Realizing the vision of a more participatory, more deliberative democracy is often assumed to require an integration of alternative participatory practices means in contemporary representative democracies. A broad variety of democratic innovations is directed at providing such alternatives in order to activate citizens, increase their support for democratic systems, and achieve more inclusive decision-making procedures (Smith 2009). The actual impact of democratic innovations on collectively binding decision-making – and thus their contribution to improving democratic quality – are, however, a disputed issue.
One crucial precondition for realizing the vision of a more participatory democracy by implementing democratic innovations is their embeddedness within the political system as a whole. Based on the systemic approach’s premises (Mansbridge 2012; Dryzek & Niemeyer 2010), we argue that this “embeddedness” can be empirically assessed by measuring the “transmissions”, i.e.: the “flows of communication” occurring between democratic innovations and institutions with the capacity to make collectively-binding decisions.
The paper’s main aim consists in developing a conceptual and methodological framework for such a measurement of transmissions and applying it to an exemplary case. Accordingly, the first part of the paper outlines the methodological framework which is based on the conceptual premises of the systemic approach and suggests to measure the quantity of “topics” and “results” which are transmitted from democratic innovations to decision-making institutions by means of a quantitative content analysis. The second part of the paper applies this framework to an exemplary case and evaluates the embeddedness of citizen participation on the district level in the German city state of Hamburg. As a result of several electoral law reforms since 2000, Hamburg now offers a broad variety of participatory means to its citizens which complement the electoral system. We apply our analytical and methodological framework to citizen forums focusing on infrastructure development at the district level in Hamburg and provide an empirical assessment of their impact on collectively binding decision-making.
In the concluding section, we discuss the explanatory power of the proposed transmission-measurement. We also outline perspectives for applications of this framework to large-n comparative studies as a large-scale assessment of “transmissions” would be a suitable point of departure for evaluating democratic innovations’ overall contributions to realizing the vision of a more participatory and inclusive democracy.
References:
Dryzek, J., & Niemeyer, S. (2010). Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mansbridge, J., Bohman, J., Chambers, S., Christiano, T., Fung, A., Parkinson, J., … Warren, M. E. (2012). A systemic approach to deliberative democracy. Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale. Cambridge University Press, 1–26.
Smith, G. (2009). Democratic innovations: Designing institutions for citizen participation. Cambridge University Press.
