. Bächtiger, S. Shinanko, S. Reber and S. Rohr (2016), ‘Deliberative abilities and influence in a transnational deliberative poll (EUROPOLIS)’, British Journal of Political Science, 1–26. Gerber, M. (2015), ‘Equal Partners in Dialogue? 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Mini-publics: design choices and legitimacy 59 Saward, M. (2001), ‘Making democratic connections: Political equality, deliberation and direct democracy’, Acta Politica, 36 (4), 361–379. Serrano, M. and L. Jardim de Oliveria (2017), ‘Citizens’ Forum: revisiting citizen participation in Portugal’ accessed 18 December 2017 at www.opendemocracy.net/democraciaabierta/manuel-nunes-ramires-serrano-louren-o-jardimde-oliveira/citizens-forum-revisiting. Setälä, M. (2017), ‘Connecting mini-publics to representative decision making’, European Journal of Political Research, 56, 846–863. Siu, A. (2017), ‘Deliberation and the challenge of inequality’, Daedalus, 146 (3), 119–128. Smith, G. (2009), Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steenbergen, M.R., A. Bächtiger, M. Spörndli and J. Steiner (2003), ‘Measuring political deliberation, a Discourse Quality Index’, Comparative European Politics, 1 (1), 21–48. Steiner, J., A. Bächtiger, M. Spörndli and M.R. Steenbergen (2004), Deliberative Politics in Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steiner, J. (2012), The Foundations of Deliberative Democracy: Empirical Research and Normative Implications, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Street, J., K. Duszynski, S. Krawczyk and A. Braunack-Mayer (2014), ‘The use of citizens’ juries in health policy decision-making: A systematic review’, Social Science and Medicine, 109, 1–9. Stromer-Galley, J. (2007), ‘Measuring deliberation’s content: a coding scheme’, Journal of Public Deliberation, 3 (1), Article 12. Suiter, J. and M. Reuchamps (2016), ‘A constitutional turn for deliberative democracy in Europe?’ in Min Reuchamps and J. Suiter (eds), Constitutional Deliberative Democracy in Europe, Colchester, Essex: ECPR Press, pp. 1–13. Suiter, J., D.M. Farrell and C. Harris (2016), ‘A constitutional turn for deliberative democracy in Europe?’ in M. Reuchamps and J. Suiter (eds), Constitutional Deliberative Democracy in Europe, Colchester, Essex: ECPR Press, pp. 33–52. Timotijevic, T. and M.M. Raats (2007), ‘Evaluation of two methods of deliberative participation of older people in food-policy development’, Health Policy, 82 (3), 302–319. The G1000 International Observers’ Report, accessed 18 December 2017 at www.g1000.org/documents/ 7_The_G1000_report_by_international_observers_EN.pdf. Warren, M.E. (2007), ‘Institutionalizing deliberative democracy’, in S.W. Rosenberg (ed.), Deliberation, Participation and Democracy: Can the People Govern?, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 272–288. We the Citizens (2011), ‘Participatory democracy in action: A pilot’, Dublin: We the Citizens. Young, I.M. (2000), Inclusion and Democracy, New York: Oxford University Press.

4.

Collaborative governance: between invited and invented spaces Sonia Bussu

1 INTRODUCTION Collaborative governance has become a common term among scholars and practitioners, cutting across broader concepts of public administration and democracy. In public administration, collaborative governance is often seen as the new paradigm for governing democratic systems, distinctive from the paternalistic relationship between professionals and users of traditional service delivery models and the market-inspired relationship between service providers and customers of New Public Management tradition (Frederickson, 1991; Kettl, 2002). Democracy theorists and researchers praise new forms of public involvement and civic engagement as more responsive and citizen-centred forms of government (Fung and Wright, 2003; Sirianni, 2009; Nabatchi, 2010). Finally, the literature on coproduction emphasises the role of citizens as critical to effective production and delivery of services (Bovaird, 2007; Osborne, 2010; Pestoff, 2014). Despite its popularity, or perhaps as a result, the concept of collaborative governance continues to suffer from a lack of conceptual clarity. Ansell and Gash (2008) complained that scholars have been focusing more “on the species rather than the genus”: from cross-sector collaboration (Bryson et al., 2002), to collaborative planning (Bentrup, 2001; Innes and Booher, 1999), collaboration processes (Daniels and Walker, 2001), or collaborative public management (Agranoff and McGuire, 2001). In this chapter, I attempt a definition that takes account of democratic innovations in collaborative governance, as defined in this Handbook (see Chapter 1). To shed light on these innovations, I build on the existing literature to develop a framework of analysis and test it on three UK-based case studies, which are different in terms of policy area and actors involved in the collaborative process: Citizen was an attempt to develop a deliberative system within the NHS through • NHS online and offline forums at different levels of governance; Whitley, South Reading, a collaboration between residents and the University devel• inoped into the Whitley Researchers group who carry out participatory action research

•

on various aspects of social exclusion in the area. Reading Local Authority joined this partnership, which became Whitley For Real, a multi-stakeholder forum with the aim to co-produce knowledge and inform local anti-poverty strategies; and in Lambeth, South London, the Council ran a one-year pilot with the support of a team of system designers, Civic Lab, to test a new model of coproduction of outcomes, Participatory City, whereby residents can get involved in different ways and through different

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Collaborative governance: between invited and invented spaces 61

channels with various degrees of intensity and commitment, so as to lower barriers to participation and engage large number of residents over time. This chapter compares these three UK-based cases, which developed within the past few years. They all show how concepts of ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces of citizenship (Cornwall, 2002)1 are continually interacting and mutually constitutive, demonstrating the fluidity of grassroots collective action. This analysis acknowledges the flexibility of grassroots strategies as a means to avoid rigid conceptual barriers between different spaces of participation. The next section offers an updated definition of collaborative governance based on recent developments in collaborative practice, while the following section presents a framework of analysis that borrows from, and builds on, the existing literature. After briefly describing each case study, the last section applies the framework to these initiatives to draw out learning on effective and sustainable collaborative governance.

2  DEFINING COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE Governance remains a widely contested concept, which is difficult to operationalise (Keating, 2008; Colebatch, 2014). Therefore, it is not surprising that the concept of collaborative governance suffers from similar theoretical and empirical confusion. After all, the importance of shared administration had already been recognised by early literature on policy implementation (see Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973). Ansell & Gash (2008) carried out a meta-analysis of 137 articles describing collaborative governance processes, in an effort to develop this overarching definition: A governing arrangement where one or more public agencies directly engage non-state stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal, consensus-oriented, and deliberative and that aims to make or implement public policy or manage public programs or assets.

This definition is based on six main criteria: (1) the forum is initiated by institutions, (2) participants in the forum include non-state actors, (3) participants engage directly in decision making and are not merely ‘consulted’, (4) the forum is formally organised and meets collectively, (5) the forum aims to make decisions by consensus (even if consensus is not always achieved in practice), and (6) the focus of collaboration is on public policy or public management. Although an important start in fostering some conceptual clarity, this understanding of collaborative governance suffers from a conventional focus on public management and the formal public sector, and it limits collaborative governance to only formal, state-initiated arrangements (Ansell and Gash, 2008). Whereas Ansell and Gash intend to distinguish collaborative governance from more casual forms of agency-interest group interaction, their definition implies an explicit state strategy of organising non-state influence. Emerson et al. (2012) offer a broader definition, whereby collaborative governance includes: the processes and structures of public policy decision making and management that engage people constructively across the boundaries of public agencies, levels of government, and/or the public, private and civic spheres in order to carry out a public purpose that could not otherwise be accomplished.

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While this definition captures a wider range of emergent forms of cross-boundary governance, it still limits the scope of the collaboration to a finite project and a formal forum. Here collaborative governance is understood as an ongoing process, more or less formalised, with possible multiple outcomes, or even covering a range of different policy areas simultaneously. What distinguishes collaborative governance from other more conventional collaborative structures, such as public-private partnerships or network management (Koppenjan and Klijn, 2004; Milward and Provan, 2000), which involve collaboration between state actors, the third sector and/or the private sector, is the presence of citizens. While interest groups and public agencies have always engaged in two-way flows of influence, within new democratic innovations, collaborative governance centres on a partnership between public agencies and citizens, who are often not formally, or only loosely, organised and do not come to the table as representatives of specific groups. By the same token, this is different from participatory democracy, which generally refers to an open and often time-limited process. Instead collaborative governance will entail an ongoing collaborative partnership. Therefore, we refine Ansell and Gash’s definition, whereby collaborative governance is: a process of collaboration between state actors and citizens, where other stakeholders (e.g. NGOs, community groups, local business etc.) are invited, often to facilitate and/or mediate the relationship between citizens and public agencies. These collaborative spaces can be opened by different actors, other than policy-makers/public agencies, in order to produce specific policy outcomes or broader changes to policy making.

3  DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS IN COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE: A FRAMEWORK OF ANALYSIS What does it take for collaborative governance to work? Collaborative forums are not objective, predetermined structures but are imbued with interests and power (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). The literature has identified key contextual and structural elements that can influence the nature and prospects of collaboration (Emerson et al., 2012): conditions that might need improving, increasing, or limiting (Ostrom, 1990); • resource policy and frameworks (Bingham, 2008); • prior failurelegal to address through conventional channels (Bryson and Crosby, 2008); • power imbalances – ifissues stakeholders not have similar capacity, organisational infra• structure, or status to participate on andoequal footing (Ansell and Gash, 2008); degree of connectedness within and across existing (Selin and Chavez, 1995); • prehistory of conflict among recognised interests thatnetworks can affect levels of trust and work• ing relationships (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Thomson and Perry, 2006). In an effort to develop a framework to assess collaborative governance processes (see Figure 1 below) I identify drivers and components of collaborative action. I borrow from Emerson et al. (2012) and Ansell and Gash (2008) and identify three interrelated drivers: leadership, incentives, and interdependence.

Collaborative governance: between invited and invented spaces 63

is likely to be time-, resource-, and skill-intensive. Where incentives to par• Leadership ticipate are weak, power and resources are asymmetrically distributed, and prior an-

• •

tagonisms are high, leadership becomes all the more important. The requisite leadership qualities may be context-dependent, but within a collaborative space, effective leadership will tend to be facilitative: this will emerge from the practices and interactions of different actors, who might lead at different points in the process; and it will require a democratic capacity for dealing with continuous challenges (Bussu and Bartels, 2013). Incentives, or what Emerson et al. (2012) call consequential incentives, refer to either internal (problems, resource needs, interests) or external (situational or institutional crises, threats, or opportunities) drivers for collaboration (ibid). Stakeholders may wish to participate to ensure their perspective is not neglected, to secure legitimacy for their position or to fulfil a legal obligation. Interdependence implies that the stakeholders in the process are unable to accomplish something on their own. Interdependence will be limited when stakeholders can achieve their goals unilaterally, or through alternative means or venues (Ansell and Gash, 2008).

Several major components may strengthen or weaken the drivers above. Emerson et al. (2012), Ansell and Gash (2008) and Purdy (2012) identify several major factors that will affect collaborative dynamics and power relations. We add four of these major components to our framework: process incorporates some of the dimensions included in the Democratic • Engagement Innovation framework developed in this Handbook (see Chapter 1), such as the mode of

•

participation and degree of inclusion of participants; the mode of decision-making; and the extent of power and influence. The collaborative process may occur over time and include different stakeholders at different points. It can take place in face-to-face or virtual formats, in private and/or public meetings, or other settings. Inclusion and diversity are important both on a normative level and for instrumental reasons (Sirianni, 2009; Emerson et al., 2012), as different interests will bring different resources to the table. As noted in this Handbook (see Chapter 1), within collaborative governance innovations, participants generally join the process through self-selection or purposive selection, while the mode of participation is generally based on discursive expression. However, throughout the process, collaboration can happen through different types of forums and based on hybrid modes of participation, whereby decisions can be reached in different ways at different points in the process, whether through bargaining, negotiation, or deliberation. In terms of influence, decisions will tend to range from consultation to communicative influence and co-governance (see Chapter 1). Shared motivation entails the belief that engagement in the process is the best way to achieve the outcomes and will affect overall commitment to the collaboration. Even when collaborative governance is mandated, achieving ‘buy in’ from all actors is essential. This also implies ownership or shared responsibility for the process (Ansell and Gash, 2008). If we think about the continuum of ‘power over,’ ‘power to’, and ‘power for’ (the three power orientations of own gain, mutual gain, and altruistic gain) (Huxham and Vangen, 2005, 175), a collaborative process will prove effective when it facilitates

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•

•

the emergence of power for, or concern for others’ interests. This will most likely happen in contexts where there are good communications, trust, and shared goals (Purdy, 2012).2 Legitimacy consists of two main elements: authority and discursive legitimacy (Purdy, 2012). Authority is determined by the relative status of a participant within the context of the collaboration. Government agencies might use their political and/or legal authority to set the agenda and decide who to invite, but other participants, such as experts, might enjoy the authority that comes with their role. Participants who might lack authority or resources might still enjoy discursive legitimacy if they are perceived to convey certain recognised values. Discursive legitimacy can influence the prioritisation or the (re)framing of issues. Resources can include tangibles (e.g. financial resources, human resources, technology, and supplies) and intangibles (e.g. knowledge, culture, and skills). In collaborative contexts, the relational and perceptual aspects of power may be as important as the objective ability to command resources (Purdy, 2012).

The quality of leadership and the strength of incentives to take part in the process, as well as the level of interdependence between the actors involved, will determine the terms of the collaboration and will continue between to drivedrivers (or hinder) its development over time. The outcome of Figure 1 shows the relationship and components of the framework. the collaboration will depend on how these drivers interact with the key components of the process: how the process is carried out; the resources and the legitimacy that different actors bring with them; and whether any power imbalances can be renegotiated and resolved in the Figure 4.1 A framework of collaborative governance name of shared motivation.

Impact Incentives

Components Drivers

Collaborative outcomes

Figure 4.1  A framework of collaborative governance

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One helpful concept in understanding issues of incentives and interdependence is Tarrow’s (1994) ‘political opportunity structure’ (POS). This refers to the degree of openness or closure of political access to citizen action (Newman et al., 2004). Tarrow defines POS as ‘consistent – but not necessarily formal or permanent – dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives for people to undertake collective action by affecting their expectations of success or failure’. He identifies ‘the opening up of access to power, shifting alignments, the availability of influential allies, and cleavages within and among elites’ as the main salient changes in the POS (Tarrow, 1994). Changes in the POS might affect the capacity of citizens to mobilise, as the dispersal of power can create new sites for social action. In the case studies presented here, the rhetoric of participation and accountability across the public policy system, as well as pressing challenges deriving from increasing demands on, and decreasing funding for, public services, have opened the way to new forms of interaction between institutions and citizens. These policy discourses can also contribute to increasing the legitimacy of officials with a commitment to citizen empowerment (see also Newman et al., 2004). The next section will examine three cases of collaborative governance innovations, based on the definition developed above, and use this framework to examine critical elements that enhanced or hindered collaboration in each case.

4  CASE STUDIES The cases presented in this section all developed over the past few years in England, demonstrating increasing experimentation with innovative forms of collaborative governance in the country. Findings are based on documentary analysis, participatory observation, and interviews with key actors: the director of one of the organisations leading on NHS Citizen’s design process; three members of the community-research team in Whitley, South Reading (the Whitley Researchers); and the system designer that developed the Participatory City model piloted in Lambeth.3 These are all cases of innovations in collaborative governance in terms of the scale and range of forums, often used simultaneously online and offline; the approach to collaboration as an ongoing process, rather than finalised to a defined policy outcome or coproduction of a specific service; and the fluidity between invited and invented spaces of citizenship, as these new collaborative processes move towards new forms of interactive governance (Edelenbos et al., 2016). Each case shows how the drivers and components of the framework of collaborative governance described in the previous section enabled or hindered collaborative outcomes. NHS Citizen NHS England4 (NHSE) was set up as an independent organisation with strategic leadership, following the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.5 This new organisation had an appointed board and therefore lacked democratic accountability. In 2013, NHSE’s Public Voice team contracted three different organisations working on public participation and digital engagement to work on a citizen engagement process in order to address this gap in democratic legitimacy: Involve, Demsoc, and Public-I. They joined the London-based Tavistock Institute, which had been previously contracted by the Board to run a workshop with patient groups and other key

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stakeholders. These four organisations and NHSE’s Public Voice team began to work on the design process of what would become NHS Citizen, a system that aimed to: citizens and organisations a direct and transparent route for their voices to reach the • give heart of the NHSE decision making process, in a way that could not be ignored; the NHSE Board and others a new source of evidence and opinion on the NHS now • give and future; the public an open and robust accountability mechanism for the work of NHSE, and • give opportunities to participate in every aspect of the organisation’s work; • establish a mechanism/system that would lead to action, quickly (Burall et al., 2014). Between 2013 and 2014, six open design days, three assembly tests and six one day regional events took place in different parts of country. These were all open, webcast events, to think about how NHS Citizen would work and design the process collaboratively. The format of the design workshops was innovative and included role plays, thought-experiments and interactive presentations, as well as more traditional small group and plenary discussions. The NHS Citizen website hosted several blog posts representing a range of different views and interests and promptly published reports of every event, as well as regular updates on the design process. NHS Citizen aimed to operate through three different spaces that would function online and offline: led by Public-I, was described as an online/offline civic space that connected • Discover, together conversations already happening around the NHS. led by Demsoc, was envisaged as an online platform where citizens, civil soci• Gather, ety organisations, or NHS bodies could raise and discuss issues. led by Involve, was a biannual citizens’ assembly where 250 people, with a • Assembly, mix of self-selected and purposively selected participants, would deliberate over issues raised through Gather and co-design solutions with the NHSE Board and NHS staff.

These spaces were meant to continuously interact: Discover would tap into conversations on health already happening in the community and local health forums and encourage discussion online through Gather (with community groups and organisations acting as gatekeepers between the offline and online spaces). Gather would enable deliberation and online voting to select key priorities, which would later be discussed at the biannual Assemblies, where the NHSE Board members would also participate to coproduce solutions with the public. A separate strand of the work, Relationship and culture change, was led by the Tavistock Institute and underpinned the whole system, fostering connections between people and organisations and ensuring ongoing dialogue between NHS Citizen and all parts of the NHS. Through the public design process, new elements were added, such as a citizen jury (with participants chosen through stratified random selection) that would select the issues to discuss at the Assembly, out of those raised through Gather. All parts of system were successfully tested, including the Assembly Meeting in September 2014 and the Citizen Jury in 2015. NHS Citizen was mentioned in the NHSE Five Years Forward View and other official documents; the NHSE Board, including the then recently appointed chief executive Simon Stevens,

Collaborative governance: between invited and invented spaces 67

took part in the Assembly Meeting test in 2014. However, after over two years of work on the design, the whole process came to a halt and NHS Citizen now appears to be just a brand. As the NHSE Board’s developed and its role and responsibilities became clearer, Board members increasingly felt citizens’ input was misaligned with the financial and political pressures they faced. Whitley for Real Whitley is an area in South Reading suffering from severe deprivation. In 2012, it was selected by the Big Lottery Fund to be part of the Big Local programme.6 This is a resident-led, placebased programme launched in 2010. The programme includes 150 small areas across England, with an average population of 7000. Each area receives at least £1m over ten years or more and residents are free to decide how to spend this money, with minimum oversight and regulation. Following initial consultations with residents to decide how to spend this money, a lack of adequate transport and poor mobility, leading to social exclusion, emerged as a clear priority. Residents involved in the Big Local programme, led by the Big Local community development worker, approached the University of Reading to discuss the possibility to facilitate community-led research on transport needs. One member of the academic staff agreed to help and a new community-based research team was formed, the Whitley Researchers. It included Whitley residents, staff and students from the University of Reading and Northumberland Training Academy. They adopted a Participatory Action Research approach, actively engaging the local community throughout the research process (Dorn and Kenny, 2015). In 2015, the team launched a thorough report, based on 500 questionnaires with residents, multiple interviews with potential stakeholders, and six focus groups.7 Not only did the involvement in the project boost the confidence and self-worth of the residents, but the strong evidence collected, prompted Reading’s bus agency to implement the recommendations in the report. Simultaneously, some of the Big Local money was used to refurbish an old building, which became a community hub run by the new Whitley Community Development Association (WCDA). The establishment of this association also allowed the group to remunerate the citizen-researchers for their work. The Whitley Researchers started to attract much interest from institutional stakeholders: the University, on the back of the enthusiasm for the impact of the research project, helped them to set up a Participation Lab8 to share learning and resources and provide training for new citizenresearchers; and the Council understood the potential of a collaboration with the residents around a number of different policy areas. The ‘Whitley For Real: hearing local voices’ forum was launched in 2016, including the Whitley Researchers, the WCDA, councillors and council officers, and the University. The Whitley for Real forum continues to carry out research on financial exclusion and social housing, with groups of young people also being involved in undertaking some research tasks. Members meet regularly to decide on activities and identify funding streams, as they try to build mutual trust and a shared language. Participatory City One of the criticisms against participatory and deliberative democracy is that it encourages citizen mobilisation that is focused around short-term, often individualised action, premised

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on fragmented participation (Lee et al., 2015). Particularly within open participatory arrangements based on self-selection, those stakeholders and citizens who are already active tend to participate the most, often replicating, rather than resolving, the power imbalances of the real world (Mohan and Stokke, 2000; Cooke and Kothari, 2001). Within the context of ongoing collaborative forums or community self-governance processes, participation can overburden a small number of individuals for whom engagement can become an exhausting and overwhelming experience. Participatory City9 was envisaged as a response to some of these criticisms. The Participatory City model is about encouraging peer learning and support and embedding participation throughout a neighbourhood. It does this by using two main platforms, one online and one offline (in the form of a shop front), which perform two functions: a horizontal function by connecting projects together, and a vertical function by integrating these with local government services. The system designer behind this model described it as a way ‘to create a collective structure where lots and lots of projects can start.’ In 2014–2015, a pilot of this model, Open Works, was implemented in West Norwood, Lambeth, through a partnership between the start-up Civic System Lab (now Participatory City) and Lambeth Council. At the time, Lambeth Council was developing the concept of the Cooperative Council, based around coproduction and peer support, and Open Works was an opportunity to test this idea.10 Within one year, 20 new practical projects were designed and tested with residents to reorganise the neighbourhood. They covered communal crafting, cooking and learning, item sharing, social events, and activities to improve the local environment. The projects ran at various days and times including evenings and weekends, over a period ranging, depending on the project, from a few months to a year. Activities were hands-on for all participants with no formal responsibilities, but community members could also lead on projects, as initiators and de facto primary supporters for the duration of the project, or act as hosts, session organisers, or teacher for one day (Participatory City Evaluation report, 2015; Detroux, 2016). This model was an effort to open up multiple channels for people to get involved in their community on their terms, based on the idea of micro-participation. It did so by creating practical, low commitment and low barrier opportunities open to everyone, so that within a 5- to 15-minute walk from each household there would be dozens of opportunities every week to participate in free activities with neighbours, with the possibility to join in at short notice. These projects generated 2500 participation opportunities, with 1000 people involved out of a population of about 50,000, of whom 530 participated between two and ten times. The cost of building and maintaining this participatory ecology in an area of approximately 50,000 residents was estimated at £300,000–£400,000 per annum. In Lambeth, this represented 2 percent of local council tax, and 0.1 percent of local area public spending. The pilot was funded through a collective fund to enable corporate partners, foundations, central and local government, and residents to invest in the neighbourhood (Britton and Anderson, 2015). As the champions of the model within Lambeth Council moved to other jobs, enthusiasm for the project within local government weakened; the council faced drastic cuts and became increasingly risk averse, while Civic System Lab struggled to compensate for their hesitancies. The Participatory City model is currently being implemented in Barking and Dagenham, where there appears to be strong political buy-in.

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NHS Citizen

Leadership of the process developed through the role of the four organisations leading on the design of NHS Citizen and NHSE’s Public Voice Team. They tried to bridge the gap between patient groups and institutional stakeholders with mixed results.   This leadership fell short of being genuinely facilitative and overlooked changes in the NHSE Board as its role developed and priorities changed.

NHSE’s need for democratic legitimacy offered the perfect opening for opportunities to increase citizen voice within the NHS.   Patient groups and other stakeholders, although weary of tokenistic exercises, were keen to seize this new opportunity to increase their influence.   The four organisations’ ethos and work focused on opening up space for citizen influence on policy making. They were keen to establish partnerships with institutions.   The incentive for the Board to be involved started to fade away as its role developed and directors had to deal with a new set of financial and political pressures. The four organisations were not able to pick on that promptly.

Drivers

Facilitative leadership

Incentives

Participatory City Council managers and Civic Lab initially led on the process. As the former moved to a different role, the system designer by herself was unable to drive the process and keep momentum. The council’s commitment fizzled out and by the end of the pilot they were unwilling to continue to invest.

When the pilot started in 2014, Lambeth Council had been developing the concept of Cooperative Council for a few years. When Civic Lab started to talk to them about the possibility of carrying out a pilot of the Participatory City model (Open Works), there was political support as the model offered the required infrastructure to translate an abstract concept of coop council into practice.   By the same token, the system designer behind Participatory City had been researching the model for the past three years and was looking for ways of testing it.   By the end of the one year pilot, incentives were misaligned as supporters within the Council had moved to other jobs.

Whitley for Real Facilitative leadership emerged from the practices of and relationships between: active residents; the academic from the University of Reading; the Big Local community development worker; and, at a later point, a council officer who became a champion of the partnership within the council. Different actors led at different points in the process and contributed to building a common language between the community and local institutions. Both the University and the Council played an ambiguous role at the start and only fully endorsed the Whitley Researchers once they demonstrated impact, by having the bus route altered following their report.   An event in September 2015 held by the Whitley Researchers to present to the wider community the findings of their report on transports was an opportunity for the residents to start an ongoing dialogue with local institutions and develop better understanding of what each side could gain from the collaboration.   The University – on the back of the enthusiasm for the impact of the research project on transport and social exclusion – helped them to set up Participation Lab, an online platform to share learning and resources and provide training for new resident-researchers.   The Council realised the potential of a collaboration with the residents around a number of different policy areas, primarily to inform anti-poverty strategies.

Table 4.1  Framework of collaborative governance applied to the case studies

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NHS Citizen

Components Engagement process

Much effort was placed into building an inclusive design process, using both online and offline channels.   As is often the case with participatory processes based on self-selection, patient representatives and activists used to engaging with institutions tended to participate the most.   There were efforts to increase participation from hard-to-reach groups, as well as NHS directors and senior staff, with mixed results.

Interdependence The Board quite suddenly moved from an abstract notion of what it means to be accountable to feeling very accountable for things that the public were not bringing up in ways Board members could recognise and understand. Public input through NHS Citizen was not the data-rich information the Board was looking for.   The Board’s understanding of what role NHS Citizen was supposed to play within the system started to diverge from other actors and communication became ambiguous. Inevitably, stakeholders became increasingly less interdependent.

Drivers

Table 4.1  (Continued)

Twenty new practical projects were designed and tested with residents to re-organise the neighbourhood, covering communal crafting, cooking and learning, item sharing, social events, and activities to improve the local environment.   These projects generated 2500 participation opportunities, with 1000 people involved out of a population of about 50,000, of whom 530 participated between two and ten times.

The Council, increasingly struggling for funds and resources, saw an opportunity first to improve communication with a community traditionally hard to reach such as Whitley, and second to make use of the resources the Whitley Researchers brought with them (including their link to the University of Reading) to support anti-poverty policies.   By the same token, the other stakeholders residents and academia – need the Council to translate their innovative ideas into real policies.   The Whitley for Real forum started, and continue to be sustained, as a result of this interdependence.

Initially the resident-researchers, with the support of the academic from the University of Reading, used a Participatory Action Research approach to actively engage the local community throughout the research process. The involvement in the project boosted the confidence and self-worth of the residents building trust between the community and the University.   The ‘Whitley For Real: hearing local voices’ forum was launched in 2016 as an ongoing partnership between the Whitley Researchers, the WCDA (the new Whitley Community Development Association supported through the Big Local programme), councillors and council officers, and the University.   The new partnership carried out scoping work on financial exclusion and social housing, with groups of young residents and students also being involved in undertaking some research tasks.

Participatory City By the end of the pilot the aim of the project was no longer clear to, or supported by, political actors.   Although the pilot was successful in terms of citizen participation, the council was no longer sure about how this model of co-production would help meet its new priorities.   By the same token, Civic Lab needed long-term commitment and investment to test the efficacy of Participatory City and they chose to move to another borough where there was more political buy-in and a willingness to invest resources, Barking and Dagenham.

Whitley for Real

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Resources

The discursive legitimacy of patient groups and other stakeholders external to the NHS became increasingly less convincing in the eyes of the NHSE Board members and other directors, as their own pressures and responsibilities changed and developed.

Legitimacy

The resources brought to the table by the public and patient groups were not properly understood and/ or valued by the NHSE Board.

As incentives diverged, keeping momentum and shared motivation to participate in the process proved challenging.   The needs of the Board drifted away from the needs of NHS Citizen. The four organisations ended up running a co-production process with only one side involved, the patients/public.

Shared motivation

Tangible and intangible resources provided by Civic Lab and the residents taking part and leading on projects were not valued by the Local Authority, as priorities shifted away from the idea of cooperative council, and the Council was unable to use the new social capital produced.

As Civic Lab lost its allies in the council, it proved difficult to sustain the legitimacy of civic stakeholders and of a model of coproduction that was no longer prioritised by political actors.

As the Local Authority became aware of the impact of the residents’ research work, they started to see them as legitimate stakeholders. The fact that the Whitley Researchers by then also enjoyed the support of the University further increased their perceived discursive legitimacy.   Issues of hierarchy and authority are still pervasive. In this respect the academic voice within the group is often expected to act as the bridge between the Local Authority and the community. Both tangible (human resources) and intangible resources (knowledge of the community and research skills) brought to the table by residents were perceived as extremely important by the Council, at a time of drastic cuts to central transfers.   By using academic knowledge on funding streams, the group is now working on applications for external funding for their research work.   Residents’ relational and perceptual aspects of power were also strengthened by their close links to the University of Reading.

A lack of facilitative leadership with clear and long-term vision and misaligned incentives translated into an inability to keep sustaining shared motivation for actors to support the process beyond the one-year pilot.

Building a common language and developing shared motivation was not easy and the role played by the facilitative leadership proved crucial. Navigating the rules and codes of two complex bureaucracies such as academia on the one side and local government on the other raised a number of challenges for the residents. They continuously negotiate their autonomy moving between invited and invented spaces and are very aware of risks of ‘incorporation’ or being ‘used’ for the resources they bring to the process.

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5  RE-IMAGINING COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES These three cases highlight critical elements that can enhance or hinder the interaction between citizens and institutions. This section applies the framework described above to examine issues of interdependence between stakeholders, facilitative leadership, common purpose or shared motivation, and resource availability. Alignment of incentives is crucial to guarantee the sustainability of a collaborative process. When NHS Citizen started, in 2013, the NHSE Board was a relatively new body, with no clear responsibilities on spending. By the last NHS Citizen meeting in April 2015, the Board was dealing with a set of different financial and political pressures. While much effort was placed on some of the key components, such as the engagement process, crucially, drivers such as incentives and interdependency were not adequately understood. Suddenly directors moved from an abstract notion of what it means to be accountable to feeling very accountable for things that the public aren’t bringing up in ways they can recognise and understand; the issues the public were bringing up were not quantitative data-rich. They were quite broad, quite discursive, quite anecdotal – many Board members struggled to connect those things. So, the needs for the Board drifted away from the needs of NHS Citizen. … Essentially, we ended up running a coproduction process with only one side involved, and that side was the patients/publics and various stakeholders. We never got the board properly engaged and [didn’t] frame the role of the engagement mechanism to such an extent that it met their needs more (Director of one of the organisations leading the design process).

There was, therefore, a mismatch between issues raised by citizens and what the Board expected. Furthermore, the NHS funding timelines raised some challenges. NHS Citizen expected to be funded in April 2015 (I think) but only received confirmation in late July. I was then told that an Assembly had to be delivered by November. This meant that there wasn’t enough time to commission and build the tech, do the engagement to widen the pool of people engaging, do the necessary research to get evidence behind the issues that were coming through, and so on and so on (Director of one of the organisations leading the design process).

As the incentives for the Board to be involved started to weaken, the organisations were unable to pick on such diminished interest promptly. In this case, leadership fell short of being facilitative and was unable to build a common language, sustain shared motivation, and ensure that an understanding of what shared outcomes would mean was consolidated among all the actors involved. Understanding the meanings that actors ascribe to collaborative arrangements will inevitably influence both the processes and its outcomes (Della Porta and Diani, 1999). Patient groups’ discursive legitimacy and the resources they and other stakeholders external to the NHS brought with them became less convincing in the eyes of the Board members and other directors, who were by then responding to different pressures. Efforts to open up a complex bureaucracy such as NHSE to public input will unsurprisingly trigger a reaction, as institutions perceive these forms of engagement as add-ons and will tend to continue business as usual in order to meet their internal priorities. Changes in the political opportunity structure (Tarrow, 1994) and policy discourse are unlikely to have any effect, unless they are perceived to be important by all those involved. This emerged quite clearly from all the case studies, and in particular, NHS Citizen and Open

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Works in Lambeth. In the first case, a new organisation in need of democratic legitimacy, NHSE, opened the way to a citizen engagement process, while in the second case, the new policy discourse on the Cooperative Council, based around coproduction and peer support, needed a way of translating that concept into practice, and Participatory City appeared to be the ideal solution. However, in the end, different pressures and objectives were prioritised by officials and over time incentives on each side were no longer aligned. In this respect, building on the learning from Open Works in Lambeth, the new Participatory City project in Barking and Dagenham is working more on systemic integration between citizen projects and local services. Relationships between citizens and institutions are riddled with conflicts. In Whitley, both the University and the Council played an ambiguous role at the start and only fully endorsed the group once they demonstrated impact. As local institutions became aware of residents’ work, they started to see them as legitimate stakeholders, recognising opportunities to achieve shared goals. However, building a common language and sustaining shared motivation has not been easy. Navigating the rules and codes of two complex bureaucracies, such as academia on the one side and local government on the other, raised challenges for the residents, even as they could count on insider allies from within the University and the Council. Interviewee 1: This is when my heart starts sinking, when I sit in those closed little meetings… What they talk about in those meetings is… ‘Well we can copy this… we can do this here, there, everywhere…’ Interviewee 2: What sometimes can smuggle in is an emphasis on notions of outputs, measures… They start talking about beneficiaries… (Whitley Researchers).

Issues of hierarchy and authority remain pervasive and the academic directly involved in the process is often expected to act as the bridge between the local authority and the residents. Interviewee 3: One of the roles that I see the University play is this role of authenticity, which is a bit weird in a way… Because I’m the one that is being invited to all the high-brow council meetings, to represent the Whitley Researchers… So, I’m always the one saying, ‘Oh can we invite the whole team to the meeting?’ So again, for them it’s like, ‘Oh maybe we can do this if the University is supporting them, because it will be valid…’ You know, it’s about who values which type of knowledge, who has the power to make decisions and things like that. So, I’m always aware of that (Academic from the University of Reading and Whitley Researcher).

Overall, these cases offer some promising examples of how collaborative governance might contribute to radically changing the relationship between citizens and local services, but also to innovating political practices (Bussu, 2015). The role of brokers and boundary spanning leaders (Aldrich and Herker, 1977), who enjoy perceived authority in the eyes of both institutional actors and citizens, can be crucial in helping to build a shared language and ensure that over time incentives, as well as expectations about the collaborative outcomes, continue to be aligned. In the case of NHS Citizen and Whitley for Real, this facilitative leadership was critical but led to different outcomes. Within NHS Citizen, the Public Voice’s Team initially ensured buy-in from many patient networks, while the four civil society organisations reached out to civil society and government, as well as ‘tech’ and participatory networks. In the case of Whitley, the academic, some of the residents, the Big Local community development worker

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and the council officer, all played a key role in reaching out to their different networks. However, the NHS Citizen facilitative leadership, unlike Whitley for Real, was not able to keep momentum and ensure ongoing buy-in from the key institutional actor – the NHSE Board. Collaboration often seems to depend on achieving a virtuous cycle between communication, trust, commitment, and a shared understanding of the outcomes, but these interactions are often nonlinear (Emerson et al., 2012).

6 CONCLUSION These three case studies are examples of innovation in collaborative governance: in all cases stakeholders tried to re-imagine the relationship between citizens and institutions and attempted to redefine the terms of the collaboration and its outcomes. New collaborative processes increasingly use different platforms online and offline, and often simultaneously, as in NHS Citizen and Participatory City. They demand different working practices from both institutional actors and citizens, whereby it is no longer simply about an organisation opening a collaborative forum, framing the agenda around well-defined objectives, and inviting stakeholders to contribute resources and expertise. The case of Whitley demonstrates how citizens constantly renegotiate their role and space, moving between their invented spaces and counter-publics (Fraser, 1992)11 and more traditional invited spaces, and using different sets of tools in different arenas. These spaces are not mutually exclusive: actions taken by citizens within invited spaces can encourage more radical mobilisation within invented spaces, while actions that started in the invented space can then be articulated and presented to institutional stakeholders. By the same token, Participatory City offers a glimpse into a possible future for collaborative governance and coproduction, where participation is embedded in the community and where invited and invented spaces of citizenship are continuously interrelated in a participatory ecosystem. Whereas these collaborative processes seem best suited for situations that demand ongoing cooperation, this requires important changes in the way institutions understand citizen participation and utilise citizens’ contribution and evidence. There is an ongoing chasm between institutional views of the public as needing ‘skilling up’ and citizen views of public services as needing culture change, in order to engage with the public effectively (see Newman et al., 2004). Some of the interviews unveiled anxiety from citizens around incorporation and the expectation from institutions that citizens should adapt to an organisation’s working practices. Innovations in the practice of collaborative governance, although benefitting from advances in technology and system design, and from the emphasis on collaboration and coproduction of current policy discourses, seemingly continue to stumble against the same old obstacles in the real world, where working practices and power dynamics are hard to change. Further research should focus on the contextual conditions that can favour culture change and what role collaborative practice can play in genuinely altering power dynamics and opening policy and decision-making to public input.

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NOTES   1. Cornwall’s ‘invited’ spaces refer to those arenas legitimised by institutions and occupied by grassroots and their organised allies in civil society. ‘Invented’ spaces are those claimed by grassroots collective action and are directly confronting the status quo.   2. On this, see also the concept of constitutive power within co-productive arrangements (Durose and Richardson, 2015).   3. All interviews were carried out between January and February 2017.  4. www.england.nhs.uk/about/about-nhs-england/.  5. www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2012/7/contents/enacted.   6. http://localtrust.org.uk/assets/downloads/documents/What%20is%20Big%20Local.pdf.  7. http://localtrust.org.uk/assets/images/uploads/Whitley_Report_25.09.2015_FINAL_VERSION.pdf.  8. https://blogs.reading.ac.uk/participation-lab/.  9. www.participatorycity.org/. 10. www.lambeth.gov.uk/sites/default/files/ec-lambeth-behaviours-cooperative-council.pdf. 11. Fraser terms ‘counter-publics’ the groups or networks based on common interests, experiences and identities, that have the capacity to challenge official norms and assumptions.

REFERENCES Agranoff, R. and M. McGuire (2001), ‘American federalism and the search for models of management’, Public Administration Review 61, 671–81. Aldrich, H. and D. Herker (1977), ‘Boundary spanning roles and organization structure’, Academy of Management Review, 2 (2), 217–230. Ansell, C. and A. Gash (2008), ‘Collaborative governance in theory and practice’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 18 (4), 543–71. Bentrup, G. (2001), ‘Evaluation of a collaborative model: A case study of analysis of watershed planning in the Intermountain West’, Environmental Management 27, 739–48. Bingham, L.B. (2008), ‘Legal frameworks for collaboration in governance and public management’, in L.B. Bingham and R. O’Leary (eds.), Big Ideas in Collaborative Public Management, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 247–69. Bovaird T. (2007), ‘Beyond engagement and participation: User and community coproduction of public services’, Public Administration Review, 67 (5), September-October, 846–60. Britton, T. and A. Anderson (2015), ‘The illustrated guide to participatory city’, at www.participatorycity.org/ the-illustrated-guide/. Bryson, J.M., B.C. Crosby and M.M. Stone (2006), ‘The design and implementation of cross-sector collaborations: Propositions from the literature’, Public Administration Review 66 (S1), 44–55. Bryson, J.M. and B.C. Crosby (2008), ‘Failing into cross-sector collaboration successfully’, in L.B. Bingham and R. O’Leary (eds.), Big Ideas In Collaborative Public Management, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 55–78. Burall, S., C. Howe, A. Zacharzewski and C. Child (2014), NHS CITIZEN Exploring a New Model for Participation in NHS England, NHS Citizen Paper 5. Bussu, S. (2015), ‘Between a rock and a hard place: The councillor’s dilemma between strong mayors and citizens’ needs’, Local Government Studies, 41 (6), 841–60. Bussu, S. and K.P.R. Bartels (2014), ‘Facilitative leadership and the challenge of renewing local democracy in Italy’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36 (6), 2256–73. Colebatch, H.K. (2014), ‘Making sense of governance’, Policy and Society, 33, 307–16. Cornwall, A. (2002), Locating Citizen Participation, IDS Bulletin, 33 (2), 49–58. Cooke, B. and U. Kothari (2001), Participation: The New Tyranny?, London: Zed Books. Daniels, S. and G.B. Walker (2001), Working Through Environmental Conflict: The Collaborative Learning Approach, Westport, CT: Praeger. Della Porta, D. and M. Diani (1999), Social Movements: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell. Detroux, A. (2016), The Productive Community: Can Ecosystems of Community Participation Lead to a Culture of Political Engagement?, Masters dissertation, London School of Economics. DiMaggio, P.J. and W. Powell (1983), ‘The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields’, American Sociological Review 48 (2), 147–60. Dorn, D. and J. Kenny (2015), The Reading Participatory Research Network. An Evaluation of the Whitley Researchers and a Proposal for a Participatory Research Training Programme. Durose, C. and L. Richardson (2015), Designing Public Policy for Co-production. Theory, Practice and Change, Bristol: Policy Press.

76  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance Edelenbos, J., van Meerkerk, I. and Koppenjan, J. (2017), ‘The challenge of innovating politics in community selforganization: The case of Broekpolder’, Public Management Review, 19 (1), 55–73. Elstub, S. and O. Escobar (2019), ‘A Typology of Democratic Innovation’, in S. Elstub and O. Escobar (eds), Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Emerson, K., T. Nabatchi and S. Balogh (2012), ‘An integrative framework for collaborative governance’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 22 (1), 1–29. Fraser, N. (1992), ‘Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy’, in C.J Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and The Public Sphere, Boston, MA: MIT Press. Frederickson, H.G. (1991), ‘Toward a theory of the public for public administration’, Administration & Society 22, 395–417. Fung, A. and E.O. Wright (eds) (2003), Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance, London: Verso. Huxham, C. and S. Vangen (2005), Managing to Collaborate: The Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage, New York: Routledge. Innes, J. and D.E. Booher (1999), ‘Consensus building and complex adaptive systems’, Journal of the American Planning Association 65, 412–23. Keating, M. (2008), ‘Thirty years of territorial politics’, West European Politics 31 (1–2), 60–81. Kettl, D.F. (2002), The Transformation of Governance: Public Administration for Twenty-first Century America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Koppenjan, J. and E.H. Klijn (2004), Managing Uncertainty in Networks: A Network Approach to Problem Solving and Decision Making, New York, NY: Routledge. Lee, C., M. McQuarrie and E.T. Walker (2015), Democratizing Inequalities. Dilemmas of the New Public Participation, New York, NY: NYU Press. Milward, H.B. and K.G. Provan (2000), ‘How networks are governed’, in C.J. Heinrich and L.E. Lynn (eds), Governance and Performance: New Perspectives, Washington, DC: Georgetown Press, pp. 238–62. Mohan, G. and S., K. (2000), ‘Participatory development and empowerment: The dangers of localism’, Third World Quarterly 21 (2), 247–68. Nabatchi, T. (2010), ‘Addressing the citizenship and democratic deficits: Exploring the potential of deliberative democracy for public administration’, American Review of Public Administration 40, 376–99. Newman, J., M. Barnes, H. Sullivan and A. Knops (2004), ‘Public participation and collaborative governance’, Journal of Social Policy, 33 (2), 203–23. Osborne S.P. (2010), ‘Delivering public services: Time for a new theory?’, Public Management Review, 12 (1), 1–10. Ostrom, E. (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pestoff, V. (2014), ‘Collective action and the sustainability of co-production’, Public Management Review, 16 (3), 383–401. Pressman, J.L., A.B. Wildavsky and Oakland Project (1973), Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington are Dashed in Oakland: Or, Why It’s Amazing that Federal Programs Work at All, This Being a Saga of the Economic Development Administration as Told by Two Sympathetic Observers Who Seek to Build Morals on a Foundation of Ruined Hopes, Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Purdy, J.M. (2012), ‘A framework for assessing power in collaborative governance processes’, Public Administration Review, 72 (3), 409–17. Selin, S. and D. Chavez (1995), ‘Developing a collaborative model for environmental planning and management’, Environmental Management, 19, 189–95. Sirianni, C. (2009), Investing in Democracy Engaging Citizens in Collaborative Governance, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Tarrow, S. (1994), Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Mass Politics in the Modern State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomson, A.M. and J. Perry (2006), ‘Collaboration processes: Inside the black box’, Public Administration Review, 66, 20–32.

5.

The long journey of participatory budgeting Ernesto Ganuza and Gianpaolo Baiocchi

1 INTRODUCTION Participation has become an imperative of our time, the subject of countless international conferences, government projects, and policy reforms. From the World Bank to political parties and Non-Government Organisations (NGOs), political participation today occupies an exceptional position as a privileged prescription for solving difficult problems and remedying the inherent flaws of democracy. In this context, citizen participation is no longer the assumed domain of outsiders, but has become widely encouraged by governments. Moreover, participation has evolved from being a corrective to entrenched professional expertise, to its own globalised field of expertise. Participatory instruments, as democratic innovations, now quickly travel the world. They seem to do so without apparent boundaries. The proliferation of democratic innovations, however, poses a political challenge. Unlike traditional political thinking on the left, the concept of participation today reconciles protests and proposals. Participation does not begin from a place of conflict, but of shared interest. The participant listens to what others say, and decides what is best. This is a new and different approach to empowering people, a new way to frame participation, which has become a central object of government intervention. Public participation has become a globalised instrument for any administration to be used against the destabilising tendencies within representative democracy itself, guaranteeing governments greater legitimacy, and an alternative means of addressing the social demands that threaten governability. Therefore, participation is no longer a counter-power; it’s part of the planning of how power functions. Participatory Budgeting (PB) is currently one of the core approaches that come under an umbrella of participatory processes, routinely being included in the list of participatory democratic best practices in both the Global North and Global South. PB today means a seemingly infinite, malleable set of institutions that attract attention from actors on both ends of the political spectrum. PB has become institutionalised, with training manuals in dozens of languages (Chinese, Bengali, Albanian, English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Arabic, etc.), and whose advocates cover the gamut of political orientation and organisational type. Some thirty years after its first mention by neighbourhood activists in Porto Alegre (Brazil), the ideas and basic blueprint of PB have now circled the world, having been implemented in literally hundreds of cities in all continents (Sintomer et al., 2010). The global travel and adoption of Participatory Budgeting is a remarkable story. A relatively simple idea – that ordinary citizens should have a direct say in public budgets that impact them – has travelled the world by the most unexpected routes and landed in unlikely sites. In Europe and US, PB has recently become a key piece in democratisation discourse. It’s a new instrument used by political newcomers, such as Podemos candidates in Spain or the new Democrat mayor of New York, to face the democratic flaws of political dissatisfaction (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017). Since PB was first introduced in Brazil thirty years ago, it has been adapted 77

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and transformed, but it has also turned into a global instrument of democratic innovation. In the following pages we will deal with this travel and its significance for democracy today.

2  PB AS A DEMOCRATIC SOLUTION Political disaffection and its impact on Western democracies has been pointed out by scholars for decades now (see Chapter 8 in this Handbook). The global expansion of PB since the 2000s would be inconceivable without this background. PB is claimed to solve this political disconnection everywhere (Sintomer et al., 2010). The recognition of the broken link between politics and society, favours the search for new political instruments. PB emerged out of the cauldron of leftist experimentalism in Brazil in the early 1990s, as a particularly successful instrument, one that seemed to render compatible social justice, good governance, and electoral fortunes for the left. It travelled, largely in Brazil, but to some extent across Latin America, in the 1990s, as a centrepiece of a political strategy. At that point, administrations implemented it wholesale, often adapting and innovating parts, but also implementing administrative reforms. It was a centrepiece of a political strategy, and travelled as a representative of a leftism that could work because it broke with clientelism, as well as with movements, or the idea that leftists could only oppose capitalist institutions instead of transforming them. In the late 1990s, however, things changed. PB attracted international attention, becoming a participatory best practice that was taken up by a number of international networks. Now, it travels as a politically neutral device that, it is argued, can improve governance and generate trust in government. PB, as a democratic innovation which at the time was initiated by the left Working Party, unconnected to international networks, had succeeded in merging two realities that neoliberalism has never achieved: the use of massive participation and the success of government in distributing wealth. But it was used first to transform the political imaginary of the party and the traditional ways politicians understood government. The Participatory Budget process that was implemented in 1990s had, as one of its key principles, if not the key principle, the fundamental rule of ‘meetings open to anyone’, without any privileging of existing associations or movements (Baiocchi, 2005). Any citizen, associated or not, could come to the meeting and have an equal voice. This was counter to the proposal made by civil society in Porto Alegre, which was based on associations. If we return to the original document from the federation of neighbourhood associations (UAMPA), it called for a system ‘where the investment priorities of each district would be discussed with popular leaders of each district’, where there would be ‘Popular Councils throughout with proportional representation of the community movement to discuss the municipal budget’ (Ganuza and Baiocchi, 2012). The UAMPA proposal was one in which representation of associations was central. In it, representatives of clubs, churches, associations, and others would come together in a forum to debate proposals. The distance between the two ideas was immense and profoundly consequential. In terms of political theory, it is the difference between associational democracy (or corporatism for that matter) and direct democracy. And it was the key step to transform participation from its traditional countervailing feature to become part of the state. Collectives, like unions, which were previously understood as privileged interlocutors to speak on behalf of the whole, became symbolically reduced to a segment smaller than the whole. In our view, this was a very

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important turning point in the transformation of the Working Party (WP) from a party of movements, into a party that governs well. The administration’s discourse on the autonomy of civic organisations and the government responsibility for the whole city, were rooted in a new imaginary of how interactions between state and society should be (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2014). As the administration began to change its discourse in terms of a city for all, it also began to reorganise its administrative machinery. In order for a ‘new public sphere’ to emerge, it was necessary to reach all citizens and develop transparent spaces of interactions with the administration (Genro, 1999). The reform consisted of two lines of action. First, in relation to civil society and administration, all social demands of local government were channelled through PB, and all other channels were essentially closed. The government transformed the whole administration in such a way that it was impossible to receive any funds, investments, or projects outside of the participatory process (Baiocchi, 2005). This was a rupture with old traditions on the political right and the left. It was meant as a way to avoid cronyism, circumventing politicians, but it also circumvented social movements. One of the founders of UAMPA recalled that, though the federation had played a role in the early stages, the process went on without it, and its role as interlocutor was marginalised because ‘when any demand reached the city councillors, their message was to say to the people that they had to go to the PB to get anything done about it’. However, in time, ‘everybody was for the PB; cronyism was finished’ (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017). The initial result was opposition towards using PB, something that we see again in other cities in Europe (Ganuza et al., 2014). Second, in relation to administration, in order for ‘participation to come into the administration’, it was necessary to create new patterns and practices within the administration. This was a combination of ‘political centralization with administrative decentralization’ (Navarro, 1996). All of this made sense through a significant ‘root and branch’ and fiscal reform to increase revenues. Real estate taxes became increasingly important, going from 5.8% of the volume of municipal revenues to nearly 18% of total revenues, while the services tax went on to account for 20% of municipal revenues (Santos, 2002). Over ten years, tax evasion was also significantly reduced (Baeirle, 2003). These reforms essentially doubled the city’s income over this time. To put it in context in Brazil, while roughly two thirds of municipal budgets in Brazil, overall, come from transfers from higher levels of government during the time period, Porto Alegre’s own revenues accounted for almost 60% of its budget. This was almost the level of local fiscal autonomy of European cities (Carvalho and Felgueiras, 2000; Santos, 2002; Bremaeker, 2004). PB thus became a specific device that allowed the state to rule and imagine other relations between state and civil society. These relations meant a new process of democratisation, but from above. As a form of democratisation from above, based on transparent devices and supported by citizens’ participation, the process was not without problems. As it was supposed to transform collective action from protest to proposition, it gave civil society a new role in public affairs. If we imagine, for a moment, an idealised Habermassian sequence (cf. Habermas, 1996) in which informal debate in the public sphere (by citizens) is followed by structured deliberation of formal positions (by civil society organisations) that are then passed along to authorities, PB radically changed the usual stages of this political process. Instead of an informal debate, PB set up a structured debate among people and this formal deliberation was translated directly to administration. This would take place in a horizontal public space, where citizens gained influence over public decisions. Earlier, utopian versions of civil society

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theory (cf. Cohen and Arato, 1992) imagined social movements as connectors between public opinion and public policy; with PB, it was the administration that established and regulated those communication channels, but it did so on its own terms. Participatory Budgeting translated the wishes that emerged in grassroots democracy into a technical and rational language, and into sensible projects that could be weighed against each other in a transparent way, thus helping citizens present their needs. But this idea is premised on accepting certain limits on public debate, mainly based on administrative limits and timing. That is, through procedure, PB promises to make democracy more bounded, more fair, and more objective. But this, by definition, then means PB also excludes some demands, projects, and ways of making claims. The democratic innovation was not based only on participation, but also on new administrative routines. During the 1990s, Porto Alegre’s poorer citizens participated in droves in a relatively simple system that promised, and delivered, results. Many poor urban residents, otherwise having little voice in government or political affairs, became apt and loyal participants, diligently coming to meetings week after week to debate the arcane features of municipal finances and regulations, as they decided on investment priorities for their neighbourhoods, boroughs, and the city itself. The administrative reform improved the administrative machinery, alleviated the conditions of poor people, and established a new way of administering that would eventually cause admiration elsewhere. Furthermore, it proved politically efficacious: the political promoters (Workers Party) were comfortably re-elected in 1992, 1996, and 2000, each time advertising PB as the centrepiece of a mode of governance that benefited the ‘whole city.’ The ideas of universal participation and a new public and transparent management fitted well with new ideas of change coming from international agencies, and scholars who talked about the deliberative turn in politics.1 Everything was new, but it quickly met an international audience that turned PB into a novel, traveling blueprint. Participatory Budgeting, over time, has broken with the imaginary that associated participation with populism and economic inefficiency, though without ceasing to uphold the principles of social justice. The benefits of PB in this version are a mix of good governance (transparency, increased resources, and the reduction of clientelism), social justice (redistribution of resources), and civic goals (legitimacy, dialogue, cooperation, and solidarity). All of these attributes are of course attractive to both local state officials and politicians elsewhere, in an era marked by political dissatisfaction.

3  PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING AS A GLOBAL INSTRUMENT PB was actually recognised as an instrument of democratisation best practice at the UN Habitat Istanbul meeting of 1996. The description of PB at that moment, and at subsequent iterations, was a simplification: PB was defined as sequence of meetings premised on universal participation and fair and transparent decision-making. Ideas about state reform as a necessary condition for establishing PB had all but disappeared, and the close connection between participation and administration was severed. Instead of pointing to fiscal reforms as a pre-condition to PB, increased revenues were now sometimes framed as an outcome of PB (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017). Europe was the first continent to adopt PB, and progressive European politicians saw possibilities for PB within the context of discussions taking place in various contexts. Public

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administrations throughout the continent were experimenting with ways to bring the citizenry closer. Legislative changes carried out in several countries actually sought to facilitate citizen involvement. This was the case, for example, in the United Kingdom (Local Government Act, 2000), France (Proximity Democracy Law, 2002), Spain (Local Government Modernisation Law, 2003), and the Netherlands (Local Democracy Law, 2002). All of these reforms were seeking to increase the transparency of public management in order to enhance democratic legitimacy by: (1) improving accountability, through making executive responsibility more transparent; and (2) increasing the breadth and depth of participation in government. The effect of this has been the proliferation of new participatory instruments in France (Sintomer and Maillard, 2007), the United Kingdom (Birch, 2002), Spain (Ganuza and Francés, 2012), and many other countries (Smith, 2009). Between 2000 and 2010, European experiences increased from a handful to more than 200 (Sintomer et al., 2010). European experiences are, however, very different from one another, with some clear national patterns (Sintomer et al., 2008). The British experiences, for example, sometimes have to do with smaller amounts of money and with social service projects, while Spanish experiences have more of a focus on urban infrastructure. But Spanish experiences are unique in their mixed model of representation, allowing for a set-aside number of city-wide seats for neighbourhood associations, while French experiences have taken place at the sub-municipal level. The diversity speaks to the inventiveness of implementers and the role that different kinds of local actors have played in cobbling their experiences together. But it also speaks to the plasticity of PB as a democratic practice, a plasticity that comes from its apparent political neutrality and low institutional profile. In the majority of cases in Europe, PB required no institutional reforms or changes. One clear consequence of the transformation of PB into a best practice of democratic innovation has been the marginalisation of social justice principles that inspired the initiative in the first place. By and large, PB is justified in terms of its results in terms of good governance, those ‘things that enable a government to deliver services to its people efficiently’ (Wolfowitz, 2006: 3). Although PB had featured prominently in the 2001 Human Development Report, it was only in the latter half of the 2000s that the World Bank became heavily involved with its dissemination and its involvement helped propel PB to Africa, usually in partnership with NGOs and other development agencies. The first experiences were in Cameroon, where an NGO first organised a conference on PB, in partnership with a World-Bank funded Municipal Development Partnership, and UN Habitat. A letter of intent for the promotion of PB in Africa, from 2004, signed by these organisations, signalled the beginning of a large effort; this would come to include several workshops, training manuals, a radio show, and an online component. Together, this facilitated the start of dozens of experiences in most countries of Africa by the late 2000s (Sintomer et al., 2010). The expansion of PB to Asia came slightly later and with less of a coordinated strategy; rather, these came as a series of direct exchanges between city governments, sometimes sponsored by UN Habitat or the World Bank; exchanges between Brazil and the Philippines, sponsored by Transparency International in 2003; and then between Korean and Brazilian municipalities in 2004, and between China and Brazil in 2005. PB is found today in cities of Japan, South Korea, China, India, Indonesia, or Thailand (Sintomer et al., 2010; Allegretti, 2011; He, 2011). And in 2009, a German foundation, with connections to the Social Democratic Party (Friedrich Ebert Foundation), the Marc Bloch Center (Berlin), and Zhejiang University in China,

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promoted the first Asian-European Congress on PB in the city of Hangzhou, in China (Sintomer et al., 2013). The numbers for the spread of PB are impressive. By 2005, there were roughly 200 PB experiences outside of Brazil; by 2008, there were at least 500, and by 2010, the sum total of PB experiences were at least 1500 (Sintomer et al., 2010). These experiences were concentrated in Latin America and southern Europe, with an increasingly strong presence in Northern Europe, North America, and a significant number of cases in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe (Sintomer et al., 2010). Despite this spread, there are profound ambiguities in what PB is and what it is supposed to do. In the practitioner and scholarly literatures there are often disputes about how to define PB, if a particular experience is, or isn’t really a case of Participatory Budgeting. In Europe, for example, most experiences were advisory, with the exception of Spain. If we take into consideration these procedural characteristics, PB in Brazil (Avritzer, 2006) would not resemble what has happened in Europe (Sintomer et al., 2008), and none of these with what happens in China (He, 2011). For many practitioners, a red line had to do with decision-making. Is decision-making within a particular experience of PB ‘binding’ or merely ‘advisory’? For others, the dividing line has to do with a minimum quality of participation. Particularly because the proponents of PB can be so different, it is possible, at any one site, for experts and implementers to run up against quite divergent local interpretations of what PB can be. How central social justice is, for a particular PB experience, for example, can be a profound source of confusion. But the most salient concern about PB is the ambiguous relationship to the administration. In most cases, the implementation of PB has been outside of the administrative machinery, not as a way to transform governing, but as a new way to link administration and civil society. The logic of a participatory experience, anchored in a process of decision-making on public affairs, can come to collide with institutional structures set up for something else, for example under New Public Management doctrines. Many administrations promoted PB as an alternative to the existing connections between civil society and administration, but without transforming the latter. Participatory Budgeting was then expected to achieve certain outcomes, such as improvement of administration, for example, or to increase citizen trust, regardless of changes in administrative organisation. This has also been a source of tremendous confusion.

4  PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING FLAWS The range and diverse trajectories of the PB process, as well as its success, can be well illustrated by two very different sites on either side of the Potomac River in Washington DC. On one side of the river, towards downtown, sits the glass and steel compound that is the headquarters of the World Bank. In 2007, the World Bank convened a meeting of experts to develop recommendations for a Participatory Budgeting campaign for the African continent. Bringing together Brazilian consultants, NGOs from Latin America and Africa, and the Bank’s Civic Empowerment team, discussions took place over two days at the World Bank Institute. After addressing the advantages of PB, the best practices from Brazil, and feasibility issues for an African context, an Africa strategy was developed. Some months after that meeting, the Bank sponsored a PB workshop in Johannesburg, followed by a distance-learning program to disseminate PB throughout much of the continent (Allegretti, 2011).

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On the other side of the Potomac River, less than a mile away, are the strikingly modest offices of Tenants and Workers United, a small, mostly volunteer-run organization best known for having launched the first successful Living Wage campaign in the United States in 2003. Its mission, ‘to build the power of low-income people’ and to ‘struggle against racism and sexism’, translates in practice to a number of direct services it provides, such as legal assistance to immigrants, along with a shifting agenda of direct action campaigns around workers and tenants’ rights, among other issues. In 2007, the organisation had become interested in PB and it became one of the points of agreement for the nascent Right to the City, or RTTC, a national network that TWU helped to organise. The network was officially formed in July of the same year at the US Social Forum, with a mandate to ‘strategically challenge neo-liberal economic policies’ (Right to the City Alliance, n.d.). The RTTC network sponsored two sessions at the US Social Forum on PB, bringing together community activists, including Alderman Joe Moore, who would later credit these workshops as one of the inspirations for the first ever PB experience in the US (Chicago) (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017). The World Bank and the Tenant and Workers Union are vastly dissimilar institutions, addressing very different publics at disparate global venues. The World Bank is a massive transnational bureaucracy that carries out highly coordinated development projects throughout the world, enlisting high-level experts and civil servants. The TWU is a small local organisation, working in co-ordination with a loose national network (RTTC) of similarly small local organisations. There are some differences evident in project documents produced by these two very distinct organisations. For the TWU/RTTC there is a stronger normative argument for PB. As a democratic innovation, PB not only increases transparency and citizen access to government, but also advances a democratic form of governance that is desirable on its own terms. The redistribution of power (advanced by PB) is a desirable goal in and of itself, and there is a special emphasis on empowerment. For the World Bank, PB is a tool that helps advance specific ends, such as poverty reduction, improved public accountability, and good governance. The emphasis is on effectiveness. While these differences are not particularly surprising, what stands out are the striking similarities in the procedures described. Both the World Bank and TWU describe almost identical procedures: a sequence of meetings open to all, to discuss projects and priorities, followed by an open and transparent system for vote-taking to rankorder priorities, and then composing a budget reflecting voters’ preferences. What is it about participatory budgeting that means such different organisations can deploy it as a workable instrument, given the difference in objectives? The differences that have emerged in the practice of PB are that, in its original version, it was but one part of a set of institutional reforms. In addition to open meetings where citizens decided on priorities (the more visible part of PB, and the one that is emulated elsewhere), there was a (much less visible) institutional architecture that linked those preferences to the centres of decision-making, so as to give them impact. This included administrative reform to both enhance the responsiveness of the local bureaucracy to citizen demands, and protect the ‘chain of popular sovereignty’ from outside influence. This latter step involved the creation of a cabinet-level special department above fiefdom-like municipal departments, as well as a decision to make the PB the only point of contact between citizenry and the local state. These administrative reforms made PB participation come closer and closer to effective control of the local state, to the point that a recurrent problem with those early PB experiments was that elected city councillors often opposed the process, as they felt sidelined. In contrast, in its

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international journey, PB is defined as a set of procedures (how to run meetings, how to quantify preferences, etc.), to rationalise and democratise the spaces of public opinion, giving voice to citizens and making societal decision-making transparent (features that were certainly present in the first version). As good as it is, nothing is provided on institutions, how they should work to embrace a new public democratic space. In those cases, in fact, PB has been peripheral to city administrations, outcomes were technically over-determined, and the decision-making of participants was far removed from any locus of local power (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017). PB, in other words, has become de-coupled from the state or state reforms. That is, it can sit outside of the state, and be very easy to implement. Thus, the story we tell is not a simple ‘neoliberalisation of participation’, nor is it that advocates and mediators are themselves neoliberals (in fact, sometimes quite the contrary, as should be evident from the case of RTTC). Rather, the story we tell is that despite the invocations of social justice by some of its implementers, over time Participatory Budgeting became de-linked from progressive institutional projects. As such it can be reassembled and rendered compatible with the most diverse projects and political contexts. In the 2000s, for example, in the Andean region, PB was promoted by both the USAID and Internationalist activists of the Chavez government (which also adopted it as a national policy). PB has also reached territories that, from a democratic perspective, have been historically unaffected by liberal tenets, such as China, and some countries in the Maghreb and the Middle East. Additionally, their forms have been able to expand into economically fragile territories (Albania, Mozambique, and the Dominican Republic) and cities both rich (Paris, New York, and Edinburgh) and poor (Yaounde and Dakar). The International Observatory on Participatory Democracy’s prize for the ‘best example of participatory practice’ was awarded, in 2014, to the Municipality of Chengdu in China, which, since 2009, has conducted a ‘Participatory Budgeting in Rural Services’ project.2 This project sets aside a portion of its rural services budget and gives villagers the right to decide, monitor, and evaluate the project funds. Greens and progressives find resonance in PB’s local empowerment, but centrists and conservatives do so as well: as a ‘sensible step in decentralising and localising responsibility,’ PB is promoted as fostering ‘community cohesion,’ ‘innovation,’ ‘social entrepreneurship,’ and ‘restoring trust’ in government (PB Network, n.d.).

5  PB AND DEMOCRATIC CHALLENGES Participation has spread at the same moment that an increasing number of decisions, because of their technical demands or their global scope, have become insulated from democratic arenas. The influence of big corporations, bureaucratic central banks or supranational institutions (Hay, 2007) has replaced democratic dialogue and has fuelled political dissatisfaction. As the recent literature about PB says, today there are thousands of participatory experiences worldwide, but people don’t have a say in matters of importance, because everything is around opinion, preferences about what people wish, rather than what they think strategically for the city as a whole. Currently, the PB story very much confirms other accounts of ‘fast policy transfer’. Today policies are more likely to ‘move in bits and pieces – as selective discourses, inchoate ideas, and synthesized models’ (Peck and Theodore, 2010), rather than as complete and coherent blueprints.

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PB as an innovative political instrument was part of an administrative project, a new way of ruling. It attracted a global audience because of political crisis, the idea that citizens had lost trust in governments. Therefore, politicians and state officials, globally, have seen PB as a new way to engage people with government functions. For example, the publicity of PB locally is quite similar worldwide; it always puts people at the centre (‘people matter’, ‘your opinion is important’ etc.). The previous success of PB in Brazil, and the powerful idea of giving a voice to people, allows for the fuelling of the political imagination. This is the same for China as for US, even if they do not share the same political settings. Many critics have come to argue that contemporary configurations of participation constitute nothing more than a new form of management of conduct characteristic of the neoliberal era (Pateman, 2012; Brown, 2015). While acknowledging this can happen, we think that participation is something more. Participation is related to democracy in a sense that entitles citizens the right to be part of a political community. From this standpoint, anyone can have the opportunity to question the rules and to have a voice in expressing their political will. If people think that link is broken, political disaffection with democratic institutions emerges (Rosanvallon, 2011; Urbinati, 2014). One of the major problems facing participation in general (and PB here) is that, to be politically effective, PB needs to guarantee that link. As the PB story show us, the difficulties come from the intention to implement a new instrument within an administrative architecture designed for something else, that is, mainly focused on consumption of goods (New Public Management). In addition to open meetings where citizens decided on priorities (the more visible part of PB), Porto Alegre’s PB relied on a much less visible, but crucially important, institutional architecture. This structure created the conditions for decisions to be meaningful, by linking them to the centres of governmental decision-making. The open meetings, combined with these reforms, allowed PB participation to operate as an effective popular control mechanism of the local state. The importance of this institutional dimension started to be highlighted by scholars, who think that a well-designed procedure is not sufficient to provide democratic quality, without considering institutional design and its impact on the practices of power (Pogrebinschi and Ryan, 2018). It is for this reason that we think that Participatory Budgeting is not at an ideological endgame, and that emancipatory possibilities exist even within experiences completely divorced from the administrative apparatus, and organised around the rhetoric of New Public Management. It appears unlikely that the conditions that produced a political project that linked participation to both real administrative reforms, and an imaginary of social justice, will be repeated. This does not mean that other PB experiences cannot occasionally move toward transformation. Rather, it suggests different critical tasks. The study of these new mechanisms of participation ought not to forget the political dimension of any policy instrument, which means thinking about the consequences and impact of a new participatory logic from the viewpoint of the exercise of power, and not only from the viewpoint of those who participate. Indeed, can the citizenry use PB to mount a practical opposition to the state? If citizens cannot debate and change the rules, if there is no plural inclusion of citizenry, or if decision-making procedures are not transparent, then PB may conceal a new form of domination that has nothing to do with a new process of democratisation. In this respect, as long as we recognise the importance of society’s self-organising capacity as a means of challenging public powers, PB can offer a good environment, as much as it can conceal other purposes.

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To be able to deal with these challenges we propose an analytical separation of participatory processes. We describe participation and administration reform as the communicative and the sovereign dimensions of PB. We use the term ‘communicative dimension’ to describe the open structure of transparent meetings to deliberate on projects and priorities. It is a way of democratising the nature of demand-making by citizens in civil society and being open to the plurality of opinions in the city. The ‘sovereign dimension’ refers to the connection of those meetings to the centres of decision-making within the administration. To understand the political challenge faced by participatory budgeting means to make sense of the ways PB articulates both dimensions. Transparent and universal procedures facilitate a rational and argumentative use of political space, at the expense of the strength and power accumulated by some, against others, which often characterises liberal political spaces. Deliberative theory offers us a counterfactual standard against which we can test the communicative dimension of participatory budgeting. For deliberative scholars, the formation of political will starts in a debate between individuals in the public sphere, in the context of shared understandings. These debates take place under specific conditions: inclusion (nobody can be excluded from participation in a discussion that interests them); the absence of coercion (anyone can take part in the argument and counter argue freely without being subject to domination by others); and openness (each participant can start and continue the discussion on any relevant topic, including on the procedures regulating the discussion) .3 Moving this critical framework to participatory budgeting and democratic innovations, gives us several counterfactual standards against which we can judge specific experiences and their procedures: 1. What is the intensity of the participation? Who actually participates? Do features of participatory spaces prevent these processes from being open to all? 2. How inclusive is the deliberation? In addition to presence at assemblies, do all citizens ‘deliberate’? Are there systematic biases about who speaks and who decides? Is the technical language made accessible to all? 3. How democratic is the deliberation? What is the quality of decisions emanating from the participatory process? Do participants feel free to openly debate or discuss the rules governing discussions? The sovereignty dimension invites us not only to consider deliberative intensity and quality, but also to examine the intensity with which participants can qualify and sort their preferences. Looking at the sovereignty dimension also allows us to think about the intensity of the connection between participation and the exercise of authority. The sovereignty dimension has, for us, four distinct, but interrelated, criteria against which to judge other experiences: 1. The primacy of the participatory forums. That is, if the participatory forums are not the exclusive point of contact between government and citizen, how important a point of contact is it? Are there other ways of accessing government resources, and how important are those? 2. The scope and importance of administrative issues that are subjected to participation. How much of the local budget is subjected to participation, and how important is that budget to social justice efforts?

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3. The degree of actual participatory power over the budget. Are there institutionalised, direct, and transparent links between participation and government action? What, if any, administrative reforms are undertaken to prepare the state apparatus to receive participatory inputs? What discretion do elected officials, technical staff, and bureaucrats have over the decisions once they are made? 4. Participatory self-regulating, or constitutional features. To what extent are participants able to determine the rules of participation? To what extent are they able to debate and determine social justice criteria that will order the process? To what extent are participants able to determine the reach of participatory influence over government affairs?

6 CONCLUSION If we were to take both our sets of questions about communication and sovereignty to today’s ‘how-to’ manuals and to currently circulating blueprints for participatory budgeting, the result would be to show that processes seldom include anything but the communicative dimension. From the point of view of an emancipatory project, it poses at least three fundamental problems. First, as we have suggested throughout, participation can become disconnected from the decisions that matter most to communities. Practitioners often attempt to implement Participatory Budgeting through the path of least resistance. This is why many left-wing practitioners have accepted a low-profile PB, thinking that new changes will come later. For these people, it is important to guarantee a strong political basis, even if it is fragile at the beginning. Thus, these processes become connected to small, discretionary budgets. This can lead to community organising around issues outside social justice frameworks, or, worse, PB projects dictated by administrative possibilities, rather than more autonomous conversations about community and individual needs. A second possibility is that participants might come to understand participation as a technical solution, rather than as a political tactic of emancipation. Scholars sometimes term this the ‘de-politicising’ of participation (Cleaver, 1999). This happens when citizens are unable to debate second-order issues, that is, how administrations allocate resources, not just which kind of needs are attended to, or which goods are supplied. A third concern is that a high degree of discretion over citizens’ participation outcomes remains in the hands of others. In this situation, politicians can hijack the process to legitimise charismatic authority, or demobilise communities that have invested time and energy into processes. These processes can result in a community’s understanding of the participatory project as a sham. Contemporary participatory rhetoric can therefore be very ambivalent. That’s why the battle for democracy lies not only in procedures designed to engage people, or in the communicative dimension, but in the emancipating force of the dimension of sovereignty. The political battle is much more radical and it has to do with the advent of the democratic regime, whereby everyone can be part of the political community. This implies that the debate must be linked in a practical way to the manner in which the administration manages (and rules) common affairs.

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NOTES 1. This was the case for reports by OECD (2001) and Council of Europe (2001) and literature focused on deliberative theory, such as Habermas (1996) or Dryzeck (2000), among others. 2. www.oidp.net/docs/repo/doc15.pdf. 3. There are different texts where Habermas describes the pragmatic conditions of communication. We recommend one of his later works, because he tries to answer some criticisms and he is especially clear about them, Jürgen Habermas (2008: ch 3, 77–97).

REFERENCES Allegretti, G (2011), ‘Los presupuestos participativos en África y en Asia’, in A. Falck and P. Paño Yanez (eds) (2011), Democracia participativa y presupuestos participativos, Málaga: Diputación Málaga y Unión Europea. Avritzer, L. (2006), ‘New public spheres in Brazil: Local democracy and deliberative politicsm’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30 (3), 623–637. Baierle, S. (2003), La experiencia brasileña en el Presupuesto Participativo: el caso de Porto Alegre, In Prefectura Municipal Porto Alegre, Financiación local y Presupuesto Participativo, Seminario de lanzamiento, Red 9 Urb-al. Baiocchi, G. (2005), Militants and Citizens. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Baiocchi, G. and E. Ganuza (2014), ‘Participatory budgeting as if emancipation mattered’, Politics and Society, 42 (1), 29–50. Baiocchi, G. and E. Ganuza (2017), Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Birch, D. (2002), Public Participation in Local Government, a Survey of Local Authorities, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, London: ODPM. Bremaeker, F.E.J. (2004), ‘Panorama das finanças municipais em 2003’, Série Estudos Especiais nº77. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Brasileiro Administraçao Municipal, accessed 10 August 2019 at www.oim.tmunicipal. org.br/abre_documento.cfm?arquivo=_repositorio/_oim/_documentos/0071D6A1-EFA1-E0A7-06B27E3C1A3434E024032015023258.pdf. Brown, W. (2015), Undoing The Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carvalho, M.C. and D. Felgueiras (2000), Orçamento Participativo no ABC: Mauá, Ribeirao Pires, Santo André, São Paolo: POLIS. Cleaver, F. (1999), ‘Paradoxes of participation: Questioning participatory approaches to development’, Journal of International Development, 11 (4), 597–612. Cohen, J.L. and A. Arato (1992), Civil Society and Political Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Council of Europe, Committee of Ministers (2001), Recommendation Rec(2001)19 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on the participation of citizens in local public life. Dryzek, J.S. (2000), Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ganuza, E. and G. Baiocchi (2012), ‘The power of ambiguity: How participatory budgeting travels the world’, Journal of Public Deliberation, 8 (2), Article 8. Ganuza, E. and F. Francés (2012), El círculo virtuoso de la democracia: los presupuestos participativos a debate, Madrid: CIS. Ganuza, E., H. Nez. and E. Morales (2014), ‘The struggle for a voice: Tensions between associations and citizens in participatory budgeting’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (6), 2274–2291. Genro, T. (1999), ‘Um debate estratégico’ in I. Magalhães, L. Barreto and V. Trevas (eds), Governo e Cidadania: Balanço e Reflexões Sobre o Modo Petista de Governar, São Paulo: Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo. Habermas, J. (1996), Between Facts and Norms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2008), Between Naturalism and Religion, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hay, C. (2007), Why We Hate Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. He, B. (2011), ‘Civic engagement through participatory budgeting in China: Three different logics at work’, Public Administration and Development, 31 (2), 122–131. Navarro, Z. (1996), ‘“Participatory Budgeting” – the case of Porto Alegre (Brazil)’ in Regional Workshop: Decentralization in Latin America – Innovations and Policy Implications, Caracas, Venezuela. OECD (2001), Citizens as Partners, Paris: OECD. Pateman, C. (2012), ‘Participatory democracy revisited’, Perspectives on Politics, 10 (1), 7–19. Peck, J. and N. Theodore (2010), ‘Mobilizing policy: Models, methods, and mutations’, Geoforum, 41 (2), 169–174. PB Network (n.d.), Make the Case – Conservative, accessed 16 May 2012 at www.thepeoplesbudget.org.uk/ makethecase/conservative/.

The long journey of participatory budgeting 89 Pogrebinschi, T. and M. Ryan (2018), ‘Moving beyond input legitimacy: When do democratic innovations affect policy making?’, European Journal of Political Research, 57 (1) 135–152. Right to the City Alliance (n.d.), ‘Right to the City Charter,’ accessed on 1 November 2011 at www.righttothecity.org. Rosanvallon, P. (2011), Democratic Legitimacy. Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Santos, B. d. S. (2002), Democracia e Participacao: O Caso do Orçamento Participativo de Porto Alegre, Porto: Afrontamento. Sintomer, Y., C. Herzberg and G. Allegretti (2010), Learning from the South: Participatory Budgeting Worldwide, Bonn: InWEnt gGmbH. Sintomer, Y., C. Herzberg and A. Röcke (2008), Démocratie participative et modernisation des services publics, Paris: La Découverte. Sintomer, Y., R. Traub-Merz and J. Zhang (2013), Participatory Budgeting in Asia and Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sintomer, Y. and M. Maillard (2007), ‘The limits to local participation and deliberation in the French “politique de la ville”’, European Journal of Political Research, 46 (4), 503–529. Smith, G. (2009), Democratic Innovations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Urbinati, N. (2014), Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolfowitz, P. (2006), Good Governance and Development – A Time For Action, Jakarta, Indonesia, accessed 4 November 2006 at http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/ORGANIZATION/EXTPRESIDENT2007/EXTPASTPRESIDENTS/EXTOFFICEPRESIDENT/0,contentMDK:20883752~menuPK:6 4343258~pagePK:51174171~piPK:64258873~theSitePK:1014541,00.html.

6.

Referendums and citizens’ initiatives Maija Jäske and Maija Setälä

1 INTRODUCTION Referendums and citizens’ initiatives are regarded as instruments of direct democracy because they allow citizens to participate directly in processes of political agenda-setting and decisionmaking. For example, Smith (2009) discusses direct democratic practices as ‘democratic innovations’ in the context of representative democracies. Actually, the first democratic practices in Ancient Athens were in many ways more similar to direct democratic practices than to the current forms of representative democracy. From this point of view, the term ‘democratic innovation’ might be regarded as a misnomer when it comes to instruments, such as, initiatives and referendums. However, following the discussion in Chapter 1 in this Handbook, direct democratic instruments obviously ‘reimagine’ and seek to ‘deepen’ citizen participation in democratic governance, especially compared to the institutions of representative democracy. In this respect, the term ‘democratic innovation’ is apposite. In this chapter, we first introduce some of the key classifications of direct democratic instruments, and point out the large variation between these instruments and their roles in political systems. We narrow our approach to institutions that deal with policies, that is to say, referendums and initiatives, and therefore mostly omit the institution of recall that allows voters to remove public officials from the office retrospectively (c.f. Baldassare and Katz, 2008; Cronin, 1989). After this, the main arguments in favour and against referendums and initiatives are briefly discussed. Special attention is paid to three major areas of criticism. First, we discuss the problems of voter competence, as well as the problem of the lack of deliberation in referendum campaigns. Second, we discuss the problems related to government-initiated referendums, especially how they can be used for manipulative purposes and how they may undermine parliamentary deliberation. The third issue to be discussed pertains to the role of money and organised interests in citizens’ initiatives, which affects the potential of initiatives to actually enhance inclusion in policy-making. Finally, we discuss two recent practices that provide new solutions to some of these perennial problems of direct democracy. The Citizens’ Initiative Review in Oregon is a system designed to improve voter competence, while the Finnish Citizens’ Initiative couples online citizens’ initiatives with parliamentary procedures.

2  INSTITUTIONS OF DIRECT DEMOCRACY The research literature on direct democracy involves plenty of concepts, as well as some inconsistencies in how they are used. In this section, we therefore discuss the classifications of, and differences between direct democratic institutions. This is important for understanding the variety of roles and functions that these institutions can have in different political systems. For clarity, it is necessary to start with the term ‘referendum’. In this chapter, we use the term 90

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referendum to refer to all kinds of ballot measures pertaining to individual issues. In this respect, referendums are distinguishable from elections and recalls which have to do with political office-holders. However, the English usage of the term ‘referendum’ is different from how the term is used in the Swiss context, where it is used to refer specifically to those votes that are organised to repeal a law passed by the parliament (see below). In the Swiss context, the term popular vote is used whenever the ballot issue is proposed by a number of citizens. The differences in the usage of the terms already indicate that there is significant variation between referendum institutions. One of the main differences pertains to whether the vote is legally binding or advisory. Binding referendums allow a (simple, qualified or double) majority of voters to make a policy decision, whereas advisory referendums leave the power to make an actual decision to some other decision-making body (such as the parliamentary majority). However, even advisory referendums tend to give rather strong guidance to decision-makers, and it has been argued that advisory referendums are de facto binding (c.f. Setälä, 1999). This seems to be the case especially in government-initiated advisory referendums at the national level (for a different experience, see Parkinson, 2001). However, a more relevant distinction between referendum instruments can be drawn on the basis of the ways in which referendums are initiated and their agenda is set. First, referendums can be initiated by a number of citizens, which is, for example, the case of popular votes in Switzerland. Second, they may be initiated by actors in the representative government, for example a minority or a majority in the legislature, a president or regional governments. Third, referendums may be mandatory, that is, required by the constitution on a particular type of issue, typically on constitutional changes. In addition to the way in which referendums are initiated, the relationship between the agenda-setter and the initiator of the referendum is crucial when it comes to their role in political systems. This was already pointed out by Uleri (1996), who makes the distinction between ‘decision-promoting’ and ‘decision-controlling’ referendums. Altman (2011) uses the terms ‘proactive’ and ‘reactive’, when referring to a similar distinction. In decision-promoting referendums, the agenda-setter and the initiator of the referendum are the same political actor who uses the referendum as an instrument to achieve a particular change in legislation. In decisioncontrolling referendums, the referendum is not initiated by the political actor who sets the agenda. For this reason, this type of a referendum functions as an extra check or a ‘veto point’ on a legislative change. This is also the case in mandatory referendums which are triggered ‘automatically’ on particular types of decisions. The category of decision-promoting, or proactive referendums, includes two very different types of referendums: those initiated by actors holding governmental power, i.e. governmentinitiated referendums (cf. Morel, 2001), also known as plebiscites (Altman, 2013), and those based on popular initiatives. In representative democracies, top-down government-initiated referendums are typically used to legitimise an important decision, or to settle an issue that divides a governmental coalition or a party. Alternatively, referendums may become ‘politically compulsory’ on particular types of issues (Morel, 2001). A good example of politically compulsory referendums are those held on the membership of the EU. Citizens’ initiatives are also decision-promoting instruments, in the sense that they allow a certain number of citizens to demand a legislative change. The differences between citizen initiative institutions are discussed more in detail below.

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As already indicated above, the category of decision-controlling referendums includes constitutionally required mandatory referendums, which usually pertain to constitutional amendments. Moreover, decision-controlling referendums include non-mandatory, or facultative, referendums initiated by a number of citizens (for example, Switzerland), or a parliamentary minority (for example, Denmark) wanting to repeal a law passed by a parliamentary majority. Governments have an incentive to avoid these kinds of rejective referendums because of the delays and, obviously, the risk of a loss at the popular vote. Therefore, governments tend to adjust their policies to meet the demands of those groups that could initiate a referendum. In Denmark, the institution of a rejective referendum was adopted in 1953, in conjunction with the abolition of the second chamber of the parliament. The referendum was regarded as an institutional check on the legislative process and hence as having similar functions to the second chamber. Denmark has experienced rejective referendums only once, in 1963, but the institution has arguably had indirect effects on Danish parliamentary politics, by encouraging consensus between parliamentary parties (Svensson, 1996). The Swiss institution of citizeninitiated facultative referendum has had a profound impact on the whole political system, and this institution will be discussed later in this chapter. Direct democratic instruments also include a variety of instruments of citizens’ initiatives. Overall, the term ‘citizens’ initiative’ refers to an institution that allows a number of citizens to raise an issue onto the political decision-making agenda. In this respect, citizens’ initiatives can be understood as decision-promoting instruments. An important distinction in citizens’ initiatives can be drawn between so-called full-scale initiatives and agenda initiatives. Full-scale initiatives lead to a (non-binding or binding) popular vote automatically, after having reached the pre-determined threshold of statements of support. Agenda initiatives, on the other hand, are discussed and decided upon by the elected representatives. Compared to full-scale initiatives, agenda initiatives appear to be rather weak institutions for empowering citizens. It may even be asked whether agenda initiatives can be regarded as a form of direct democracy because they do not change the distribution of institutional power in representative systems. Between these two types, there are so-called referendum motions (cf. Schiller and Setälä, 2012), where a number of citizens can ask a legislative body to organise a popular vote on a specific issue, while the elected representatives have the authority to decide whether or not to hold a referendum. Sometimes the difference between decision-promoting and decision-controlling initiatives is not as clear-cut, since they can be used to repeal recently passed laws. For example, the Italian abrogative referendum where 500 000 voters can demand a referendum to repeal a law, was originally adopted as a decision-controlling institution. However, because the referendum can be used to repeal laws that are already in operation, the Italian abrogative referendum has turned out to be a decision-promoting institution that has been used to demand legislative changes (Uleri, 2012). There are also more refined differences between initiative instruments, for example, those related to technical regulations for the signature-collecting process and parliamentary proceedings. For example, the practices related to full-scale initiatives in Switzerland are quite different from those in California. In Switzerland, an initiative requires 100 000 signatures that need to be collected in 18 months (see e.g. Lutz, 2012). What is specific about Swiss citizens’ initiatives is that the initiative is negotiated and deliberated in the parliament before the popular vote. The parliamentary proceedings may bring about legislative changes that satisfy

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some of the initiative committee’s demands. Indeed, the initiative committee may withdraw their initiative if they are satisfied with the legislative concessions made by the government. Alternatively, if the initiative is submitted to a popular vote, it may be voted together with a governmental counterproposal. The voters can vote in support for both the initiative and the counterproposal. If both are supported by the majority of voters, the one with more support will be implemented by the government. In contrast, a popular ballot follows from an initiative, more or less automatically, in the Californian system; even the judicial check is conducted after the vote (Bowler and Donovan, 2000). After filing the proposal to the Attorney General, the proponents have 150 days to collect signatures from registered voters. The signature threshold is 5 per cent of votes cast in the previous gubernatorial election (8 per cent for constitutional proposals). Once this threshold is met and the popular vote organised, the initiative becomes law immediately if more yes than no ballot votes are counted. Critics have pointed out that the Californian initiative process is not very open to amendments (ibid). For example, some propositions that have been passed by a plurality of voters require a supermajority to be overturned. Second, even the proponents themselves cannot change mistakes, or loopholes, discovered in their own proposals after they have been passed. The inflexibility of the Californian initiative institution also means that there is no space for deliberative discussion on the content of the initiatives in the state legislature (Reilly and Yonk, 2012).

3  THE USAGE AND THE IMPACT OF DIFFERENT FORMS OF DIRECT DEMOCRACY As outlined above, we have put forward a number of classifications of referendums and initiatives, which help us understand the differences between the roles of direct democratic instruments in various political systems. Next, we discuss some of the features and examples of the use, and the impact of different direct democratic instruments. While the type of an instrument is an important explanatory factor, these ‘rules-in-form’ alone do not dictate how widely the direct democratic rights are actually used (Stadelman-Steffen and Vatter, 2012). Citizeninitiated direct democratic procedures are allowed at a national level only in a few countries, while these types of instruments are much more common at the local and the regional level. According to Altman (2011), there have been on average 6.42 citizen-initiated popular votes per year in Switzerland during the years 1984–2009, which account for about a half of the total of the nation-wide citizen-initiated referendums held annually in the whole world. The Swiss citizen-initiated votes include both decision-promoting votes based on citizens’ initiatives and decision-controlling facultative referendums. This comparison already suggests that the procedural hurdles for nation-wide popular initiatives and facultative referendums are relatively low in Switzerland. In other countries, for these types of instruments, the number of required signatures tends to be higher and often there are other limitations, for example concerning the types of issues that can be submitted to a referendum. When mandatory constitutional referendums are also counted, Switzerland is by far the most active user of referendums at the national level. Indeed, Altman (2011) finds that there were on average 9.12 nation-wide direct democratic votes annually in 1984–2009. Italy comes second, with 2.19 direct democratic votes per year, followed by Liechtenstein, Uruguay and

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Lithuania. The fact that these countries allow citizen-initiated measures at the national level explains the relatively high frequency of direct democratic votes. However, compared to Switzerland, the thresholds for these procedures, such as the requirements concerning signature collection, are much higher in the other four countries. Comparative research from the German Länder also shows that high institutional hurdles significantly reduce the number of popular initiatives in practice (Eder et al., 2009). The frequency of direct democratic votes in Switzerland, at the national level, highlights the originality of the Swiss political system. As Kriesi (2012) points out, the repertoire of direct democratic measures has increased since the creation of the Swiss confederation in 1848, and there are various direct democratic institutions also at the cantonal and local levels. The extent of the use of popular votes is indicative of their overall impact, but there are also other ways of assessing their impact on political systems. Direct democratic instruments also have a variety of indirect effects on the functioning of democracy, and these effects are not entirely captured by looking at mere numbers of referendums. For example, as pointed out above, not all initiatives are actually taken to a popular vote in Switzerland, because some of them are withdrawn based on legislative changes achieved in parliamentary negotiations. In the literature, Switzerland has been characterised as a ‘semi-direct’ democracy (see, for example, Linder, 1998; Church, 2003), and the Swiss political system has been very much shaped by its direct democratic practices. When it comes to the functioning of the political system, the instrument of a facultative referendum has had a deep impact on Swiss democracy. A facultative referendum can be initiated by 50 000 voters, in 90 days after a law has been passed by the parliament. Overall, the institution can be regarded as protecting the interests of minorities because a relatively small number of citizens can request a referendum on a bill they oppose. It is also notable that the possibility of a rejection of laws through popular votes has an anticipatory effect on the legislative process in Switzerland. In the literature, the prospect of a facultative referendum has been described as ‘referendum threat’, or even more dramatically as ‘a sword of Damocles’ that hangs over the legislative process (for example, Kriesi, 2012). In addition to defeats in facultative referendums, governments also want to avoid delays and controversies caused by them. For this reason, Swiss governments tend to seek a large consensus over their law proposals as a pre-emptive measure, and ensure that their law proposals also have broad support within civil society. This is the case because referendums can be demanded by a relatively small number of citizens (Lutz, 2006; el-Wakil, 2017). According to Neidhart (1970), the instrument of facultative referendum is key to explaining the consensual character of the Swiss political system. Since 1959, all the main parties have been represented in governments, and there are extensive pre-parliamentary legislative procedures (Kriesi, 2012). This feature, it could be argued, is evidence of a more problematic aspect of Swiss democracy, namely the very low electoral turnout in the country that has remained below 50 per cent since the late 1970s.1 Indeed, much of the political competition takes place through popular votes. Governments can be held accountable on issue-by-issue basis in facultative referendums, while popular initiatives encourage the mobilisation of new political movements. In recent years, initiatives have been increasingly used by parties to mobilise voters in elections (Lutz, 2012). Of course, less institutionalised referendums, organised on an ad hoc basis, can also have a profound impact on the political system. One of the most recent examples is obviously the

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British referendum on the membership in the EU in June 2016. The motivations behind the referendum were related to internal division on the issue within the ruling Conservative Party and the electoral challenge by the anti-EU UK Independence Party. Despite its formally advisory character, the ‘Brexit’ referendum has turned out to be de facto binding and a clear parliamentary majority has voted in favour of following the result of the referendum, that is, leaving the EU. In this case, a referendum has led to a more or less irreversible decision that will shape the political future of a country in a profound manner. This is indeed quite common, since government-initiated referendums are often used to resolve the most important issues, such as constitutional matters or territorial issues. In these decisions, governments feel obliged to consult the people in order to make a decision that can be perceived as legitimate (Morel, 2001). Finally, direct democratic institutions are not immune to similar malpractices and manipulative designs that elections suffer from (Norris, 2014). This seems to be the case especially in government-initiated referendums, which are often organised, rather purposefully, to strengthen the government’s position, or to promote a particular law. Especially in the context of authoritarian political systems, referendums often turn out to be outright manipulative exercises. In these and similar cases, the term ‘plebiscite’ is often used to emphasise the manipulative character of the popular vote. When it comes to bottom-up procedures, governments may try to intervene in the signature-collecting processes in order to silence the opposition. Also, by manoeuvring time constraints and signature thresholds, governments may try to avoid organising referendums that would most likely turn against them. In Venezuela, for example, the attempt to collect signatures in 2016 for a recall referendum on the popular support for President Maduro was watered down by the election authority, closely aligned with the government. As a gatekeeper, at several stages of the process, the National Election Council is claimed to have both delayed opposition’s authority to collect signatures, and rejected the first signatures from 1 per cent of registered voters on false grounds (Brodzinsky, 2016). Due to these decisions, the recall was not organised and lost its momentum.

4  KEY ISSUES IN DIFFERENT FORMS OF DIRECT DEMOCRACY 4.1  Referendums: Voter Competence, Deliberation, Representative Procedures The discussion above shows that referendums have quite different functions in different political systems, and therefore generalisations may not be possible. In his seminal article, Gordon Smith (1975) argued that there cannot be a ‘general theory’ of referendums. Different instruments of referendums interact with representative procedures in different ways, and, consequently, their impacts on the functioning of elected governments vary. However, there are overall concerns about the quality of public discussion and voter competence, which concern all kinds of referendums, regardless of the way in which they come about. In the following, we will first briefly review the problems of voter competence, paying specific attention to how ballot structure and information demands affect the prospects of public deliberation. Thereafter, we will move onto the specific issues related to each specific type of referendums. Simone Chambers (2001) has argued that majority rule, in particular, is hard to reconcile with deliberation. The use of the majority rule easily leads to adversarial style of argumentation between those who support and oppose the proposals. This may give rise to further polarisation

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of positions between the pro and con camps. In his book Strong Democracy (1984), Benjamin Barber suggested multi-option ballots because they potentially enhance processes where the alternatives are actually judged by their merits. Simone Chambers (2001) argues that the Borda rule, which allows people to express preference ordering of the alternatives, is more reconcilable with deliberation than majority rule. The Borda rule favours those alternatives which are not overly objectionable, and therefore it seems to encourage people to moderate their views. In reality, most referendum votes have only two alternatives, that is, ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a policy proposal, and multi-option referendums have been relatively rare events. Recent research also emphasises the importance of the ballot itself in helping voters make informed choices. For example, language complexity on the ballot paper is linked to how well voters can match their vote with their policy preferences (Reilly, 2010). Studies on voter behaviour indicate that voters tend to favour the status quo (Christin et al., 2002) and rely on cognitive shortcuts and partisan cues when they make decisions (Gastil, 2014). Elite cues, especially, have been regarded as the key element in direct democratic votes, meaning that citizens tend to follow the views signalled by their favoured cultural and political elites. Obviously, this can be regarded as a problem if referendums are expected to enhance reasoned discussion on political issues, or policies, that are intended to be responsive to people’s (real) preferences. On this basis, political scientists (Warren and Gastil, 2015) have suggested that providing voters with better cues would be the way to help voters’ choice, and thus improve the democratic process. This view is supported by empirical studies showing that patterns of communication between political elites and voters appear to be relevant for the development of voter competence in referendums (Kriesi, 2005). For example, a governmental voting recommendation is issued on each proposal submitted to a popular vote in Switzerland. In the Swiss consensual political system, a governmental recommendation may have some credibility among the public at large, because it is supported by all main parties across the political spectrum. In more competitive political systems, governmental voting recommendations are not likely to be a sufficient signal for those who do not support the government. However, voters can also be given other sources of information to help them make decisions on ballot proposals (Gastil, 2014). The most important example is the Citizens’ Initiative Review, which will be discussed in more detail in the following section. When direct democratic instruments are used in the context of representative systems, the key question is how they affect the procedures in representative bodies. From the perspective of deliberative democracy, it seems particularly relevant to understand how these processes affect parliamentary deliberation. There are significant differences between referendums in this respect, especially depending on who initiates them and whether they are, in Altman’s terms, ‘proactive’ or ‘reactive’. Overall, government-initiated referendums involve a risk of undermining the role of elected representatives, even when they are not purposefully used to bypass representative institutions. When government-initiated referendums are binding, the parliamentary proceedings are bypassed entirely. When they are formally advisory, representatives face a normative dilemma: Should they respect the result of the referendum in the parliamentary vote, or the majority opinion within their constituency, or should they make their decisions on the basis of their own conviction, or parliamentary deliberation? Parties and representatives often commit themselves to the result of advisory referendums, which may be instrumentally rational, considering their need to maximise votes in future elections. However, this more or

Referendums and citizens’ initiatives 97 Table 6.1  The impact of referendums on representative procedures and deliberation Replacing or additional to representative procedures

Incentives for representative deliberation undermined/ Effects on inclusion in based on representative deliberation

Governmentinitiated: binding advisory

Replacement Additional (before)

Undermined

Varied

Mandatory

Additional (after)

Need to ensure support by popular majority (anticipation)

Accommodation to the majority opinion

Rejective

Additional (after)

Willingness to avoid Accommodation to referendum (anticipation) minority views

Type of referendum

Citizens’ initiative:   ‘Californian’ type   ‘Swiss’ type

Replacement Additional (before/ after)

Willingness to avoid popular vote

Accommodation of the views of initiators, especially when supported by the popular majority

less, precludes the possibility of parliamentary deliberation, which may be regarded as a problem, if such deliberation is regarded as a way of ensuring the legitimacy of decisions (Setälä, 2006). Another problem with government-initiated referendums is that they may become a general test of the popularity of the government, rather than a vote on the issue at hand. Governmental signals play an important role in this respect (Hug and Sciarini, 2000), and there are several cases where government-initiated referendums have been explicitly framed as votes of confidence in the government. From the deliberative perspective, the ex post character of reactive referendums is particularly important. Because these referendums are held after the representatives have taken their positions, they allow parliamentary deliberations before the issue is submitted to a referendum. Moreover, the representatives’ awareness of the possibility that a decision may be submitted to a referendum makes them anticipate various kinds of opposition to their policy proposals. Rejective referendums, in particular, like the Swiss facultative referendum, are likely to encourage the government to be more responsive and reflective to minority views – this happens largely as a pre-emptive strategy by governments. When it comes to popular initiatives, there are big differences between instruments. The Californian type of citizens’ initiative essentially replaces representative procedures, whereas in Switzerland, initiatives are dealt with in the parliament. Therefore, the Californian type of initiative is, in Budge’s (1993) terms, much more ‘unmediated’ than its Swiss counterpart. Table 6.1 summarises these differences. 4.2  Citizens’ Initiatives: Money and Power Generally speaking, citizens’ initiatives open up the political agenda for novel viewpoints emerging from civil society, rather than the political establishment. This may be considered valuable from the perspective of both participatory and deliberative democracy. Based on a study of Swiss initiatives, Kriesi and Wisler (1996) conclude that grassroots organisations and

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new social movements are active users of popular initiatives. In the US, initiatives were originally introduced by progressive movements in order to decrease the power of special interest groups (Smith, 2001). Based on empirical studies, this goal has, at least partly, been reached because initiatives have not been completely dominated by economic and business interests (Lupia and Matsusaka, 2004). In an analysis of the US states, Boehmke concludes that statewide initiatives serve as influence channels for traditionally under-represented groups, and not only for economic interest groups (Boehmke, 2005). Creating an initiative, is not possible without some resources that enable successful campaigning and collecting the required number of signatures. In practice, initiative campaigns at national or state levels are very rarely run without the machinery, or at least the support, of some interest organisation (Adams, 2012). In this respect, the organisation of a popular initiative may be beyond the reach of truly marginalised groups in the society. For full-scale citizens’ initiatives, money and special interests play a crucial role both in what kinds of initiative are qualified, and what kind of legislation is passed in popular votes (Smith, 2001). In a recent example from California, the online merchandise company Amazon launched a signature collection campaign in order to pre-empt a tax law that would have affected its sales, and succeeded in changing the course of policy (Reilly and Yonk, 2012). Initiatives are also used by traditional political parties for agenda-setting before elections (Damore et al., 2012: 369; Rytel-Warzocha, 2012), which raises similar concerns about the role of organised interests. If citizens’ initiatives become a tool for economic and well-established political interests only, it will not have the desired effects on inclusiveness and representation, and it may even start working against the voice of more genuine grassroots groups (Boehmke, 2005). In the US, a whole ‘initiative industry’, with paid signature gatherers, has emerged as a result of the institutions of citizen law-making (Adams, 2012). The capacity of various societal groups to actually use initiative instruments depends on factors such as campaign financing regulation and institutional design features of the initiative procedure, especially on thresholds, such as the required number of signatures and the time limits of signature collection (Eder et al., 2009). Moreover, practices such as online collection of signatures help lower the costs of making popular initiatives. Because the numbers of signatures required for agenda initiatives are usually low compared to full-scale initiatives, these kinds of institutions seem to be more easily within the reach of marginalised groups. However, agenda initiatives face other kinds of hurdles when they are dealt with in parliament, or houses of assembly, and for this reason they risk remaining rather toothless institutions. In the case of full-scale initiatives, a successful initiative leads to a referendum campaign, which also requires considerable financial and organisational resources.

5  RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 5.1  Citizens’ Initiative Review In the literature, there have been calls for measures to enhance public deliberation, in conjunction with direct democratic procedures. For example, in his Strong Democracy, Barber (1984) demanded that initiatives and referendums should always be combined with measures that enhance citizen deliberation and reflection on the issue at hand. Ackerman and Fishkin (2002)

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have suggested that there should be a specific public holiday, a so-called ‘deliberation day’, before every national referendum. More recently, David Altman (2014) has suggested that the practice of citizens’ counterproposals could be used in conjunction with full-scale citizens’ initiative instruments. In this section, we will have a closer look at some practices, which seem to successfully link public deliberation with direct democracy. As our discussion above has shown, the high information demands on citizens of direct democracy are a common criticism and therefore require consideration. Measures for improving voter competence have been developed, and the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) in Oregon is a prime example (Gastil and Richards, 2013). Since 2010, the CIR has been regulated in state law and therefore has become an institutionalised element in direct democratic practice in Oregon. The CIR is organised by a non-governmental body, under the direction of the Oregon CIR Commission. CIR is essentially a citizens’ jury, which evaluates ballot initiatives before they are submitted to a popular vote. Not all initiatives are deliberated by the CIR, as the Commission judges which initiatives meet the criteria for the CIR treatment. The CIR panel consists of a group of 18–24 registered Oregon voters, selected through a stratified random sample. Convening for three to five days, the CIR panel hears witnesses from both sides of the issues and produces a one-page statement. Nowadays, CIR statements include ‘key findings’ as well as arguments for and against the ballot measure, while previously they also included the result of a panel vote. The statement is included as a part of official Oregon State Voter’s Pamphlet, which is delivered to all registered voters (Warren and Gastil, 2015). Similar CIR processes have recently been piloted in other US states, with full-scale initiatives taking place in states, such as Arizona, Colorado and Massachusetts. Focus-group research shows that voters are interested in knowing both intended and unintended consequences of policy options before casting their votes (Gastil et al., 2016). The idea of the CIR is to provide these more thorough diagnoses of the problem, and not just a collection of arguments pro and con, as the governmental voter guides often do (Warren and Gastil, 2015). The fact that voting recommendation is formulated by fellow citizens, not by politicians or experts, may also be an important factor for how it is received by the electorate. In the study on the Citizens’ Assembly in British Columbia, Cutler et al. (2008) found that voters with populist attitudes were likely to support the proposal by the Citizens’ Assembly because its members were ordinary citizens, whereas non-populists appreciated the expertise of the members. There are some studies on voters’ awareness and their attitudes to the CIR process. Based on a telephone survey conducted among voters in Oregon, the CIR is already a relatively wellknown instrument. The awareness of the CIR has risen from about 40 per cent in 2010 to 54 per cent in 2014. Two-thirds of those who were aware of the CIR in 2014 had also read CIR statements. In the 2014 survey, more than 60 per cent of the respondents found CIR statements informative. Online surveys carried out in Oregon in 2014, show further that voters have quite a lot of trust in the CIR process. One of the most interesting findings of the survey, was that when respondents were asked to rate the quality of judgements made by different public bodies, only 36 per cent rated Oregon state legislature as ‘good’ or ‘very good’, whereas criminal juries and the CIR were rated similarly by 48 per cent of respondents (Warren and Gastil, 2015). Based on findings in studies of political behaviour, one might expect that voters read the recommendations made by citizen panels very selectively. For example, people are likely to be affected by confirmation bias in the sense that they pay more attention to arguments that

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support their pre-established views. Based on a panel survey, Warren and Gastil (2015) and Gastil et al. (2016) explore the effects of the CIR in comparison with other possible sources of information, namely a letter from the Secretary of State and a standard voting pamphlet, or no information at all. The members of the panel (N=431) were randomly assigned to different treatment groups. The issue in question pertained to the proposed Mandatory Minimum Sentencing Law in 2010. On this topic, reading the CIR statement had a dramatic shift in people’s attitudes against the measure. Of those initially inclined to vote for the measure, only 67 per cent held that position after reading the CIR statement. Of the undecided voters, 78 per cent turned against the proposal after reading the statement (Warren and Gastil, 2015). As Gastil (2014: 157) argues, the evidence on CIR shows that ‘…voters appreciate hearing concise issue summaries from their peers’. Based on findings like this, one might argue that the CIR can be regarded as more than yet another cue among more partisan cues. Gastil concludes that the CIR serves rather as a voting aid because it is not expected to give straightforward recommendations to voters. Moreover, reading CIR statements did not necessarily make people more confident of their own position, but rather led them to think that they would need to investigate and reflect on the issue more (Warren and Gastil, 2015: 570). In this respect, there are indications of the capacity of CIR to trigger more deliberative modes of reflection on the pros and cons of policy alternatives. On these grounds, Warren and Gastil (2015) argue that CIR exemplifies a specific type of political trust, that is facilitative trust, which is based on learning and deliberation, and therefore sets rather high cognitive demands on citizens. In this respect, facilitative trust is different from trust in experts and professionals, because it is not based on factors such as a trustee’s expertise, position and reputation. The point of facilitative trust is that it helps citizens to make sound political judgements, by lowering their cognitive costs, while not reducing their capacity for making critical judgements. In sum, the CIR seems to have a lot of potential in addressing the issue of voter competence by increasing deeper understanding of ballot measures and their complexity. As a consequence, the CIR can potentially have impact on what kinds of initiatives are likely to be successful in the initiative process. This may have an effect on what kinds of initiatives are made in the first place. As a more macro-political consequence, the CIR could thus reduce the dominance of moneyed interests in the direct democratic process and help more marginalised groups to take advantage of direct democratic institutions for promoting their policy goals. 5.2  Finnish Citizens’ Initiatives Since March 2012, the Finnish Constitution defined a right for 50,000 citizens eligible to vote (about 1.2% of the total electorate) to make legislative proposals that the Parliament (Eduskunta) can discuss and decide on. The initiative can be written in the format of a law, or it could entail a proposal for the government to start a legislative process. The Finnish citizens’ initiative is a so-called ‘indirect’ or ‘agenda’ initiative, because it does not lead to a popular vote. While the Californian type citizens’ initiatives bypass representative institutions, agenda initiatives represent a ‘soft’ version of direct democracy, where citizens merely provide advice for elected representatives (Jäske, 2017). In parliamentary democracies, agenda initiatives seem to represent a feasible compromise between those who support the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and those who support the expansion of people’s direct involvement in policy-making processes.

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The law on Finnish citizens’ initiatives (enacted in March, 2012) regulates a six-month time limit for the collection of expressions of support, as well as the format of an initiative and signatures. It also specifies the procedures and the technical requirements for online collection of signatures (a so-called ‘strong identification protocol’). The law specifically mentions the possibility of signatures on an online platform provided by the Ministry of Justice, but also other organisations are allowed to develop their own platforms. The vast majority of expressions of support are nowadays collected on the governmental website www.kansalaisaloite.fi. Despite Barber’s visions in Strong Democracy (1984), up-to-date formal institutions of direct democracy have rarely been accompanied by online tools. By enhancing the accessibility of the initiative instrument from the citizens’ perspective and significantly reducing initiators’ costs, the online collection system makes it possible for smaller and more marginalised civic groups to reach the signature thresholds for their political and societal causes. The law obliges the Finnish Parliament to deal with those agenda initiatives that have reached the threshold of 50,000 signatures. The rules for parliamentary procedures stipulate that citizens’ initiatives should be processed like other legislative proposals, and that initiators should have the right to be heard in the relevant committee. So far no initiative submitted to Parliament has been ‘buried’ in committees, and they have gained relatively swift and thorough proceedings in Parliament. The relevant committee has given a report on each initiative, and the reports have then been discussed and, apart from few exemptions, voted on at the plenary. Initiators have been heard by committees, and these committee hearings have been open to all MPs, as well as to the media. The publicness of committee work is a novel feature in the Finnish legislative system, which has served to increase the openness of parliamentary work (Christensen et al., 2017). During the first four years of existence, the citizens’ initiative has been a fairly popular instrument among the civil society actors and individual citizens. Based on the early experience with the Citizens’ Initiative, we also know, however, that it is fairly difficult to acquire sufficient support for proposals. In August 2015, only 10 proposals for initiatives – 2.9 per cent of all proposals made at www.kansalaisaloite.fi – had gathered the required 50 000 signatures. Obviously, it is entirely up to parliamentary discretion to decide whether the initiative will be passed, rejected or changed. So far, only one initiative, on gender-neutral marriage legislation, has passed the plenary vote. This specific initiative was immensely popular and gathered the required number of signatures within a few hours, and it received a lot of public attention during the decision-making process (Christensen et al., 2017). Some other initiatives (for example, one on energy certificates) have had indirect impact on legislation, but the overall picture is similar to other European experiences, where citizens’ initiatives have resulted in rather few legislative changes (see Schiller and Setälä, 2012). Of course, agenda initiative instruments have certain inherent limitations in systems, such as, Finland, where the governments largely set the legislative agenda. So far it seems that agenda initiatives have chances of success only in policy areas, which are not high on the governmental agenda, or where the government is divided. The latter was the case in the issue of gender-neutral marriage. Nevertheless, the political impact of initiatives is not limited to legislative changes, since they have also been influential in increasing awareness of specific issues, and influencing citizens’ and representatives’ attitudes on them. The early experiences of the citizens’ initiative suggest that it has also served as a channel to test ideas and raise awareness

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on questions that tend to be under-represented in the parliamentary decision-making agenda (see e.g. Christensen et al., 2017). Like other non-binding participatory processes, agenda initiatives are open to the risk of public frustration, which may follow when the representative decision-making body rejects citizens’ suggestions (Ulbig, 2008). Considering the limited legislative impact of the Finnish agenda initiative, one might thus worry whether citizens perceive the instrument as a credible channel for influencing decision-making. However, it has been shown that people judge instruments and decision-making processes based not only on their outcomes, but also on their procedural aspects (Lind and Tyler, 1988). Indeed, Christensen et al. (2015) found that the rejection of an initiative decreases trust in parliament and other key political actors. However, the perception of the fairness of parliamentary procedures moderates this effect. Therefore, one might argue that the success of an agenda initiative instrument very much depends on the quality of parliamentary deliberations, where the arguments for and against an initiative are evaluated by their merits. Furthermore, public perceptions of the citizens’ initiative mirror its positive uptake in Finnish civil society, since about 80 per cent of respondents in the Finnish National Election Study, in 2015, agree that the citizens’ initiative has had a positive impact on the functioning of Finnish democracy.

6  CONCLUDING REMARKS This chapter has aimed to illustrate a variety of direct democratic practices and their effects in political systems. As Gordon Smith argued, in the 1970s, there cannot be a ‘general theory’ of referendums. This applies in direct democracy more generally. Even in the context of representative democracies, the functions and roles of direct democracy vary dramatically. Depending on institutional design, referendums may undermine or enhance parliamentary deliberation. Government-initiated referendums may be most problematic in this respect, but similar problems can also be found in the Californian type of citizens’ initiatives. It has also been pointed out that direct democratic practices do not just supplement representative democracy, but they may actually have a rather profound impact on the functioning of the whole democratic system. This has been the case, especially in Switzerland, where the institution of a facultative referendum has had a key role in the development of a specific consensual form of government. The instrument has proven to protect the interests of minorities by giving them a right to trigger a referendum to veto legislation. This kind of mechanism of issue-by-issue accountability has also been suggested as a potential solution to the problems of multi-national and supra-national democracy (Abromeit, 2009). On the other hand, the Californian system of direct legislation shows the extent to which big money and corporate actors can take advantage of direct democratic institutions. Nevertheless, there are various innovative ways of using direct democracy, which in part help overcome the problems usually associated with these instruments. Deliberative mini-publics can be used as elements of direct democratic procedures at different stages of the policy process. In case of the CIR, a citizens’ jury functions as a trusted source of information for voters. The problems related to the impact of moneyed interests in initiative campaigns can also be counteracted by allowing systems of online collection of signatures, which is the case in the Finnish Citizens’ Initiatives.

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NOTE 1. International IDEA Voter Turnout Database www.idea.int/data-tools/data/voter-turnout.

REFERENCES Abromeit, H. (2009), Accountability and democracy, in S. Gustavsson, C. Karlsson and T. Persson (eds), The Illusion of Accountability in the European Union, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 23–34. Ackerman, B. and Fishkin, J.S. (2002), ‘Deliberation Day’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 10 (2), 129–152. Altman, D. (2011), Direct Democracy Worldwide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Altman, D. (2013), ‘Does an active use of mechanisms of direct democracy impact electoral participation? Evidence from the U.S. states and the Swiss cantons’, Local Government Studies, 39 (6), 739–755. Altman, D. (2014), ‘Strengthening democratic quality: Reactive deliberation in the context of direct democracy’, Kellogg Institute for International Studies working papers, University of Notre Dame, June 2014. Baldassare, M. and C. Katz (2008), The Coming Age of Direct Democracy: California’s Recall and Beyond, Lanham MD and Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Barber, B. (1984), Strong Democracy. Participatory Politics for a New Age, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Boehmke, F.J. (2005), ‘Sources of variation in the frequency of statewide initiatives: The role of interest group populations’, Political Research Quarterly, 58 (4), 565–575. Bowler, S. and T. Donovan (2000), ‘California’s experience with direct democracy’, Parliamentary Affairs, 53 (4), 644–656. Brodzinsky, S. (2016), ‘Venezuelans warn of ‘dictatorship’ after officials block bid to recall Maduro’, The Guardian, 21 October 2016, accessed 21 December 2017 at www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/21/ venezuela-president-maduro-recall-referendum. Budge, I. (1993), ‘Direct democracy: Setting appropriate terms of debate’, in D. Held (ed.), Prospects for Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Chambers, S. (2001), ‘Constitutional referendums and democratic deliberation’, in M. Mendelson and A. Parkin (eds), Referendum Democracy: Citizens, Elites, and Deliberation Referendum Campaigns, Hampshire: Palgrave, pp. 231–255. Christensen, H.S., M. Karjalainen and L. Nurminen (2015), ‘Does crowdsourcing legislation increase political legitimacy? The case of Avoin Ministeriö in Finland’, Policy & Internet, 7 (1), 25–45. Christensen, H.S., M. Jäske, M. Setälä and E. Laitinen (2017), ‘The Finnish Citizens’ Initiative – Towards inclusive agenda-setting?’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 40 (4), 411–433. Christin, T., S. Hug and P. Sciarini (2002), ‘Interests and information in referendum voting: An analysis of Swiss voters’, European Journal of Political Research, 41, 759–776. Church, C. (2003), The Politics and Government of Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke. Cronin, T.E. (1989), Direct Democracy: The Politics of Initiative, Referendum, and Recall, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Damore, D.F., S. Bowler and S.P. Nicholson (2012), ‘Agenda setting by direct democracy comparing the initiative and the referendum’, State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 12 (4), 367–393. Eder, C., A. Vatter and M. Freitag (2009), ‘Institutional design and the use of direct democracy: Evidence from the German Länder’, West European Politics, 32 (3), 611–633. el-Wakil, A. (2017), ‘The deliberative potential of facultative referendums: Procedure and substance in direct democracy’, Democratic Theory, 4 (1), 59–78. Gastil, J. (2014), ‘Beyond endorsements and partisan cues: Giving voters viable alternatives to unreliable cognitive shortcuts’, The Good Society, 23 (2), 145–159. Gastil, J. and R. Richards (2013), ‘Making direct democracy deliberative through random assemblies’, Politics & Society, 41 (2), 253–281. Gastil, J., K. Knobloch, A. Hannah, C. Maiorca, E. Paicopolos and J. Watters (2016), Assessment of the 2016 Massachusetts Citizens’ Initiative Review Pilot on Question 4, State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University. Hug, S. and P. Sciarini (2000), ‘Referendums on European integration’, Comparative Political Studies, 33 (1), 3–36. Jäske, M. (2017), ‘“Soft” forms of direct democracy: Explaining the occurrence of referendum motions and advisory referendums in Finnish local government’, Swiss Political Science Review, 23 (1), 50–76. Kriesi, H. (2005), ‘Argument-based strategies in direct-democratic votes: The Swiss experience’, Acta Politica, 40 (3), 299–316. Kriesi, H. (2012), ‘Direct democracy: The Swiss experience’, in B. Geissel and K. Newton (eds), Evaluating Democratic Innovations: Curing the Democratic Malaise?, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 39–55.

104  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance Kriesi, H. and D. Wisler (1996), ‘Social movements and direct democracy in Switzerland’, European Journal of Political Research, 30 (1), 19–40. Lind, E.A. and T.R. Tyler (1988), The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice, New York: Springer Science & Business Media. Linder, W. (1998), Swiss Democracy, MacMillan: Basingstoke. Lupia, A. and J.G. Matsusaka (2004), ‘Direct democracy: New approaches to old questions’, Annual Review of Political Science, 7, 463–482. Lutz, G. (2006), ‘The interaction between direct and representative democracy in Switzerland’, Representation, 42 (1), 45–57. Lutz, G. (2012), ‘Switzerland: Citizens’ initiatives as a measure to control the political agenda’, in M. Setälä & T. Schiller (eds), Citizens’ Initiatives in Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 17–36. Morel, L. (2001), ‘The rise of government-initiated referendums in consolidated democracies’, in M. Mendelson and A. Parkin (eds), Referendum Democracy: Citizens, Elites and Deliberation in Referendum Campaigns, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 47–64. Neidhart, L. (1970), Plebiszit und pluralitäre Demokratie. Eine Analyse der Funktionen des schweitzerischen Gesetzreferendums, Bern: Francke. Norris, P. (2014), Why Electoral Integrity Matters, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parkinson, J. (2001), ‘Who knows best: The creation of citizen-initiated referendums in New Zealand’, Government and Opposition, 32 (3), 402–421. Reilly, S. (2010), Design, Meaning and Choice in Direct Democracy: The Influences of Petitioners and Voters, London and New York: Routledge. Reilly, S. and R.M. Yonk (2012), Direct Democracy in the United States: Petitioners as a Reflection of Society, London and New York, Routledge. Rytel-Warzocha, A. (2012), ‘Popular initiatives in Poland: Citizens’ empowerment or keeping up appearances?’, in M. Setälä and T. Schiller (eds), Citizens’ Initiatives in Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 212–227. Schiller, T. and M. Setälä (2012), ‘Introduction’, in M. Setälä and T. Schiller (eds), Citizens’ Initiatives in Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 1–14. Setälä, M. (1999), ‘Referendums in Western Europe – A wave of direct democracy?’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 22 (4), 327. Setälä, M. (2006), ‘On the problems of responsibility and accountability in referendums’, European Journal of Political Research, 45 (5), 701–723. Smith, D.A. (2001), ‘Special interests and direct democracy: A historical glance’, in M. Dane Waters (ed.), The Battle over Citizen Lawmaking, Washington, DC: Initiative and Referendum Institute. Smith, G. (1975), ‘The referendum and political change’, Government and Opposition, 13 (1), 294–305. Smith, G. (2009), Democratic Innovations. Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stadelmann-Steffen, I. and A. Vatter (2012), ‘Does satisfaction with democracy really increase happiness? Direct democracy and individual satisfaction in Switzerland’, Political Behavior, 34 (3), 535–559. Svensson, P. (1996), ‘Denmark: The referendum as minority protection’, in M. Gallagher and P.V. Uleri (eds), The Referendum Experience in Europe, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Ulbig, S.G (2008), ‘Voice is not enough: The importance of influence in political trust and policy assessments’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 72 (3), 523–539. Uleri, P.V. (1996), ‘Introduction’, in M. Gallagher and P.V. Uleri (eds), The Referendum Experience in Europe, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Uleri, P.V. (2012), ‘Institutions of citizens’ political participation in Italy: Crooked forms, hindered institutionalization’, in M. Setälä and T. Schiller (eds), Citizens’ Initiatives in Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 71–88. Warren, M.E. and J. Gastil (2015), ‘Can deliberative minipublics address the cognitive challenges of democratic citizenship’, The Journal of Politics, 77 (2), 562–574.

7.

Digital participation

Hollie Russon Gilman and Tiago Carneiro Peixoto

1 OVERVIEW Technology has become part of nearly everything we do in our public and private lives. It shapes the way we connect with our friends and family, move through our cities and hometowns, and engage with our democratic institutions. Technology also increasingly provides avenues for public interaction – within our communities (online and off) and with our governments. New technology helps citizens to more easily access government data, rate services, report problems, enter into dialogue with policy makers and service providers, and, in a growing number of instances, participate in the design of budgets, policies, laws, and even constitutions. These technological advances help citizens and private organisations to directly collaborate. This enables better coordination, decision making, resource gathering and sharing. Such technologies have been applied to community building projects, campaigning, protesting, and to the creation of new mechanisms of peer-to-peer service delivery. This body of technologies with its many names – e-democracy, e-government, e-collaboration, open government – is now being promoted by a growing industry, the industry of civic technology (Steinberg, 2014). Firms, non-profit organisations and individuals are continuously developing new civic technologies in a $6.3 billion ‘civic tech’ industry that attracts both public and private investments (Howard, 2015). This diffusion is fuelled by governments, international development agents, private donors and non-government organisations (NGOs). Approaching the subject of civic technology, however, requires a clearer definition, for two main reasons. On one hand, vague definitions enable confusion about the contours of the field, and the opportunity for self-appropriation. For example, Uber, Airbnb and other for-profit companies that might have a disruptive effect on communities are sometimes labelled as civic technology, to the dismay of many activists (Heller, 2013). On the other hand, the lack of a clear definition reveals the continuous emergence of new terminology that reduces the possibility of collaboration and cumulative learning. In the last twenty years, the field has witnessed the emergence of a variety of overlapping categories, from e-democracy, e-participation and e-collaboration to the very recent civic hacking and digital citizens’ engagement (World Bank Group, 2016). This proliferation of terms has meant a fragmentation of knowledge that has prevented collaboration both in academia and among practitioners (Steinberg, 2013).1

2  WHAT IS ‘CIVIC TECH’ AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? ‘Civic tech’ offers the potential to re-define how citizens engage in their civic life. Our chapter contributes to this growing body of literature by examining the use of ‘civic tech’ for enhancing public participation in governance decision making. In the past few years, ‘civic tech’ experiments have become very popular in the U.S. and around the globe. Americans spent an 105

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estimated $493 million on ‘civic tech’ in 2015 alone, up from $225 million in 2013 (Omidyar Network, 2016).2 The academic literature has not kept up with the growing pace of democratic reform initiatives that are related to ‘civic tech’. Too often the fields of democratic governance and ‘civic tech’ do not intersect or overlap. Scholars often view these initiatives as only being relevant for technologists (for more on e-government, see Coursey and Norris, 2008; West and Schambra, 2007). As a result, there is limited academic understanding of the impact of ‘civic tech’ on policy outcomes. This chapter focuses on the civic dimension of ‘civic tech’ and its implications for enhancing democratic innovations in governance. It defines ‘civic tech’ as technology that is explicitly designed and leveraged to increase and deepen democratic participation.3 By design, this is a stylised definition that excludes technology that is used solely for modernisation, e-government or market gain, or technologies that have not been explicitly designed to deepen democratic participation. This definition encompasses inclusive governance, but it limits the contours of responsiveness to existing e-government frameworks (for a discussion, see Thomas and Streib, 2003; Welch et al., 2005). Civic tech differs from digital government, because its primary concern is expanding the relationship between citizens and State, not only modernising IT and basic service delivery (Knight Foundation and Rita Allen Foundation, 2017). Several examples of e-government include the U.S. Government first web portal (U.S. General Services Administration, 2000) developed during the Clinton-Gore Administration. Other significant projects were the Millennium Challenge Corporation in 2004, and the passage of the E-Government Act (Justice Information Sharing, 2013), which made the Office of E-Government and Information Technology a permanent fixture within the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Enhancing modernisation and efficiency is not the only aspect of ‘civic tech’, but also includes offering further channels for citizen feedback, voice, accountability, and governance transparency. Civic tech can generate process improvements in core governance functions by providing new and multiple entryways for citizens to engage with decision makers. Leveraging ‘civic tech’ for democratic innovation governance requires not only modernising government services, but also changing the traditional relationship between citizens and the state, to increase public participation in governance, ‘[i]n particular, public participation can be a potent means to achieve key democratic values such as legitimacy, justice, and effectiveness in governance’ (Fung, 2015). ‘Civic tech’ offers the potential for a new suite of tools, methods, and processes for connecting citizens and public administrators in governance decision making. However, the precise implementation of ‘civic tech’ may look different than traditional democratic governance interventions. Therefore, this chapter provides a series of brief case studies to systematically check how ‘civic tech’ contributes to enhancing democratic outcomes and redefining civic life. We conclude with recommendations for further areas of inquiry and research.

3  DEMOCRATIC GOODS FOR ASSESSING ‘CIVIC TECH’ Graham Smith’s conceptualisation of democratic goods is particularly useful for analysing democratic innovations such as civic technology (Smith, 2009). While there are many

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democratic scholars who have discussed re-engaging citizens in democracy, Smith offers a valuable framework for assessing ‘civic tech’. He identifies four democratic goods – inclusiveness, popular control, considered judgement, and transparency – as well as two institutional goods: efficiency and transferability. We will apply Smith’s approach to assess different ‘civic tech’ applications. But it is important to notice that these goods are convenient ‘placeholders’, whose specific and detailed meanings come to life only when enacted in specific institutions. This list of principles is not exhaustive and can be compared to a toolkit of imperfect metrics that capture different, correlated characteristics of the same phenomena. The first democratic good introduced by Smith is inclusiveness, which requires even participation from all segments of society to promote equality. It requires the inclusion of all types of people – a critical condition for an informed, contested environment. Inclusiveness requires processes that create effective incentives for participation, for people across different social groups with varying, prior civic knowledge and awareness. This chapter highlights inclusiveness as a particularly promising avenue for ‘civic tech’ to enhance democratic outcomes. It includes original research from the authors on the opportunity for e-petitions to engage more inclusive, representative voices. The second, popular control, refers to the degree to which citizens have actual power or control over decision making. From this perspective, people act ‘not merely as objects of legislation, as passive subjects to be ruled, but as autonomous agents who take part in the governance of their society, directly or through their representatives’ (Gutmann and Thompson, 2004). The third, considered judgement, requires thoughtful and reflective judgement (Smith, 2009). Considered judgement is related to epistemic democracy’s ability to ‘produce preferences, opinions, and discussions that are appropriately informed by logic and are the outcome of substantive and meaningful consideration of relevant reasons’ (Mansbridge and Parkinson, 2013). Considered judgement enables citizens’ considerations to be discussed, aired, and appropriately weighed (see also Habermas, 1996). It empowers individuals in deliberative settings to conduct rational, good faith discussions to enhance democratic governance. Civic talk, when applied to policy specification and implementation, can make public policies more competent (Freeman, 2002; Richardson, 2002; Cohen, 1989). The fourth, transparency, requires that rules and information are clearly presented to citizens. Through transparency, citizens can effectively weigh and assess the democratic system, which is critical for a well-functioning democracy. It includes actively releasing information, such as data, as well as providing policy pressure whereby information induces policy change. The targeted transparency ‘action cycle’, as developed by Fung et al. (2007), traces how information moves from disclosure to become a part of decision-making routines. Through providing transparency, people can actually read and understand information in a new way. Smith also describes two institutional goods, efficiency and transferability, i.e., the practice of not wasting scarce resources and the ability of a democratic innovation to be transplanted effectively in another context. Additional institutional goods not discussed by Smith, which are particularly interesting when evaluating technological innovations, include efficacy and resilience. Efficacy is the capacity to achieve the intended result, while resilience is the ability to resist capture from malicious attacks. Given that a vast literature in computer science and egovernment specifically focuses on institutional goods, in this chapter we focus attention on democratic goods that are less analysed in relation to civic technology. In particular, we choose the four which are more closely linked

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to institutions and therefore help evaluate current ‘civic tech’ practices. The next section offers illustrative case studies within Smith’s four democratic goods of: (i) inclusiveness; (ii) popular control; (iii) considerate judgement; and (iv) transparency. As Smith (2009) notes, goods do not necessarily reinforce each other, and often the promotion of one good can conflict with the promotion of another one. For example, the promotion of considered judgement might reduce efficiency, by requiring slower decision-making processes that evaluate all available information, but that can help assess current democratic innovations in practice. 3.1 Inclusiveness Digital tools can lower the barriers to entry for previously marginalised groups, in order to foster more inclusive engagement in the democratic process. An example of ‘civic tech’ empowering citizens to make governance decisions by working directly with political leaders and institutions, is participatory budgeting (PB), a process to empower traditionally marginalised citizens to make binding recommendations on spending public money. Another example is the online petition form Change.org, which allows underrepresented groups, such as women, an opportunity to have their views heard. While not a representative sampling, we have included these examples because they are illustrative of how ‘civic tech’ can foster more inclusive channels for civic engagement on a large scale. Case study: participatory budgeting Digital technologies have been used in PB for a multiplicity of purposes. For instance, one of the most common uses of technology in PB is that of enabling citizens to vote on projects or, before that, to suggest projects that should be submitted to the voting process. Other common usages include: the use of applications to simulate budget decisions, and the use of online and mobile technology (e.g. email, text messages) to encourage citizens to take part in the PB vote, and to monitor the implementation of selected projects (Peixoto et al., 2017). In contrast to the wealth of PB experiences using digital technologies, there is a limited number of studies assessing their effects on the inclusiveness of PB process, and these are mostly limited to the effects of Internet voting (i-voting). One of the first studies in this area that attempted to assess these effects examined the experience of the Brazilian Municipality of Belo Horizonte (Peixoto, 2009). Based on analysis of aggregate voting data, initial findings suggested a potential increase in participation due to i-voting. In traditional offline participatory budgeting, in which $43 million were being allocated, only 1.5% of eligible voters (residents over 16 years) old took part in the process. Conversely, in the digital participatory budgeting held in the same year, in which only $11 million was allocated, 10% of citizens cast their vote online. However, the study observed that given the difference in institutional design between the two PB models (e.g. different types of projects submitted to vote), no certain attribution could be given to the role of i-voting on increasing turnout, let alone its capacity to improve inclusiveness. Only more recently, studies have gone beyond the analysis of aggregate data, examining the effects of i-voting in the world’s largest PB process, that of Rio Grande do Sul state in Brazil (Spada et al., 2016; Halkin et al., 2017). Every year, approximately one million people participate in the state-wide process, where citizens can vote either online or offline for projects that are to be included in the public budget. Spada et al. (2016) presented the results of

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a unique survey of over 22,000 Internet voters. Two-thirds of online respondents stated that they would not have taken part in the process if i-voting was not available, lending support to the view that technology increases the participation among individuals who would not have voted otherwise. Overall, the study documents an 8.2% increase in total turnout with the introduction of i-voting.4 The extent to which this uptake translates into inclusiveness, however, is nuanced. When examining the socio-demographic characteristic of online voters, a picture running counter to the image of inclusiveness emerges: all things being equal, i-voting seems more likely to engage individuals who are younger, male, of higher income and educational attainment, and more frequent social media users. However, and simultaneously, the study also suggested that i-voting seemed to engage rather atypical constituents, who were previously uninspired by traditional politics and community activities. In the same state of Rio Grande do Sul, a recent randomised controlled trial examined the effects of SMS and email messages to take part in the PB vote. In the experiment, over 43,000 citizens were randomly assigned to receive email and text messages, encouraging them to take part in the PB voting process, with the authors using voting records to assess the impact of these messages on turnout and support for public investments. The turnout effect documented in the study (4.7%) is substantially larger than what has been found in most ‘Get Out the Vote’ (GOTV) studies, and particularly those focusing on the effect of technologies like email and SMS (Peixoto et al., 2017). But if digital technologies increase uptake and diversity of participants in PB processes, an important question to address is whether they ultimately change the outcomes of the process, that is: which projects are selected for funding? The limited evidence so far suggests that neither digitally enabled GOTV efforts nor i-voting have affected the final selection of projects, even when these bring new profiles of participants to the PB process (Peixoto et al., 2017; Mellon et al., 2017). A potential explanation for these results is linked to the institutional design of PB, in which the voting stage is typically preceded by a deliberative stage. In this respect, a potential hypothesis is that this deliberative stage generates sets of projects representing preferences that are more evenly distributed across demographic groups – thus reducing the effects that changes in demography may play. Whether or not further research is needed, such a potential explanation highlights the importance of taking into account institutional design, in order to better assess the impact of technologies in participatory processes. Case study: change.org5 Change.org is a certified ‘B’ Corporation social enterprise website which enables people to both start and sign a petition. Joining Change.org and creating a petition are free. Participants use a structured form to (i) identify the short title for their petition; (ii) choose a decision maker; and (iii) explain the problem to be solved. Petition creators can designate a specific number of users they want to sign their petition. Users can browse existing petitions to sign someone else’s petition, or use a search function to look for petitions on specific issues. Despite the huge scale of online petition platforms, little is known about how different demographic groups participate on them, or whose interests these petitions reflect. It is therefore an open question whether online participation will tend to replicate, exacerbate, or change the participatory and representational gaps that exist in offline participation. To help tackle this question, in a new study with collaborators Jonathan Mellon and Fredrik M. Sjoberg, we focused on the participation and success of women on Change.org (Mellon et al., 2017). More than 177 million have used the change.org website (Mellon et al., Forthcoming). Using

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a dataset of 3.9 million signers of online petitions in 132 countries, we examine the number of successful petitions and the topic of successful petitions of women and men. A major value in democratic societies is the concept of gender inclusiveness. Women in advanced industrial democracies are more likely than men to engage in ‘thin’ forms of participation, such as voting, yet less likely to engage in ‘thick’ forms, such as donating money or running for office. Lower ‘thick’ participation means that fewer women are elected to legislatures, which reduces the link between policy and women’s interests. Our first finding is that men and women actually have different policy priorities on Change. org. For instance, women are disproportionately likely to both create and sign petitions in the categories of animals and women’s rights, whereas men are more likely to create and sign petitions in the categories of economic justice and human rights. Furthermore, our results show that online petition signing reproduces the pattern of thin/thick participation seen in representative democracy. Second, women participate at high rates in the ‘thin’ form of participation of signing petitions, but under-participate in the thicker form of participation, that is, petition creation. But does that mean that – as in representative democracy – women’s interests are less likely to be taken into account? Or, considering that men are more likely to set the agenda by creating more petitions, do they ‘capture’ Change.org to further their specific policy priorities? Overall, and counter-intuitively, our results do not suggest that under-representation in creations of petition translates into poorer results for women. On the contrary, all things being equal, when petitions have an impact – for instance, when governments follow petitions’ appeal – the agenda that is actually implemented is much closer to the issues women choose to focus on than those that men focus on. The findings highlight the importance of institutional design for inclusiveness, and suggest the opportunity for online platforms, and e-petitions in particular, to create new and promising pathways for women’s political inclusion. These findings also should temper rushed criticisms against ‘thin’ forms of participation, often dismissed as ‘slacktivism’, ‘clicktivism’, and ‘pushbutton democracy’. Instead, they lend support to a more positive stance on the democratic and inclusive aspects of ‘viral engagement’. The research suggests there may be untapped policy opportunities for women’s preferences to enter the policy arena on topics they view as particularly salient. The findings demonstrate the ability for platform design to offer more meaningful, and substantive participation opportunities than the current electoral structure in established democracies. How much should we expect the findings to be generalisable? In the study, we suggest the conditions under which the same results should hold and present suggestions for further research. In the meantime, Change.org’s design seems to do a good job in mitigating the effects of unequal participation, democracy’s unresolved dilemma. 3.2  Popular Control Digital tools have the potential to foster popular control and effective communication with citizenry. Various forms of ‘civic tech’ can generate process improvements in core governance functions, by providing new and multiple entryways for citizens to engage with decision makers. ‘Civic tech’ can also equip citizens with necessary information. These digital approaches may, potentially, enable everyday people to exert control over the decisions that influence their

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lives. Many of these initiatives also have mechanisms for two-way feedback and communication between elected officials and citizens. Civic technology can create interfaces for citizens to provide input into decision making. While this may not always result in full control over agenda setting, there are pathways for citizens’ insights to inform better policy and governance. For example, Regulations.gov is an online federal portal created by the U.S. government to make public, regulatory review during notice and comment periods more transparent and accessible. This is occurring at the local level as well. For example, Grade.DC.Gov is a website that uses sentiment analysis from social media citizen input to ‘grade’ city services. It creates a public record of residents’ preferences of individual agencies, which benefits both government agencies and the public. Beyond simply enabling citizens to comment, ‘civic tech’ is also providing structured settings for people to make choices to actively govern their society. Prior to launching the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM), in Boston, its co-founders leapt onto the momentum and distribution of smart phones to develop a cutting-edge application called Citizens Connect in 2009 (Crawford and Walters, 2013). The app creates a streamlined process for residents to report local issues directly to the right municipal agency, empowering them to improve the condition of their neighbourhoods. It has been used by over 70,000 residents across multiple platforms, including a web-based interface, as well as Android mobiles. The app now accounts 20% percent of non-emergency requests in the city, leading to over 35,000 quality of life improvements (Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 2012). Unlike processes that are designed to simply modernise government, Commonwealth Connect enables direct two-way communication between city residents and government employees – there is even a constituent ‘thank you’ button to thank the public bureaucrat for well-done services. Since Boston’s new mayor took office, the application has moved from a pilot initiative to become more embedded and institutionalised within the government (Crawford and Walters, 2013). 3.3  Considered Judgement In recent years, a variety of digital deliberation software has emerged (e.g., Loomio, Pol.is, Consider.it, Deliberatorium, liquid feedback). These software programs are specifically designed to scale up deliberation. Interestingly, many of these software programs have emerged in invented spaces to improve group collaboration. For example, Loomio is software that has emerged from New Zealand developers involved in the Occupy movement (Loomio, 2018), and Pol.is has recently been used in Taiwan for a deliberation involving more than 1,800 people to discuss the pros and cons of Uber.6 Finally, particular political parties have adopted some of these technologies, such as the experiments of the German Pirate Party with liquid feedback, and the experiment of the Italian Democratic Party with the Deliberatorium (Spada et al., 2014). Distributed ICTs can also be part of a broader structure for engagement. For example, the ‘Text Talk Act’ platform created by Creating Community Solutions uses SMS to facilitate face-to-face conversations. After discussing relevant policy issues through dialogue and deliberation, participants receive discussion and polling questions (for discussion see Lukensmeymer, 2017). The extent to which these tools have promoted considered judgement is subject to debate. Deliberation through digital technologies has proved particularly difficult, in part because of

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the asynchronous nature of digital technology and the importance of face-to-face engagement for deliberations. As a result, many ‘civic tech’ solutions are not focused on deliberation. There is the additional concern that online deliberation may reinforce extant political inequalities (Smith et al., 2009). Further research is necessary to explore the impact of online deliberation on policy outcomes, not only on the design of the platform itself (for discussion, see Friess and Eilders, 2015). 3.4 Transparency In examining existing examples of civic technology, it is clear that lots of attention is dedicated to make data more transparent through releasing data and creating collaborative spaces, yet the two are rarely put together to fully promote the ideals of epistemic democracy. For example, as a first step towards empowering the public with information, the Obama Administration released an executive order making open and machine readable information, the new default for government. The official announcement notes, ‘[o]penness in government strengthens our democracy, promotes the delivery of efficient and effective services to the public, and contributes to economic growth’ (Executive Order, 2013). This, in turn, can foster the development of industries and the creation of a suite of easily accessible tools using an application program interface (API). The U.S. government’s decision to release weather and GPS data led to a $90 billion industry, ranging from precision crop farming to location-based apps, such as Google Maps. Releasing open, public government data, with an application programming interface (API), enables civic entrepreneurs, nonprofits, civil society, and others, to be able to use information to develop accessible applications, businesses, and tools to address policy problems. For example, hackathons, challenges, and the use of data by civil society have the potential lead to more accountable governance. However, releasing information on its own is not enough; data must also become embedded within a larger policy ecosystem to enable users to develop preferences, opinions, and have a say in governance decision making. The Obama Administration created the Presidential Innovation Fellows, U.S. Digital Service (USDS) in the White House, and 18F in the General Services Administration, to modernise government and deploy hyper-networked technology teams into agencies. USDS and 18F deployed service delivery teams to make government servers more user-friendly and user-centric for citizens, in part by providing easily digestible interfaces, data, and digital tools.7 Another important example comes from local government. Urban and regional governments have adopted digital technologies to be leaner and more agile, as well as to perform ‘smarter’, more targeted, responsive, and efficient form of governance (Goldsmith and Crawford, 2014). More recently, cities and regional governments have begun to actively foster new sets of public and private actors, to leverage open data to help governments improve their performance. They have also started integrating their various digital engagement initiatives in hubs that collect and share data. As Goldsmith and Crawford reflect in their study of uses of data in governance, ‘government’s authority comes from its cooperation with a vibrant community, and the community’s respect for that authority flows from government’s responsiveness’ (2014: 62). Some of the most successful examples of this new incubation and integration strategy i­ nclude: the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston and the 2011–14 implementation in

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the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, of an integrated multi-channel engagement system that combined multiple digital tools of engagement (Spada et al., 2016). Some of the more typical civic technologies implemented by these offices are: platforms that allow citizens to report non-emergency problems and track progress (e.g., Open311,8 SeeClickFix.com,9 and FixMyStreet10); platforms providing comments and feedback on city projects; policies (e.g., Reach in Singapore)11 and services that provide alerts when zoning changes are going to be implemented so that citizens can discuss them (e.g., PlaceSpeak)12; and, at the most basic level, the apps that tell us public transport locations and timings. While these tools have proven successful at enhancing transparency of service delivery, we anticipate the next generation of ‘civic tech’ tools in urban governance will seek to address increasingly complex policy areas from opioid addiction in the U.S., to growing inequality across cities and connect with the emotional experience of being a citizen. ‘Civic tech’ has yet to connect with people’s political identity. As a result, ‘civic tech’ has not yet connected to people’s hopes, fears, or ways to make them feel more efficacious in their civic and communal life.

4  CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS FOR RESEARCH There are serious limitations to leveraging ‘civic tech’ for digital participation and strengthening democracy. There have been several other scholars put forth research agendas as they relate to new trends in governance (for further discussion, see Nabatchi and Amsler, 2014) and the role for citizens in public participation (Roberts, 2008), including in multi-stakeholder processes (Bryson et al., 2013), such as, mini-publics, collaborative governance, and referendums. In this section, instead of repeating those efforts, we highlight five areas that researchers must examine with respect to ‘civic tech’ and enhancing democratic governance. These include, but are not limited to: (1) addressing the digital divide; (2) the incentives for public administrators and maintenance; (3) role of government and value of public-private partnerships; (4) measurement of impact; and (5) embedding pilot programs. First, any efforts on behalf of public administrators to deploy digital tools, must acknowledge their potential biases and address outstanding questions surrounding issues, such as, digital access, literacy, and equity. It is critical to ensure an inclusive, community-driven approach to these projects. A recent survey by MySociety, a prominent NGO, describes ‘civic tech’ in richer and more developed countries, as having a ‘clear bias in users towards the group that has often been referred to as “male, pale, and stale”’ (Rumbul, 2015: 23). Specifically, it will be important to avoid path dependency and elite capture with regards to specific funders, technology platforms, tools, technologists, and software. Working toward democratic innovations in governance will require policies around the commercially valuable and ever-ubiquitous data people generate every day. It will also be important to support public norms that guide privacy, equitable access, and citizen control over their information, including, with private companies. It will be important to safeguard against privileging only certain types of people (e.g. elites) with certain skills (e.g. data coding), via the same funding mechanisms. Across cities, the digital divide is correlated with poverty. Additionally, communities without high-speed internet often lack hardware, or digital training to effectively leverage digital tools. For example, in the United States, internet access is highly unequal: poor and rural areas

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see limited investment in digital infrastructure and hardware. Urban cities have not escaped these pitfalls. Even after a United States federal court ruling that high-speed Internet service is a utility; there are still an estimated 34 million Americans without broadband services (Kang, 2016). While research has examined the urban-rural divide, there is also growing digital inequality within cities across the globe that demands further inquiry. Second, these digital participatory processes are labour-intensive by design. What are the incentives for government officials to implement ‘civic tech’ innovations? Engaging citizens for more inclusive governance requires resources, time, and intentionality. In times of spending cuts and austerity, how can government prioritise citizen engagement? Although this chapter has outlined the potential for multi-stakeholder partnerships to buttress these initiatives, government buy-in and support are still required to structure such partnerships. Getting officials to agree to these digital democratic innovation ventures will require building a robust evidence base of what works and why. Even well-intentioned public administrators may face ossified political structures that prevent them from fully engaging with citizens (Peixoto and Fox, 2016). In particular, maintenance and upkeep of digital infrastructures are critical to ensure that processes have continual support and are integrated into the structural and budgetary systems of governments. Without dedicated maintenance and support staff, these processes and tools will quickly become outdated. Employees also need dedicated training to ensure the technology is up-to-date. What then is required for the absorption of tech tools into the structural and budgetary system of governance (for discussion see Rumbul and Shaw, 2017: 2)? We maintain that this then also requires dedicated personnel with dual competencies in technology and policy, which may push the public sector to recruit more inclusive and diverse talent including people with backgrounds in computer science, sociology, ethnography, etc. Third, ‘civic tech’ processes raise the question about what precisely is the role of governance in the 21st century? There is a long history of government reform aiming to ‘reinvent government’ to function more like a private firm. It is not the purpose of this chapter to engage in that literature (for discussions see Kettl, 2015; Evers and Ewert, 2015). Critically, it is important to note that multi-sector actors should not replace or gut the public sector. Many ‘civic tech’ projects require strong ecosystems of multi-sector partners including industry, academia, philanthropy, and civil society. The purpose of creating cross-sector collaborations is a form of ‘public value’ (Bryson et al., 2013; Moore, 2013). ‘Civic tech’ projects need to ensure that they are not abdicating responsibility for the public sector to other multi-sector actors. Instead, they should supplement and enhance the ability of the public sector to generate public value. Fourth, how can we measure the impact, both of processes and technology? We need to identify the nature of such impact and understand it relative to other types of impact. Is it simply the number of people who participate, or the type of people who participate (including their demographic diversity, as well as prior levels of civic engagement)? Alternatively, should we measure the quality and efficacy of their engagement? Can we develop ‘democratic indicators’ of ‘civic tech’ where advancing democratic norms is measured and advanced? These processes may take a long time to show results. Positive community indicators from the deployment of participatory budgeting in Brazil, for example, were only evident after many years. How can we conduct longitudinal studies of impact within a political environment that rewards instant gratification and political success? With respect to data and technological tools, what types of metrics are necessary, beyond simply quantitative metrics such as ‘amount of open data

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released’? Metrics on a government’s releasing of data are insufficient on their own. Rather, these data must be strategically deployed to engage citizens when and where they most need information. Finally, many of the examples outlined were limited in scope and topic area. If ‘civic tech’ projects are limited to only ‘toilets and trees’ they will have limited impact (for discussion see Fung, 2015). Fung (2015) refers to this as the ‘park bench problem’, where participatory interventions are only engaging citizens on small-scale politics. Public officials need to ensure that these processes are not limited in reach but rather empower civic voice and new pathways for citizens to be engaged in policy and decision making. For all the promise of these innovations and partnerships, ultimately change must seep into the very fabric of every city hall, state house, and national government building to enhance democratic innovation and foster citizen-centric governance. This will require more flexible hiring, innovative procurement, IT modernisation, and training to help existing staff understand and implement the new paradigm. The definition of ‘civic tech’ put forward in this chapter is agnostic of topic, by design, therefore ‘civic tech’ could be applied to larger scale issues within subnational governance. This is a political and bureaucratic challenge, not a technical one. ‘Civic tech’ on its own is hardly a panacea for solving democratic deficits, but it does represent a suite of tools that public sector leaders will continue to incorporate into the practice of democratic governance. The biggest question is how researchers and practitioners will adapt. We need additional research to better understand of how ‘civic tech’ enhances public goods.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank Oliver Escobar, Stephen Elstub, Archon Fung, Aliya Bhatia, Jonathan Mellon, Beth Noveck, Sonal Shah, Paolo Spada, Micah Sifry, Fredrik M. Sjoberg, David Tannenwald, K. Sabeel Rahman, Brian Wampler, Lily Wei, Stefaan Verhulst.

NOTES   1. Tom Steinberg was one of the first to highlight the problem with the deficit/surplus of names. See more at www. mysociety.org/2013/04/09/what-should-we-do-about-the-naming-deficitsurplus/.   2. The Omidyar Network, which is a foundation that was started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, provided $870 million in venture capital funding for civic projects during the period from 2013 to 2015. See more at www.omidyar.com/sites/default/files/file_archive/Pdfs/Engines%2520of%2520Change%2520-%2520Final. pdf.   3. There has been debate about these defines including, for example, whether for-profit entities (such as, Airbnb or Waze) should be included in the definition of civic tech, the role of government-backed projects, and whether or not ‘govtech’ should be counted as well. For discussions, see Heller (2013).   4. A later study, surveying both online and offline voters in a subsequent year, documents similar demographic variation and a 12% increase in turnout (see Halkin et al., 2017). This difference, however, may be attributable to specific get-out-the-vote efforts aimed at i-voting at the same period of the second assessment (see Peixoto et al., 2017).   5. Change.org research reflects our collaborative work with Jonathan Mellon and Fredrik M. Sjoberg. See Mellon et al. (2017).   6. See http://blog.pol.is/vtaiwan-uberx/ for more information.   7. USDS and 18F are federal agencies, comprising teams of engineers, designers, coders, and policy makers to improve service delivery for citizens. USDS is housed at the Office of Management and Budget and is actively deploying USDS teams throughout agencies. 18F is housed at the General Services Administration. See more at

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  8.   9. 10.

11. 12.

www.usds.gov and https://18f.gsa.gov/. These agencies grew out of the Presidential Innovation Fellows, a fellowship to bring in technology experts for a rotation in the federal government. They reflect a general trend for integrating technology into federal government under the Obama Administration, including the first position of Chief Technology Officer and Data Scientist. See www.open311.org/ for reporting non-emergency urban issues. It has become an open and collaborative model which cities can use. SeeClickFix has ‘civic points’ for engagement (ranging from reporting an issue to starting a watch group) and even a button to send a ‘thank you’ directly to the public official who fixed the problem. Three hundred cities use SeeClickFix and 180 cities have their own White Label Versions. See also Sifry (2014) for more information. FixMyStreet is an open source platform empowering residents to report on non-emergency issues in their neighbourhood. Issues are reported online, allowing others to offer support or comment. Starting in 2007, as the first UK-wide system, it has now expanded across the globe from Korea to Tunisia. See www.fixmystreet.kr and http://fixkairouan.org/ for more information. See www.reach.gov.sg/ for more information. Placespeak was born in Vancouver for the described function of allowing citizens to participate in local discussions about rezoning in their neighbourhood; it has now evolved into a more comprehensive neighbourhood-level consultation tool. See www.placespeak.com/en/ for more information.

REFERENCES Bryson, J.M., K.S. Quick, C.S. Slotterback and B.C. Crosby (2013), ‘Designing public participation processes’, Public Administration Review, 73 (1), 23–34. Cohen, J. (1989), ‘Deliberation and democratic legitimacy’, in A. Hamlin and P. Pettit (eds), The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State, New York, NY: Blackwell, pp. 17–34. Commonwealth of Massachusetts (2012), Citizens Commonwealth Connect App, accessed 6 November 2018 at www. mass.gov/anf/budget-taxes-and-procurement/community-innovation-challenge-grant/citizens-commonwealth-­ connect-app.html. Coursey, D. and D.F. Norris (2008), ‘Models of e-government: Are they correct? An empirical assessment’, Public Administration Review, 68 (3), 523–536. Crawford, S. and D. Walters (2013), ‘Citizen-centered governance: The Mayor´s office of new urban mechanics and the evolution of CRM in Boston’, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, 30 July. Evers, A. and B. Ewert (2015), Social innovation for social cohesion, in A. Nicholls, J. Simon and M. Gabriel (eds), New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 107–127. Freeman, S. (2002), ‘Deliberative democracy: A sympathetic comment’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 29 (4), 371–418. Friess, D. and C. Eilders (2015), ‘A systematic review of online deliberation research’, Policy and Internet, 7 (3), 319–339. Fung, A. (2015), ‘Putting the public back into governance: The challenges of citizen participation and its future’, Public Administration Review, 75 (4), 513–522. Fung, A., M. Graham and D. Weil (2007), Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldsmith, S. and S.P. Crawford (2014), The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Gutmann, A. and D. Thompson (2004), Why Deliberative Democracy?, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. (1996), Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (W. Rehg, Trans.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Halkin, M., F.M., Sjoberg and J. Mellon (2017), ‘Impact of online voting on participatory budgeting in Brazil’, in T. Peixoto and M.L. Sifry (eds), Civic Tech in the Global South: Assessing Technology for the Public Good, Washington, DC: World Bank and Personal Democracy Press. Heller, N. (2013), ‘The sharing economy is not civic tech’, Global Integrity, 17 December, accessed 6 November 2018 at www.globalintegrity.org/2013/12/the-sharing-economy-is-not-civic-tech/. Howard, A. (2015), ‘Civic tech in 2015: 6.4 billion to connect citizens to services, and to one another’, TechRepublic, 6 February, accessed 6 November 2018 at www.techrepublic.com/article/civic-tech-in-2015-6-9-billionto-connect-citizens-to-services-and-to-one-another/. Justice Information Sharing (2013), E-Government Act of 2002, accessed 6 November 2018 at https://it.ojp.gov/ PrivacyLiberty/authorities/statutes/1287.

Digital participation 117 Kang, C. (2016), ‘Court backs rules treating internet as utility, not luxury’, The New York Times, 14 June, accessed 6 November 2018 at www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/technology/net-neutrality-fcc-appeals-court-ruling.html. Kettl, D.F. (2015), ‘The job of government: Interweaving public functions and private hands’, Public Administration Review, 75 (2), 219–229. Knight Foundation and Rita Allen Foundation (2017), ‘Scaling civic tech: Paths to a sustainable future’, Knight Foundation, 31 October. Loomio (n.d.), ‘About us’, accessed 6 November 2018 at www.loomio.org/about. Lukensmeymer, C.J. (2017), ‘Civic tech and public policy decision making’, PS: Journal of Political Science and Politics, 50 (3), 764–771. Mansbridge, J. and J., Parkinson (2013), Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mellon, J., T. Peixoto and F.M. Sjoberg (2017), ‘Does online voting change the outcome? Evidence from a multimode public policy referendum’, Electoral Studies, 47, 13–24. Mellon, J., H.R. Gilman, F.M. Sjoberg. and T. Peixoto (2017), ‘Gender and political mobilization online participation and policy success on a global petitioning platform’, Ash Center Occasional Papers, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, 1 July, accessed 10 August 2019 at https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/gender_and_political_mobilization_online.pdf. Moore, M.H. (2013), Recognizing Public Value, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nabatchi, T. and L.B. Amsler (2014), ‘Direct public engagement in local government’, American Review of Public Administration, 44 (4), suppl 63S-88S. Omidyar Network (2016), ‘Engines of change: What civic tech can learn from social movements’, Omidyar Network, June 8. Peixoto, T. and J. Fox (2016), ‘When does ICT-enabled citizen voice lead to government responsiveness?’, IDS Bulletin, 47 (1), 23–40. Peixoto, T., F.M. Sjoberg and J. Mellon (2017), ‘A Get Out The Vote (GOTV) experiment on the world’s largest participatory budgeting vote in Brazil’, British Journal of Political Science, 1–9 doi:10.1017/S0007123417000412. Peixoto, T. (2009), ‘Beyond theory: E-participatory budgeting and its promises for eParticipation’, European Journal of ePractice, 7 (5), 1–9. Richardson, H.S. (2002), Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy, New York: Oxford University Press. Roberts, N. Charlotte (2008), The Age of Direct Citizen Participation, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Rumbul, R and E. Shaw (2017), ‘Civic Tech Cities’, MySociety and Microsoft, accessed 6 November 2018 at https:// research.mysociety.org/sites/civic-tech-cities/#start. Rumbul, R (2015), ‘Who benefits from civic technology?’ MySociety, accessed 6 November 2018 at https://research. mysociety.org/publications/who-benefits-from-civic-technology. Sifry, M.L. (2014), ‘Civic tech and engagement: How SeeClickFix is changing the fabric of local reality’, TechPresident, 24 July, accessed 6 November 2018 at http://techpresident.com/news/25206/civic-tech-and-engagementhow-seeclickfix-changing-fabric-local-reality Smith, G. (2009), Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation, Cambridge University Press. Smith, G., P. John, P. Strugis and H. Nomura (2009), ‘Deliberation and internet engagement: Initial findings from a randomized controlled trial evaluating the impact of facilitated internet forums’, paper presented to the European Consortium of Political Research General Conference, Universitat Potsdam, 10–12 September. Spada, P., M. Klein, R. Calabretta, L. Iandoli and I. Quinto (2014), ‘A first step toward scaling-up deliberation: Optimizing large group e-deliberation using argument maps’, paper presented to the American Political Science Association conference. 110th Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, August 28–31. Spada, P., J. Mellon, T. Peixoto and F.M. Sjoberg (2016), ‘Effects of the internet on participation: Study of a public policy referendum in Brazil’, Journal of Information Technology and Politics, 13 (3), 187–207. Steinberg, T. (2013), ‘What should we do about the naming deficit/surplus?’, mySociety blog, 9 April, accessed 6 November 2018 at https://www.mysociety.org/2013/04/09/what-should-we-do-about-the-naming-deficitsurplus/. Steinberg, T. (2014), ‘“Civic Tech” has won the name-game. But what does it mean?’, mySociety blog, 8 September, accessed 6 November 2018 at www.mysociety.org/2014/09/08/civic-tech-has-won-the-name-game-but-whatdoes-it-mean/. The White House (2013), Executive Order 13642 – Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information, Press Release, May 9. Thomas, J.C. and G. Streib (2003), ‘The new face of government: Citizen-initiated contacts in the era of e-government’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 13 (1), 83–102. U.S. General Services Administration (2000), FirstGov.Gov – A Great New Resource, Press Release, October 11.

118  Handbook of democratic innovation and governance Welch, E.W., C.C. Hinnant. and M. Jae Moon (2005), ‘Linking citizen satisfaction with e-government and trust in government’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 15 (3), 371–391. West, T. and W.A. Schambra (2007), ‘The progressive movement and the transformation of American politics’, First Principles Series, The Heritage Foundation, 18 July. World Bank Group (2016), Evaluating Digital Citizen Engagement: A Practical Guide, Washington, DC USA: World Bank.

SECTION II DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS AND THE DEMOCRATIC MALAISE

8.

Does political trust matter? Gerry Stoker and Mark Evans

1  DEFINITIONAL ISSUES In exploring the relationship between trust and politics we need first to reflect on some defini­ tional issues; then ask what drives trust in terms of individual drivers and motivation. Trust judgements are for most people surface-level opinions and not the product of careful deliberation. They are a useful indicator of general attitudes and will perhaps reflect a sense of what others – especially their peers – might be thinking and saying and will in addition reflect personal experiences and circumstances. When it comes to trust in government then individuals are likely to tie their trust judgements to broader opinions they have about how effectively they think democracy is working and how much say other interests, other than their own, are having sway over decisions. Trust judgements are broad conceptualisations and reflect a general orientation towards how the political system is working. 1.1  What Trust Means to Citizens Although there are some definitional challenges there is enough common ground to enable a focus on trust as a relational concept about ‘keeping promises and agreements’ (Hetherington, 2005). There is also considerable debate about how to measure trust (for a review see Marien, 2011). Broadly the choice is between whether to treat trust as a one-dimensional attitude or a multi-dimensional set of attitudes. Citizens logically might use different criteria to evaluate the trust of different institutions (Fisher et al., 2010). They might think about it pragmatically or strategically in terms of the perceived delivery record of the institution, or about the moral capacity of its leaders to do the right thing or about the checks and balances in place to make sure that those leaders behave appropriately. However, other researchers (see: Marien, 2011; Marien and Hooghe, 2011) suggest that despite this complexity, trust judgements for most citizens are effectively one-dimensional, as the different types of judgements combine in one generalised perception that they apply to everyday situations. Focus group work on trust indicates that people find it hard to explain their thought processes when coming to a trust judgement but that trust scores still seem to capture (if somewhat imperfectly) the general public image of an organisation and this is ‘indicative of the credit that people grant to the institutions in question, or the tendency to accept what they do’ (Dekker, 2012: 19). As Levi and Stoker (2000: 481) comment, the available research tells us that ‘whether citizens express trust or distrust is primarily a reflection of their political lives’. The lesson we draw from this insight is that we need to explore how trust is perceived and understood in different sections of society. In short, we need to model the drivers of trust. Trust is not something that is ‘determined’ by personality or social characteristics as much as perceptions that citizens have towards government and politics and the context in which they are making a judgement.

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Drawing on quantitative survey research from 2016 in Australia, we can see how the drivers of trust reflect particular stages in the life journey of the individual and their wider attitudes to the political system (see Figure 8.1). In February and March 2016, the Museum of Australian Democracy (MoAD) and the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis (IGPA) commissioned IPSOS to survey 1444 Australians on the relationship between trust in the political system and attitudes towards democracy. Participants for this survey were selected based on quotas corresponding to age, gender, location, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander status and immigration status. Participants were aged 18 years or older. Results were post weighted in terms of age, gender, location, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander status and immigration status. The survey was therefore representative of the adult Australian population. We found that Australian male citizens and citizens on low incomes appear less trusting of federal government; while citizens experiencing higher education, indigenous communities, and new arrivals to Australia appear more trusting. So, the picture on trust and life experience is complex. As for attitudes, the analysis appears more straightforward: those who tend not to trust have stronger general fears about the state of democratic politics in Australia. They either don’t care or they think the system is in decline or run for big interests. All of which suggests a strong connection between disaffection with politics and lack of trust in government. This connection between disaffection with politics and lack of trust in government in Australia is in keeping withTrust the broader international evidence. The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Figure 8.1 in Federal Government in Australia Age: 50 and above Male Income: