Resource or Liability? The Role of Political Remembering in Democratic Innovations

Research on democratic innovations has predominantly focused on their future-oriented dimensions, emphasizing novelty, experimentation, and transformative potential. This focus on innovation, however, tends to ignore how democratic innovations are embedded in—and shaped by—the past. Yet the success and long-term sustainability of democratic innovations crucially depend on how they relate to prior political experiences, institutions, and participatory practices within specific political contexts. While this historical embeddedness seems to be of particular importance for fragile and post-conflict societies (e.g. Curato & Calamba 2024), past experiences with participation are also relevant in consolidated democracies (e.g. Macq & Jacques 2023). This paper addresses this gap by systematically exploring the role of the past in democratic innovations. It conceptualizes this historical dimension through the lens of political remembering, understood as the ways in which past political experiences are recalled, institutionalized, and mobilized in contemporary political practices. Empirically, the paper draws on citizens’ assemblies—currently among the most prominent and contested forms of democratic innovation—as illustrative cases. The paper proceeds in three steps. First, it reconstructs how existing scholarship on democratic innovations addresses—and neglects—the role of remembering and historical experience. Second, it develops an analytical framework that specifies how political remembering can shape the trajectories of democratic innovations, drawing on insights from memory studies and archival studies. Collective memories can function both as resources and as constraints—or even liabilities—for democratic systems (Misztal 2005), rendering their effects highly context-dependent. Third, the paper explores design options for democratic innovations that enable a productive engagement with political memories. This step also utilizes observations and expert interviews from citizens’ assemblies conducted in Germany over the past decade. Overall, the paper offers an initial conceptualization of the ambivalent role of political remembering in democratic innovations and outlines how attention to the past can inform their design and implementation across diverse political contexts.