What Should We Expect from Participatory Institutions? A Theoretical and Methodological Framework

Democratic innovations are new institutions designed to increase citizen participation in political decision-making. Research shows that these institutions overcome democratic deficits as well as improve citizens’ lives. Advocates push for the adoption of a wide range of new participatory and deliberative institutions in the hopes that they will help deepen democracy and improve specific policy and social outcomes. A roadblock in the current academic and policy literature is that no one has developed a concise framework to identify when and where we might be able to assess impact. The current literature is currently plagued by a huge diversity of approaches as individual researchers search for different ways to measure impact. In this paper, we draw on a wide body of empirical and theoretical literature to develop a theoretical approach and an analytical framework in which we establish the parameters that one might expect participatory institutions to contribute to the strengthening of representative democracy as well as to improvements in well-being.