Transmissions, decisions, discourses
Subtitle
A methodological framework for measuring and comparing democratic innovations’ policy-impact(s)
Publication date
2025-04-05
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Fleuß, Dannica
Organisational unit
ISSN
Series or journal
Swiss Political Science Review (SPSR)
Is referenced by
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Keyword
Citizen participation
Deliberative systems
Democratic innovations
Direct democracy
Quantitative text analysis
Deliberative Demokratie
Direkte Demokratie
Abstract
Democratic innovations are increasingly used to counteract crisis phenomena such as citizen disengagement or disaffection. But to offer a cure, democratic innovations must be embedded within the democratic system; there must be a healthy “flow in communication” (henceforth: transmissions) between different democratic spaces. Yet so far there is no comprehensive conceptual-methodological framework that allows for systematically assessing transmissions and the different ways in which democratic innovations impact democratic processes in empowered spaces. Our article fills this gap: it suggests a flexible three-step-procedure enabling researchers to assess transmissions of “demands”, “discursive elements” and discourses with distinct research designs and methods. We demonstrate the merits of this approach with the help of two illustrative analyses. We show that our integrated framework can be an apt tool for more systematic comparative analyses of diverse institutional designs and their “embeddedness” in contemporary complex democratic systems.
Description
The data that support the findings of this study are available at https://openhsu.ub.hsu-hh.de/handle/10.24405/17488
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY).
Version
Online first
Access right on openHSU
Metadata only access
Open Access Funding
Wiley (DEAL)