What about the Representativeness of our Cases? 'Big Data' and the Use of Democratic Innovations

It is a commonplace that in local democracy, democratic innovations take place more and more often. However, evidence on the frequency and the distribution of these processes stem only from anecdotal reports or are based on unsystematic observation. Currently, most insight is gathered by single case studies or compilations of single case studies. Such studies generate close and valuable insights into the phenomena and they allow for hypotheses generation. But they do not allow for hypotheses testing. Albeit the growing body of empirical literature on participatory processes (PPs), we are not ably to make inferences from these case studies, as we do not know anything about the universe of our cases of democratic innovations. And we therefore do not know whether the cases observed tell us the whole story or whether they are special cases that cannot be used for inferences. And we hardly have any variance in the dependent variables that we want to explain, as in general only "best-cases" are reported in the literature. What we need for further research is more knowledge about the "universe" of democratic innovations. At least we should know more about the representativeness of our cases with regard to certain variables that we want to study. Being able to select our cases from a large universe, we can then select our cases systematically (with a necessary variance in the respective dependent variables – as far as we know about them) and try to answer research questions like why we find differences in the effectiveness of PPs, in their inclusiveness, in their effects on the local political culture or on local representative democracy. The proposed paper will present a web-based approach to semi-automatically monitor the full "universe" of participatory processes that took place in German municipalities in Baden-Württemberg during the last two to five years - a kind of "big data" tool, which might open a way for more systematic and hypothesis testing approaches to many research questions regarding democratic innovations.