Are Democratic Innovations always "Democratic"? Exploring the Influence of Regime Type on Public Engagement Mechanisms

The wave of democratic innovations (Elstub and Escobar 2019) has swept the world (OECD 2020), with citizen assemblies and other randomly-selected mini-publics, participatory budgeting and digital participation initiatives mushrooming in democracies and authoritarian states alike. In democracies, there is increasing interest in these new forms of public engagement whether from public officials struggling to manage policymaking’s increasing complexity (Warren 2014); political leaders worried about populist and anti-establishment tendencies (Kindt and Theuwis 2022); environmental movements keen to build public support for more radical responses to climate change; and increasingly mainstream media. Interestingly, this is not a phenomenon only concerning democratic regimes. In autocracies, participatory mechanisms have also proliferated, and include consultative and deliberative forums (He and Warren 2011; Owen 2017), participatory budgeting mechanisms (Afanasiev and Shash 2021; Li et al 2022), online feedback forums (Fu and Distelhorst 2018; Chang and Zhang 2021), as well as many others. Such innovations are often explicitly invoked by authoritarian leaders as examples of the grassroots democracy flourishing inside their regimes. The problems these mechanisms aim to address are similar across regime types: problems with the functional capacity for service delivery; the erosion of trust in local government among increasingly assertive populations; and the need to legitimise potentially unpopular policy decisions. These models of civic participation possess allegedly easy-to-replicate (and sometimes patented) formats that enjoy the favours of international organisations, such as the World Bank, which often promote these processes as part of their reform packages. Paradoxically, enthusiasm for public engagement is happening in contexts where the space for democratic decisions is shrinking under pressures of the neoliberal political economy – in democracies and authoritarian states alike. Citizen participation seems thus confined to sanitised spaces, such as citizen assemblies or participatory budgeting initiatives, which sit comfortably with the neoliberal rhetoric of good governance and open government, while doing little to further genuine democratisation or social justice (Baocchi and Ganuza 2014; Bua and Bussu, 2021). Often proposed as an antidote to democratic backsliding or a step towards democratisation, participatory innovations might be complicit in maintaining the political status quo, as they tend to bypass or tame independent forms of citizen organising and claim-making. This paper compares the rationales for and practices of participatory innovations within democratic and authoritarian regimes, revealing similar patterns. We build on the nascent literature on participatory authoritarianism (Owen 2020) to question binary distinctions between democracies and authoritarian states when it comes to participatory mechanisms.