The Design and Inclusiveness of Double Hybrid Democratic Innovations

This proposal addresses the first theme "Deepening and Broadening Democracy Across Contemporary Societal Divides". By studying the inclusiveness of double hybrid democratic innovations, it aims to provide insights on a possible way of dealing with inequalities and divides in society, thereby contributing to more inclusive and equitable democratic innovations. Over the past decades, Western democracies have witnessed the proliferation of democratic innovations (Elstub & Escobar, 2019). Since the majority of these innovations are of a deliberative nature, it has been argued that participation has taken a deliberative turn (Ganuza & Francés, 2012). Although deliberative democratic innovations offer many advantages, such as the deliberative quality of the dialogue and the epistemic quality of the final decision, an important drawback of deliberative participatory processes is their limits in terms of inclusion. This is problematic from the perspective of both input and output legitimacy: not all affected citizens have been given the opportunity to provide input, and not all potentially relevant input (knowledge, experience) has been taken into consideration. In an attempt to address this shortcoming, local governments in the Netherlands have organized participatory processes in which a deliberative mini-public was coupled with an online voting process. In such a digital vote, citizens from the wider public are invited to provide their perspective on the issue at hand by answering questions on an online platform. In addition, the participants are asked to evaluate the answers provided by others, for instance by means of up and down voting. After its conclusion, the output of the digital vote serves as input for the deliberative mini-public. Since these participatory processes combine a deliberative element with an element of voting, as well as offline participation and online participation, they are referred to as "double hybrid democratic innovations"| in this paper. Examples of such "double hybrids" include the citizens’ forum on climate change policy in the region of Súdwest-Fryslân (Itten & Mouter, 2022) and the citizens’ forum on the energy transition in Tilburg (te Riele, 2022). From previous research, we know that (inter alia) the following design features might affect the inclusiveness of participatory processes: selection and recruitment, provision of information, experts, modes of communication/participation, and moderation (Harris, 2019). However, research which investigates the design features of (double) hybrid democratic innovations, as well as how their design affects the inclusiveness of these processes in practice, is rare. Furthermore, existing research on deliberative, aggregative and digital democratic innovations has shown that participation in these processes is at least as socially biased as in traditional participatory processes (Aichholzer & Rose, 2020; De Jong, Neulen & Jansma, 2019; Navarro & Font 2013; Penney, 2019; Toots, 2019), e.g. in favour of older, more well-off, higher educated and politically active citizens. This raises the question: how inclusive are double hybrid democratic innovations, which combine different kinds of participation? And: how can design contribute to their inclusiveness? Through a multiple case study of participatory processes in the Netherlands, I intend to provide an answer to these questions.