Democratic Innovation Research: Bridging Approaches, Theories, and Methods for the Study of Participation and Deliberation

Participatory and deliberative democratic innovations have been a central research object in political science for more than three decades. Studied through the lenses of democratic theory, democratic development, public policy, and political behavior approaches, these innovations have been scrutinized by scholars from across the world through various methodological perspectives over the years: interpretative methods, qualitative and ethnographic methods, large-n quantitative methods and, more recently, experimental designs. Such variety of approaches and methods have contributed to make the field of democratic innovations broad, and have led to both groundbreaking theoretical contributions to political science and to a constant interaction with empirical practices of democratic participation and deliberation. While together contributing to define a rich and diversified field of research and to inform democratic practices, a real dialogue between these approaches, theories and methods yet remains to be developed and sustained among scholars. The Section of the Democratic Innovations Standing Group for the 2015 ECPR General Conference aims at creating such a dialogue, bringing together scholars from across the world and coming from different, yet often complementary, research traditions. Here are some themes we would like to explore across the different panels: 1. Deliberation and participation: Participatory democracy (PD) and Deliberative democracy (DD) are two distinct concepts; they can, however, also be closely associated and intertwined. Is this distinction between the two concepts useful to understand the field of democratic innovation? Can we speak about a unified field of research on participation, deliberation and democratic innovation? Is DD becoming an autonomous field, with its own questions, methods and theories? 2. Theory versus empirical work: The democratic innovation field is often divided between theoretically and empirically oriented research traditions. On one hand, there is a strong normative stance in the political theory approached to democratic innovation. On the other hand, there is a collection of case studies about participatory arrangements that are characterized by theoretical eclecticism. There is, however, a clear movement towards the diversification of the methods of inquiry adopted in empirical approaches, including experimentation, comparison, surveys, etc. Can this diversification help to bridge together theoretically and empirically driven studies? 3. The North-South (and often hidden) divide: There are two traditions in the literature that sometimes overlap, sometimes do not acknowledge each other. The first one comes from the ‘participatory turn’ in developing countries, inspired from the successful cases of Porto Alegre (Brasil, Kerala (India) and others and studied from the perspective of the democratization and/or the development literatures. The second one looks at participatory democracy in advanced democracies, from the perspective of its potential impact on the legitimacy of public decision-making processes in a context of political apathy and mistrust. On the basis of democratic innovations, how the democratization effect can be seen in the two spheres? 8 panels have been allocated to our section. Here are panels already secured: Democracy preferences, participation, and deliberation (Andre Bächtiger, Kimmo Grönlund) Collective Reasoning on Complex Problems (Kaisa Herne, Maija Setälä) Methodological challenges of comparative large-n case study analyses on deliberative procedures (Pamela Hess, Paolo Spada, Brigitte Geissel) Biographies of Section Chairs Laurence Bherer is Associate professor of Political Sciences at University of Montréal. Her research and publications focus on participatory democracy and urban politics. Her current research is on the professionalization of the public participation field and the effect of some organization dedicated to public participation on this trend. Her last article on public participation: Autonomy for what? Comparing Autonomous Public Participation Dedicated to Public Participation (with M. Gauthier and S. Simard, manuscript in preparation), «Participatory Democracy, Decentralization and Local Governance: the Montreal Participatory Budget in the light of ‘Empowered Participatory Governance’» (with C. Patsias and A. Latendresse, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2013), The Diversity of Participation Tools : Complementing or Competing with one Another? (with S. Breux, in Canadian journal of political science, 2012), Successful and unsuccessful Participatory Arrangements : Why is There a Participatory Movement at the Local Level? (Journal of Urban Affairs, 2010). Françoise Montambeault is an Assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Montreal. Her research focuses on the dynamics and impacts of citizen participation and deliberation in democratic institutions. She currently works on two main projects: the first one looks at the variety of citizenship trajectories in participatory institutions, and the second one at intercultural deliberative practices in Aboriginal rights conflict resolution processes in Canada. She has published several articles and book chapters on the transformative potential of participatory and deliberative democracy, focusing on Latin American experiences in Mexico and Brazil. Her articles have been published in The Journal of Civil Society, Latin American Politics and Society, Politiques et Société, Participations, and The Journal of Politics in Latin America. Her book The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Latin America: Institutions, Actors and Interactions is forthcoming at Stanford University Press in 2015.