Democratic Innovations and Trust in Political Institutions

In many countries actors and institutions of representative democracy are facing decline in satisfaction with their work and therefore struggling also for public trust, social legitimacy, turnout at the elections as citizens believe they are inadequately represented by politicians. All these also represent a challenge to the quality of democracy and imposes a risk of democratic backsliding. Politicians as well as citizens are therefore looking for additional and novel forms of citizen participation and the inclusion of the former into political processes. Recently different kind of democratic innovations and policy actions that give citizens (an effective) role in public decision-making have been formed and their format nowadays ranging from rather known (binding) referendums and initiatives, to participatory budgeting and mini-publics such as citizens’ forums or citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, and deliberative polling, held on the local level or nationwide societal dialogues. Anticipation is that these democratic innovations could reconnect institutions with citizens. Despite Slovenia has been frequently, at least from the end of the 1990s, described as consolidated democracy it cannot avoid many problems: rather low and in some periods even extreme low satisfaction with the functioning of democracy as well as trust in political institutions, rather low institutionalisation of a party system and turnout, high voters’ volatility. In this paper we are interested in what is the potential of democratic innovations or political actions for trust building. Despite there have been many debates about the effects of these innovations, also some empirical research of their impact on political participation, research about the impact of democratic innovations on trust in political institutions is still rather scarce although some data show that participation in democratic innovations can influence citizens’ perceived trust towards (local) political institutions. To reach the main aim of the paper we will firstly prepare a literature review and identify existent democratic innovations and policy action tools for increasing inclusiveness and participation of citizens. This will represent a basis for building a research model for analysis of the impact of democratic innovations on trust in political institutions. Lastly we will test our model on the basis of public opinion data for Slovenia, among others we will compare the trends of trust in institution with membership in civil society organisations in different time periods. The paper will present the first results of the HORIZON EUROPE study of ‘Trust in European Democracies – TRUEDEM’.