Innovating democracy for the worse? The new citizen engagement in Europe

Abstract

Citizens assemblies or participatory budgeting are democratic innovations: institutional procedures that should transform citizens participation in political decision making. These innovations, particularly those that bear on citizen deliberation, have been trialled by public organisations in many European countries, and attracted significant funding. The electoral success of authoritarian populism led to a wealth of scholarship on their promise to rejuvenate liberal democracy by means of institutional design. For many exponents of this paradigm, the question is how rather than if these innovations can contribute to counteracting the disenchantment with democracy in European societies – and democratising policy making on salient issues such as climate change. Through an analysis of three major promises of democratic innovation, this thesis argues that they may be innovating democracy for the worse. Rather than transcending political conflict, they become expressions of contemporary cleavage politics: competing understandings of citizen participation reproduce the very divisions innovations claim to resolve. Rather than reconnecting citizens with politics, they seem to embrace the social dislocation of democratic institutions. And rather than legitimating complex governance to and creating public acceptance, they seem to facilitate a simulation of democratic reform that serves to self-legitimate institutional actors. These arguments rest on two original empirical studies. In the first study, I conduct group interviews in Germany, Italy, and Ireland to examine how citizens themselves make sense of democratic innovations when confronted with realistic portrayals of their operation. Through the comparison of groups with different political leanings and social-economic profiles, the study reconstructs the discourses and frames through which participants interpret these innovations. A second study uses the European Union as an instrumental case to examine how elites and institutions understand and utilise democratic innovations. Through elite interviews, document analysis, and network data, I examine the discourses and interactions through which a field of sponsors, advocates, and experts of citizen engagement construct a simulation of democratic reform.