Coupling and Connecting Democratic Innovations: exploring effective combinations of aggregation and deliberation; online and offline tools; and smart embeddedness within democratic systems

At the 2025 ECPR General Conference, the Democratic Innovations Section aims to explore the potential of innovative combinations of different modes and tools of citizen engagement, and their embeddedness in the wider democratic system. We emphasise a broader outlook on democratic innovations beyond single case studies and beyond isolated uses of, for example, mini-publics and referendums. Organised into four core themes, our section aims to bring together scholars from all career stages to collectively broaden our outlook on democratic innovations in four key ways: In the first theme, we will analyse the potential for effective combinations of aggregative and deliberative procedures within participatory processes. Whilst some democratic innovations have traditionally been largely aggregative or deliberative in nature, such as deliberative mini-publics or referendums, in recent years we are witnessing more fluidity between the domains of direct and deliberative democracy. In this theme, we explicitly explore the possibilities of connecting elements of voting and elements of deliberation within participatory processes. Examples include participatory budgeting processes in which proposals are extensively discussed and preferences are also numerically aggregated; citizens’ initiative reviews, which add purposefully organised deliberation to a referendum vote; and deliberative referendums, in which citizens’ assemblies prepare proposals for mass voting. In the second theme, we will explore effective combinations of online and offline participation. Organising participatory and deliberative processes in online environments reduces costs and enables mass participation to an extent that physical spaces cannot compete with. However, virtual interaction raises concerns of group dynamics and equal participation. A common solution is to sequence offline and online interactions to maximise benefits. Under this theme we explore the various models of combining online and offline participation and investigate their effects on both economic and organisational costs and on democratic goods. The third theme aims to advance comparative research on democratic innovations, transcending single case studies and looking into the potential to learn from other cases. The study of democratic innovations has shifted to more empirically ambitious analyses that utilise larger datasets of various participatory and deliberative designs. Thanks to flourishing practice as well as developing research methods it has become possible to draw more reliable conclusions on democratic innovations’ impacts. This theme focuses on cross-country comparisons of various participatory and deliberative designs related to any aspect of the process, from initiators and participant evaluations to outcomes and political uptake. We are also interested in attempts to systematise data collection across various democratic innovations and geographical locations. The fourth theme focuses on how democratic innovations can connect to, and be embedded within, a broader democratic system. The panels within this theme devote attention to the linkages between participating citizens and the wider public; between citizen policymaking processes and elected representatives; and between participatory processes on different levels of government. The panels will shed light on how such linkages can be forged and how they might affect the legitimacy and policy impact of democratic innovations. The different panels within the section explore democratic innovations with an eye for both the micro-level (process design) and the system level (democratic embedding). We anticipate engaging discussions on effective ways to couple and connect democratic innovations at both procedural and systemic levels. This section thereby aims to bridge the study of single cases and isolated participation modes and to view individual citizen participation modes as interconnected and embedded in a wider democratic context.