The Electoral Payoffs of Parties' Use of Democratic Innovations for Internal Reform: Success or Backlash?

Political parties are increasingly experimenting with Party Democratic Innovations (PDIs) — participatory and deliberative mechanisms designed to foster citizen engagement in internal decision-making. Recently, several mainstream parties have gone further, using PDIs as instruments to guide substantial party reforms. While parties’ engagement with democratic innovations has attracted scholarly attention, the consequences of adopting such mechanisms within party organizations on voters’ evaluation of both the parties and the innovations themselves remain unclear, though. To address this, we conducted a pre-registered vignette experiment in Belgium, in which respondents were presented with a fictional party suffering an electoral defeat and conducting an internal reform process leading to the reorientation of its political priorities. The design of the experiment isolates the effects of the decision-making procedure (traditional vs. three types of participatory citizens’ assemblies) on voters’ attitudes and prospective vote choice. By assessing the electoral payoffs associated with internal democratic innovation, this paper provides empirical insights into the extent to which PDIs serve as meaningful renewal tools for party organizations or, alternatively, fail to counter their electoral decline in the broader context of growing citizens’ distrust in political parties.