Abstract
Following a widely perceived crisis of representative democracy, many countries have started to complement representative institutions with different forms of citizen participation – from direct forms like referendums, to deliberative forms like citizen assemblies. Although we increasingly know about the consequences of different designs of these so-called democratic innovations, we know little about how they function in different contexts. A critical contextual feature is population size, in that it determines social distance, social diversity and to which extent public deliberation is possible. Existing research has shown that this impacts how traditional institutions work. Although we can expect that it also influences the functioning of direct or deliberative forms of participation, this has not yet been tested. This project aims to do so with a mixed-method comparison of direct and deliberative democratic innovations in political communities of different size. Doing so, the research has two objectives. First, to uncover if and how population size impacts the extent to which direct and deliberative innovations realise a set of democratic values (e.g. representativeness, trust, contestation or policy efficiency). Secondly, to determine how direct and deliberative innovations can be combined to complement their strengths (values they fulfil) and offset their weaknesses (values they do not fulfil), depending on the population size of the community in which they are used.
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