Understanding the Integration of Deliberative Minipublics Through Innovation Capabilities A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Local DMPs in Belgium

This paper seeks to increase our understanding of the institutional conditions that lead deliberative minipublics (DMPs) to be more institutionally integrated in local political systems. DMP scholars have deplored the “governance disconnect” between citizen deliberations, on the one hand, and political and administrative bodies. While the ‘systemic turn’ in DMP scholarship has been arguing for a holistic focus to examine how DMPs relate and contribute to the democratic system as a whole (Dryzek 2010; Mansfield & Parkinson, 2013), the “systemic approach to DMPs remains embryonic” (Boswell et al., 2022, p. 3). The observed governance disconnect has only scarcely provoked studies that use governance theories to understand and design DMP coupling to political systems (but see Boswell et al., 2022; Dean et al., 2020; Niessen & Reuchamps, 2022). The collaborative governance and innovation literature in Public Administration has developed diverse frameworks on the conditions that make policy innovations stick and scale (Lodge et al., 2014; Sørensen & Ansell, 2023), yet applications of this knowledge to DMPs – which are after all a form of policy innovation – are scarce (for an exception, see Boswell et al, 2022). Our research builds upon Boswell et al.’s (2022) work and develops a theoretical framework with insights from collaborative governance and public innovation scholarship, which has developed a strong body of knowledge on the innovation capabilities that are needed to achieve institutional integration. More specifically, we rely on the innovation capabilities model (Gieske et al., 2019) which distinguishes between connective capacities by crossing boundaries and establish linkages between actors and institutions; ambidextrous capacities to combine activities aimed at experimentation with those aimed at exploitation; and learning capacities to reflect on and possibly change assumptions in response to experiences. To test our theoretical framework, we conduct a Qualitative Comparative Analysis on a sample of 25 to 40 local Belgian DMPs.