Should all democratic innovations be influential? A study of minipublics in Belgium (2001-19)

The question of democratic innovations’ impact on public policy is a salient issue in the literature. Numerous studies have investigated and assessed whether these participatory processes exert an influence on public policy, and most do so by assuming that all democratic innovations should have a substantial impact. A new theoretical approach is, however, changing fundamentally this research agenda. Mark Warren’s Problem-Based Approach to democracy posits that we should assess citizen participation based on the problem it seeks to solve. He argues that institutions—including democratic innovations—can contribute to realizing three main democratic functions, namely empowered inclusion, collective will formation, and collective decision-making. This functionalist approach means that we should evaluate the impact of democratic innovations based on their contributions to these deficient functions. Yet, the relationship between impact on public policy and problems still needs to be theorized. How does a problem determine the degree of impact on public policy that we could expect from a democratic innovation? Should all democratic innovations have a constant degree of impact, irrespective of the problem they aim to solve? Or should we adapt our expectations depending on their functionalist purpose? This paper intends to make a theoretical and empirical contribution about how democratic problems interweave with the impact of democratic innovations on public policy. After conceptualizing the various contributions of democratic innovations, it deconstructs the concept of problems into different categories based on their scale and nature. For the analysis, I examine a specific type of democratic innovations: deliberative minipublics. I rely on a new database, the Belgian Minipublics Project, which consists of 43 minipublics that occurred in Belgium between 2001 and 2019. For each case, I examine the problems it sought to solve through the motives of its convenors, its embeddedness in the policy-making process, and its contributions. The degree of coherency between these three dimensions gives an indication of the desirability and actual capacity of minipublics to have an impact on public policy. The preliminary results indicate that it is counterproductive to expect from all minipublics a similar degree of impact on public policy. We should instead consider the problem in order to evaluate their genuine contributions to democratic systems. I suggest nonetheless that a normative common denominator—autonomy—should apply to all democratic innovations, irrespective of the problems they seek to solve. An autonomous democratic innovation is one that is not instrumentalized by decision-makers and that can exert an influence of its own on public policy.