Abstract
Democratic innovations are increasingly considered as a strategy to renew decision-making at the one hand, and to change public service delivery and the management of the commons at the other hand. To be effective, they must be grounded in institutions that favor multidirectional processes and that intend to deepen the role of citizens in multilevel governance by the increase of participation, deliberation, and influence. Thus, democratic innovations, whatever form they take, presuppose a “game change” in that they assume partnerships between actors and levels of government, and not any tokenistic actions.
On the one hand, the paper sheds light on aspects related to the institutionalization of forms of participatory democracy, that is how democratic innovations are anchored and regulated at different levels of government (descriptive-analytical dimension). On the other hand, the paper analyses the functioning of certain democratic innovations from the perspective of their embeddedness (systemic-empirical dimension). It first traces the sources of the increased interest and acceptance of governments in engaging citizens in decision-making and public service delivery. These include: growing public concern about the legitimacy of public decisions, increasing belief that the knowledge and expertise of citizens improves the quality of decision-making, acceptance that the contesting views of citizens on controversial issues must be properly heard before final decisions are taken, and shortages of public sector resource. The paper then analyzes practices of democratic innovations at different levels of government in European countries, and it puts them into dialogue by investigating their similarities and differences.
The paper suggests that democratic innovations are under-appreciated by policymakers, and it reviews the reasons for this by analyzing the participatory, agonistic, and transformative accounts of democratic innovations in European multitier systems. Collapsing the divide between normative and empirical approaches to democratic studies and federalism is the objective of the paper that so contributes to answer the question what role democratic innovations can have in an era of democratic decay.