Public policies and institutional design for participation: a European research

The growing disconnection between citizens and decision-makers (Dalton, Farrell and McAllister 2011) is pushing politics towards a re-shaping of institutional design (Smith 2009). In this frame, communication tools can play an important role in supporting new spaces of participation, off-line (i.e. deliberative assemblies) and online (participatory platforms). In this respect, the web represents an added value to strengthen the quality of deliberative talk but also, and primarily, to improve the quality of public policies and the democratic responsiveness (Morlino 2011). In the same time, new forms of participatory democracy are rising up; it seems they are breaking the traditional frame of deliberative theory and also re-shaping the consolidated assets of participatory democracy. These new experiences seem going even beyond the analytical framework of democratic innovations (Smith 2009), so creating new methodological problems for the researchers. The aim of this paper is to present a research project about the relationships between the new forms of collaborative governance, some experiences of institutional design and the citizens e-participation in the frame of deliberative/participatory democracy. The research design tries to hold together three different perspectives: a) the impact of digital communication on the structures and processes of democratic governance; b) the role of deliberative democracy experiences as open frames; c) the relationship between public policies and different institutional designs, also considering the endogenous and exogenous democratic processes (della Porta 2013) implied. The research project adopts the perspective of the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) ad tries to apply the Todem model (Diamond and Morlino 2005; Morlino 2011) to study how this new hybrid forms of democratic innovation can improve the quality of democracy. It considers Italy, France and UK in a comparative perspective. Our first findings put in evidence the two distinctive elements of the democratic innovations in Italy, France and UK: the first one deals with the technological dimension, the second one is rooted in the process of deliberation and in the new design for participation. How to study these new experiences? Basic references Dalton, R. J., Farrell, D. M. and McAllister I. (2011) Political Parties & Democratic Linkage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. della Porta, D. (2013) Can Democracy Be Saved? Cambridge: Polity. Diamond, L. and Morlino, L. (2005) Assessing the Quality of Democracy. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University. Milakovich, M. E. (2014) Digital Governance. London: Routledge. Morlino, L. (2011) Changes for Democracy. Actors, Structures, Processes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, G. (2009) Democratic Innovations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.