Democratic Innovation in Governance? Mapping Pathways to Institutionalisation

This paper analyses how policymakers and practitioners conceptualise successful institutionalisation of democratic innovations (DIs), the constraints they encounter in practice, and the enabling conditions that have facilitated the uptake and normalisation of participatory approaches across different European initiatives. It builds on Dublin City University’s (DCU) work on scaling DIs within the Horizon-funded ScaleDem project. Drawing on interviews from actors across a variety of cases and democratic innovation designs, we qualitatively examine the factors that support or constrain the capacity of democratic innovations to scale “high”, understood as their expansion and integration within governance institutions and policy systems. By identifying the factors that both limit and encourage the embedding of these practices, the paper contributes to wider debates on democratic governance and the role of democratic innovations in shaping public policy. In doing so, it connects research and practice, illustrating how participatory and deliberative methods have evolved from experimental initiatives into more durable components of democratic policymaking.