The Politics and Administration of Hybrid Democratic Innovations: Discussion of PhD Findings About Their Impact on Policy

In the context of democratic backsliding and growing challenges to representative democracy, democratic innovations are promoted to enhance citizen trust, develop policy solutions to complex societal problems, and strengthen democratic resilience. However, despite their growing prevalence, democratic innovations frequently have limited impact on policy, undermining their ability to contribute to democratic renewal. My PhD research addresses this puzzle by examining how democratic innovations take place within the political–administrative systems they are intended to improve. The dissertation focuses on hybrid democratic innovations: participatory arrangements that combine small-group deliberation with voting by a maxi-public. These hybrids are expected to enhance policy impact by combining the deliberative quality of mini-publics with the legitimacy and reach of broader public involvement. My PhD research integrates theoretical perspectives from the literatures on citizen participation, policy implementation, and public innovation. Methodologically, it employs qualitative designs: Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), comparative and single-case studies, and qualitative methods such as interviews, observations, and document analysis. The QCA identifies patterns across cases in Western democracies at national, regional, and local levels, while three in-depth empirical cases at the Dutch local level, participatory budgeting and two cases of referendums followed by citizens’ assemblies, provide insights into how hybrid democratic innovations take place within existing political-administrative arrangements. The discussion chapter of my dissertation synthesizes findings on the politics and administration of hybrid democratic innovation processes and explains why their impact on policymaking is often limited. The analysis shows that hybrids, and democratic innovations more broadly, require changes in how political and administrative actors interact with citizens. Politicians are asked to share decision-making authority to accommodate citizen input beyond consultative roles, while civil servants must navigate competing responsibilities, organizational constraints, and political sensitivities when organizing and implementing these processes. While political actors may support initiating democratic innovations, they often remain reluctant to relinquish decision-making power or subordinate strategic interests, leading to instrumentalization and reduced legitimacy, while administrative actors frequently face limited capacity. The complexity of hybrid designs can further complicate these interactions, yet they also create opportunities to mitigate these challenges. Conceptually, the discussion chapter advances an implementation-centered perspective on democratic innovation. Rather than treating limited impact primarily as a design failure, the findings highlight how democratic innovations are shaped through everyday practices, institutional constraints, and incremental change within political–administrative systems. From the perspective of policy implementation and public innovation, experimentation, learning, and small steps forward should be understood as meaningful, if fragile, contributions to democratic repair and strengthening. By discussing these findings, I aim to engage with scholars working on democratic innovations to reflect collectively on what democratic resilience requires in practice. I argue that for hybrid democratic innovations to strengthen democratic resilience, scholarly and practical attention must shift from improving participatory design alone to improving the ‘doing’ of democratic innovations: how democratic innovations take place in politics and administration. In this sense, democratic resilience depends not only on better-designed innovations, but on continued learning about how democratic innovation processes are implemented.