Matt Ryan

The paper aims to explain why comparative approaches to Democratic Innovations (DI) are important. I argue that DI scholarship needs to be aware of best practices and methodological developments in comparative political science, and that there are risks to particularising the study of democratic innovation. DI scholarship has sometimes struggled to negotiate the tension between its normative democratising project and the empirical work aimed at understanding democratic participation in practice. More comparison is a good answer to this problem. I trace developments of comparison in DI research using examples that compare both small and large numbers of cases. I argue that the conceptual haziness of DI has led scholars to favour case-studies or individual-level behavioural data (participant surveys or quasi-experiments) for comparison. Some opportunities for comparison are being missed. I suggest that now is time to mainstream systematic comparison in the study of DI.

Much attention has been paid to government 'blunders' and 'policy disasters'. National political and administrative systems have been frequently blamed for being disproportionately prone to generating mishaps. However, little systematic evidence exists on the record of failures of policies and major public projects in other political systems. Based on a comparative perspective on blunders in government, this paper suggests that constitutional features do not play a prominent role. In order to establish this finding, this paper (a) develops theory-driven expectations as to the factors that are said to encourage blunders, (b) devises a systematic framework for the assessment of policy processes and outcomes, and (c) uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify sets of causal conditions associated with particular outcomes (i.e. blunders). The paper applies this novel approach to a set of particular policy domains, finding that constitutional features are not a contributory factor to blunders in contrast to instrument choice, administrative capacity and hyper-excited politics.

This article makes three key contributions to debates surrounding the effectiveness of democratic innovation, deliberation and participation in representative political systems. In the first instance, it argues that more attention should be paid to the role that participation actually plays in governance. The literature on democratic institutional design often neglects concern about the effects of innovative institutional designs on more traditional representative fora, at the expense of concerns about their internal procedures. Second, the article argues that despite limitations, replicable systematic comparison of the effects of institutional design is both necessary and possible even at the level of national governance. A comparative analysis of 31 cases of National Public Policy Conferences (NPPCs) in Brazil is presented. Finally, the article shows that popular deliberative assemblies that vary in their familiarity and their policy area of interest, and that organise their structure and sequence deliberation in different ways can be associated with differential effects on both option analysis and option selection stages of the policy process, respectively.

Research indicates that providing social information about other people's charitable donations can increase individual contributions. However, the effects of social information on volunteering time are underexplored. In this field experiment we measure the effects of different levels of feedback about other people's time contributions (very high, high and moderate) on individuals' hours of volunteering. The experiment was conducted with students from English universities volunteering for a variety of organizations and with a group of predominantly older people volunteering for a national charity in England. Social information did not increase volunteering for either group relative to a control group receiving individualised feedback with no social comparison. For students whose baseline volunteering time was lower than the median, social information had a demotivating effect, reducing their volunteering, suggesting that donating time is different to donating money.

While empirical research on democratic innovations is characterized by steady growth in output, a study of the top journals in political science shows that in the last ten years the vast majority of these empirical studies focused on best practices. Empirical evaluation of the lessons that we can draw from failures in participatory and deliberative processes are extremely rare. This pattern of success and failure is not representative of reality. Various specialized monographs and studies in less prominent journals have investigated a variety of problems and failures. Why do we see this pattern of 'failure neglect' in top journals? In this paper we explore some of the causes of this pattern elucidating the impact of sampling bias, innovation bias, publication bias, and the loss of independence due to the difficulty of implementing participatory action research in politically contested projects. We argue that this lack of representativeness in the real-world cases of deliberation that command the attention of general political science audiences is currently a major barrier to understanding democratic improvements. Without a comparison of success and failure, our models for successful outcomes will be chronically overdetermined, which ultimately reduces their chances of adoption in practice.

At smaller social scales, deliberative democratic theory can be restated as an input-process-output model. We advance such a model to formulate hypotheses about how the context and design of a civic engagement process shape the deliberation that takes place therein, as well as the impact of the deliberation on participants and subsequent policymaking. To test those claims, we extract and code case studies from Participedia.net, a research platform that has adopted a self-directed crowd-sourcing strategy to collect data on participatory institutions and deliberative interventions around the world. We explain and confront the challenges faced in coding and analyzing the Participedia cases, which involves managing reliability issues and missing data. In spite of those difficulties, regression analysis of the coded cases shows compelling results, which provide considerable support for our general theoretical model. We conclude with reflections on the implications of our findings for deliberative theory, the design of democratic innovations, and the utility of Participedia as a data archive.

Electronic technologies linked to the web have created a step-change in the opportunities for speedy collection and linking of data used to answer the big questions in political science. Citizens participate in social scientific research by crowdsourcing data both consciously or as involuntary sensors, or are engaged online in political science or policy science in a more participatory way. This paper takes a critical approach to developments in e-political science drawing on the experience and findings of three projects that rely on collaborative online networks and/or data-intensive research. The projects include a local citizen-social science project, a worldwide crowdsourcing project, and a systematic review of worldwide crowdsourcing projects. I identify and discuss three common dilemmas in e-political science which have not yet been treated seriously enough by practitioners of e-social science, or where they have, pose nuanced challenges to a political science that employs networked electronic technologies.