The demand for citizen participation in policymaking and decision-making processes continues to rise globally. On the supply-side, innovative forms of citizen participation are emerging. Some extend beyond the more traditional instruments, which tend to centralise a certain mode of participating, such as voting in referendums or deliberation in citizen panels. In this panel, we are particularly interested in citizen participation processes which explicitly combine elements of large-scale voting and elements of focused deliberation, also referred to as hybridization or sequencing of participation modes. Examples include citizens’ assemblies coupled with a referendum vote, or participatory budgeting processes entailing both deliberation stages and a voting stage involving the general public. Innovative digital infrastructures may also be involved in one or both stages.
Both participation modes, voting and deliberating, have unique merits. Combining them potentially offers new impulses for democratic innovation by involving larger and more diverse groups of citizens, responding to diverse needs in different stages of the policy cycle and compensating for each other’s limitations. This raises the question how the modes could be designed and linked to bring out the specific benefits of each, a question increasingly receiving attention in democratic innovations literature.
In this panel, we particularly welcome contributions focusing on empirical instances of such combined voting and deliberation within participation processes around the globe. We are interested in cases at any government level, from local to (trans)national, and welcome contributions studying them through a variety of research methods. We can also host papers taking a more conceptual or normative stance, provided that the combination of voting and deliberation is the core focus.
Papers can address questions such as, but not limited to: how such sequenced participation processes can be designed to appeal to different subgroups of the population; how the link between the participation modes can be fortified; civil or political preferences regarding design, participation and follow-up; what role politicians, civil servants and civil society organisations can play in designing and organising such innovative forms of citizen participation; how to embed them into representative democratic processes; and how process and impact can be evaluated.