Institutionalising Deliberative Democracy: The Case of Regional Laws

The paper aims to identify key factors and to explain mechanisms that influence the adoption of regional Laws on deliberative participatory practices. The institutionalisation of such practices is becoming a political issue in several countries: in 2002 the French “Law on proximity democracy” has permanently institutionalised the Débat publique for projects of big infrastructures; since 2007 Italy has moved in this direction through a main regional initiative; since 2009 Peru and Poland have introduced Laws to incentive the organization of participatory budgets at the local level; Andalusia is now discussing a draft Law on participatory practices. This paper will present the findings of an in-depth analysis of the policy-making processes that led to the approval and then to the revision of the Tuscany “Law on participation”. I will apply the “process sequencing approach” (Howlett and Rayner, 2006; Howlett, 2009) in order to trace the contribution of different factors over time. This case study is particularly useful in order to set two key issues for a future comparative research agenda on the institutionalisation of deliberative participatory practices. The former concerns the implications of a subnational institutionalisation, since this law is the first and so far the only example of well established regional legislation, but it will be probably followed by others in the next years. The latter regards the role of temporariness in affecting the adoption or abandonement of democratic innovations, since the first law was supposed to stop its efficacy in 2013 and a new law has just replaced it.