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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NEW_DEMOCRACY (Meeting Great Expectations Through Democratic Innovations)

Teaser

Summary

The projects investigates the challenges facing democratic legitimacy across Europe. There is a growing malaise towards political systems and elected representatives, on the one hand, and, on the other, there seems to be no substantial erosion of democratic principles. In this context, democratic innovations have been proposed as an important means to respond to contemporary challenges to democracy and to demands for more democratic participation. This project is studying in depth whether and how citizen involvement in political decision making affects democratic legitimacy.
Understanding current challenges to democracy across European countries is fundamental to safeguard and deepen democratic values and institutions in Europe. In particular, this project sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses that different democratic innovations taking place in different contexts display in terms of their ability to contribute to democratic legitimacy. This type of analysis is essential to envision effective forms of participation to democracy.
This project\'s first goal is to study citizensâ€™ expectations for participatory and deliberative procedures, understanding whether and why citizens want these innovations. The second goals is to understand the effects of these deliberative and democratic innovations on democratic legitimacy on citizens. These findings will generate reliable and fundamental knowledge on the ways in which democratic innovations can contribute to strengthen democratic legitimacy.

Work performed

Since the beginning of the project substantial work has been done and progress has been made on different fronts by the PI and the group of researchers working on this project.
We have explored and identified participatory and deliberative innovations to investigate as case studies. We have decided to focus on 3 countries with varying trust contexts: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Italy.
We have arranged collaboration with organizers to access case studies, that is: participatory budgeting in Duiven (the Netherlands), North Ayrshire (Scotland, UK), Newry (Northern Ireland), Bologna (Italy), and a deliberative mini-publics in Belfast (Northern Ireland, UK).
We have developed qualitative and quantitative methodologies and obtained ethical clearance from SMEC.
We have thus conducted direct observations of the above mentioned case studies. We have also conducted interviews in all of the above cases (still ongoing in the Italian case) with participants and other relevant stakeholders.
We have also designed and partially conducted pre and post surveys with participants in all case studies and with citizens in the Dutch case study.
We have also analyzed panel data about citizens\' preferences for direct democracy. This has led to our two first publications.
We are in the process of analyzing data from fieldwork activities and drafting publications.

Final results

Our ongoing research is allowing us to get a better sense of citizens\' preferences for democratic innovations. Our current publications in a leading journal in the field of political science concern citizen\'s attitudes towards referendums. In particular, our investigations shed new light on the importance of instrumental considerations about citizens\' preferences for direct democracy, a previously overlooked phenomenon in both empirical and theoretical terms.
Our current analyses are unveiling new empirical and theoretical insight into the way citizens approach participatory democratic innovation such as participatory budgeting. Soon, we will proceed to investigate also deliberative democratic innovations.
As we will progress in our inquiry we will have a reliable theoretical and empirical understanding of citizens\' relation to direct democratic, participatory and deliberative innovations. Also, we will have gained an understanding on the effects of democratic innovations in citizensâ€™ perceptions of democratic legitimacy.