Democratic Innovations and Policy Making. Advantages, Shortcomings, ‘Reverse Representation’ and the Potential of a ‘Hybrid Representative Democracy

The paper addresses issues regarding the relationship between democratic innovations, basically in the form of mini public, and the public in general with focus on issues of policy making. We analyse the concept of representation in the context of these small participatory spaces (mini publics);how their design corresponds to legitimacy claims and, how they can contribute towards citizens centred policy making. We address their representativeness under a re-appraisal of the concept of representation which we call “reverse representation” and we examine how modern representative democracies can accommodate both elected and non-elected (by sortition) bodies. The paper scrutinises both the advantages and the caveats of legitimacy in the context of mini publics outcomes; it underlines challenges and possible interpretive paths to overcome difficulties of scalability in deliberation and democratic innovations. In the end, we propose a “hybrid’ form of representative democracy which can accommodate and combine multiple forms of representation, permitting the expansion of participatory spaces and enabling a more informed and citizens -centred policy making.