Democratic innovations and participatory democracy - questions of efficiency and effectiveness

Abstract

The participatory democracy focuses on relations between the citizen and state, through developing formal methods for involving citizens in policymaking processes. Its important dimension is to improve participation, both in numbers of participants and quality of process, especially by including the marginalized groups. The ways and tools serving to broaden citizens’ access to agenda-setting and decision-making processes are the key aspect of democratic innovations to be investigated on this place. By combining the normative and empirical perspective of participatory innovation we also envisage to deal with the constitutional changes and institutional engineering in this direction. This panel aims to contribute by combining the various approaches and research questions significant for the assessment of the devices under scrutiny to democratic and effective decision-making, especially questions of openness and access (input-legitimacy), questions regarding the quality of deliberation (throughput); and questions of efficiency and effectiveness (output-legitimacy). The panel seeks to combine papers investigating different forms of democratic innovation and participatory democracy with multi-level perspective. We would like to encourage presentation of research papers offering various approaches, which examine the short-term and long-term impacts of such democratic innovations. Both, theoretical and empirical papers relating this issue are welcome.

Title	Details
Testing Charter–Manifesto Congruence For Democratic Innovations within Political Parties: Evidence from Hungary	View Paper Details
Effectiveness and efficiency of a public hearing in the Polish Parliament	View Paper Details
Citizens in the making? Participation of children and youth at the local level in Poland and Finland	View Paper Details
Subnational deliberative constitutionalism	View Paper Details