Integrating Democratic Innovations into Representative Democracy: How Participatory Processes can Address the Challenges of Social Legitimacy, Institutional Sustainability and Policy Effectiveness

Over the last few decades, various forms of participatory processes have been experimented in several countries in order to somewhat ‘democratize’ more our representative democracies. Local governments, in particular, have emerged as main promoters of these democratic innovations, although also regional and national governments have rarely introduced similar processes or tried to incentive and institutionalize them through the adoption of laws. The diffusion of participatory processes has brought out the issue of their capacity to effectively integrate representative democratic systems. The paper has the aim of identifying which combinations of strategies and tools can favour the good integration of democratic innovations into the traditional policy making and why. Integration is here framed as the capacity of a participatory process to somehow successfully address three main challenges: 1) social legitimacy, namely the capacity of the process to be perceived by civil society actors as a legitimate tool to take public decisions; 2) institutional sustainability, that is the capacity of the process to avoid conflicts and resistance by politicians and civil servants; 3) policy effectiveness, namely the capacity of the participatory process to really produce some relevant changes in public policies. The paper aims at addressing this issue by presenting the preliminary findings of a Horizon2020 empirical research on 31 inclusive processes in European municipalities, which has been conducted combining the analysis of 31 semi-structured interviews to facilitators and promoters of the processes and the analysis of the speech acts of 75 local administrators, civil servants and civil society actors involved in the processes, who took part to a deliberative event in October 2017.