Transmissions, decisions, discourses

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.