Democratic Innovations and (Anti-) Corruption: Promises, Limits, and Outcomes

Abstract

The panel “Democratic Innovations and (Anti-) Corruption: Promises, Limits, and Outcomes” aims to explore the link between democratic innovations and (anti-)corruption initiatives. Although many scholars recognize the need for greater caution when analyzing democratic innovations and their diffusion across the globe, it is often expected that they contribute to enhancing political inclusion, social equality, responsiveness, and accountability. These are also considered key elements to increase the odds of success in the anti-corruption struggle. Not by chance, there has been an increasing demand for anti-corruption indirect actions, although there is only a vague understanding of what these types of measures actually include. There are at least two challenges to the research of indirect anti-corruption measures: First, the indirect anti-corruption activities are difficult to conceptualize, because as per definition, they go beyond the anti-corruption sector and can be related to effective and efficient governance or even to more democratic participation. Second, these projects are challenging to assess due to their long-term impact and indirect causal effects on corruption. On the one hand, there are implicit expectations that democratic innovations, including participatory and deliberative democracy, civic tech, and e-democracy (in contrast to e-governance), are able to improve the interaction between the state and citizens through increasing trust and control of citizens over the state and, hence, decreasing corruption. At the same time, empirical evidence and theoretical mechanisms of this effect are still scattered. Given these two strands — democratic innovations and (anti-)corruption — that are implicitly connected, we are looking for theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions to refine the links between them. This panel seeks to ask questions like the following: - What are the implicit imaginaries and explicit expectations behind the democratic innovations that aim to counteract corruption, either directly or indirectly? - What are the theories of change behind the capacity of democratic innovations to counteract corruption? - How can civic tech and e-democracy (in contrast to e-governance) be a useful anti-corruption tools? How do those tools emerge, and which effect do they have on society? - How to assess the capacity of democratic innovations to counteract corruption? And how to measure outcomes? - How does corruption manifest itself in democratic innovations and e-democracy procedures?

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