Substantive Representation and Inequalities in Digital Policy Ideation Processes

The study of political inequalities has focused on the participation gap between socio-economic groups. It is well established that capital (economic, social and cultural) has a role in shaping political participation, through various mechanisms (such as time, skills, access to networks, political interest, etc.). Social inequalities take different shapes, and every type of inequality will impact on various aspects of an individual’s life, including their ability to participate in politics. This applies to traditional forms of political participation, as well as to democratic innovations. Nonetheless, a further reflection on the meaning of political inequality in the particular case of democratic innovations is needed to link it more clearly to the issue of power. In this paper, I apply Pitkin’s notion of substantive representation to explore the following question in a specific type of democratic innovations: How is political inequality (understood as unequal substantive representation) manifested in the way citizens partake in civic-tech-mediated policymaking participatory processes? In the case of civic-tech-mediated participatory processes, “acting” refers to the contributions that citizens make to the process, that is, what they do in the participatory platforms. Sub-questions derived from this one would include whether the participants’ contributions and demands would benefit certain groups over others, whether these contributions are solidaristic or self-interested, for the common good or private benefit. In order to answer the research question, I analyse data of the participatory platform of the Conference on the Future of Europe. The Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) was a participatory process that took place between April 2021 and May 2022, born from the European Union’s (EU) attempt to foster citizen engagement in the EU’s agenda-setting and decision-making processes. The platform received 48,530 contributions and once the CoFoE concluded, the EU published two open datasets: one containing 20,047 proposals (policy ideas) and another one with 21,215 comments. I use a combination of computational text analysis, content analysis and process tracing to determine what kind of policy and political ideas were dominant in the CoFoE platform, and identify inequalities in substantive representation. This paper will contribute to the debate around the interests that are mobilised by democratic innovations and to what extent these processes have the potential to reshape socio-economic conditions.