When Democratic Innovations Collide: Contestation Between Mini-Publics and Citizens’ Initiatives in Germany

Democratic innovations increasingly interact in contemporary governance, yet research on their coupling has largely focused on harmonious, design-driven combinations of mini-publics and referendums. However, such arrangements capture only one trajectory of how democratic innovations become linked in practice. This paper investigates how and why democratic innovations collide, when they work against rather than with one another, generating contestation instead of synergy. Such constellations arise when the introduction or outputs of one democratic innovation provoke mobilisation by another. For instance, citizens’ initiatives contest mini-publics’ recommendations. These counter-actions seek decision control and confront policymakers with competing democratic claims and legitimacy dilemmas, highlighting why a focus on design-driven couplings is insufficient for understanding the interactions of democratic innovations in practice. While the literature has documented complementary couplings, it has largely overlooked these collision dynamics and their implications for participatory governance. This paper provides insights into collisions of democratic innovations by analysing two revelatory cases at the local level in Germany in which citizens’ initiatives contest mini-publics’ recommendations. Using a case study design grounded in process tracing, the paper identifies the causal mechanisms through which these collisions emerged and unfolded, focusing on sequences, critical junctures, and actor constellations within the wider political environment. The paper draws on document analysis of media reporting and council debates as well as interviews with local councillors, citizens’ initiatives, and other stakeholders. It shows how and why governance-driven mini-publics can provoke decision-controlling reactions, illuminating the conditions under which democratic innovations generate contestation rather than synergistic effects. In doing so, the paper foregrounds contestation as an under-researched mode of coupling that extends beyond design-driven approaches to democratic innovations.