Varieties of citizen engagement? The institutional design of democratic innovations in Europe in comparative perspective

There has been a growing academic interest in democratic innovations (DI) in the wake of the democratic malaise that has been sweeping Europe. Such malaise is characterised by increasing dissatisfaction with representative institutions and increasing distrust between voters and elected officials. Many have argued that DIs can be the remedy since they purportedly seek to bring citizens closer to the policy- and decision-making process. These DIs can be defined as institutions or processes (Elstub & Escobar 2019; Smith 2009) that employ deliberative and/or participatory (Smith 2009; Warren 2009) means to increase and diversify citizen’s participation in public affairs (Elstub & Escobar 2019; Pogrebinschi 2023) with the overarching goal of improving the quality of democracy (Geissel & Newton 2012) by tackling specific contextual deficits (Pogrebinschi 2023). However, as Smith (2019) rightly contends, much of the empirical research on DIs has focused on successful case studies. While there has been in the past, comparative studies of DIs across European countries (see Geissel 2019, for instance), more should be done on cross-country variation in the institutional features of DIs as well as the relationship between such features and other dimensions of each country’s political system in order to build better generalisations regarding the relationship between the two spheres and how they interact with each other. Thus, the present paper seeks to answer the following research questions: are there shared characteristics and unique features in the institutional design of DIs across different European countries, and if so, what factors play a crucial role in explaining such trends? To answer these questions, the present research adopts an large-N cross-country comparative perspective where the institutional features of DIs can be contrasted between countries with contrasting political cultures, different systems of democratic government, and distincts degrees of administrative decentralisation. Here we assume that states are the primary units of political organisation which vary across important political aspects that influence the institutional design of DIs. To this end, cluster analysis and an extensive dataset of DIs in Europe from the 1970s to the present will be employed. This dataset is the result of a collection and compilation of open access datasets such as Participedia (Fung & Warren 2011), and the OECD’s Database of Representative Deliberative Processes and Institutions (2021) among others. The dataset is composed of over 1300 cases from all European countries, spanning the 1970s to the present. The institutional dimensions of interest pertaining to DIs are sourced from Elstub and Escobar’s (2019) updated revision of Fung’s (2006) Democracy Cube. These dimensions are divided into four features related to how DIs recruit citizens into the process, the modalities of participation afforded to citizens in such processes, how decisions are arrived at, and the extent to which citizens have power and influence over the decisions. Additionally, each individual case was classified according to its institutional features, policy area and stage of the policy cycle in which it is inserted into, as well as to the governance level (local, regional, national, or transnational) that it seeks to influence.