The Action's Working Paper Series publishes work in progress aiming to contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the broader field of democratic deliberation and in particular with reference to constitution-making. The works cut across a wide range of research areas, demonstrating both the depth and breadth of research being undertaken by members of the COST Action. We also offer the opportunity for researchers outside the Action to publish with us their work related to the topic of the Action. The copyright stays with the author(s) of each paper. Please note that there are no restrictions on submitting your paper simultaneously to a journal, although we do not accept papers that have already been published elsewhere.
Peer-review policy
Each Working Paper undergoes a thorough but timely double-blind peer-review process to ensure both high quality and timely publication. Each manuscript received is sent out for anonymous review to at least one specialist in the field. Referee reports are provided in roughly three weeks from submission, based on which the editorial board will decide if the paper is to be included in the WP Series. The decision, together with comments from reviewers and editorial board, will be communicated to the author.
Submission Guidelines
- A total length of 7,000-8,000 words, including references, tables etc.;
- A 150-word abstract and 3-5 keywords;
- A short bio (max. 50 words) for each author (position, affiliation, research interests and e-mail address);
- 1.5 line spacing, 2.5cm margins all around, and text justified (full alignment);
- American English should be used;
- Footnotes and not endnotes should be used;
- Harvard style 10th edition should be used for references (while the manuscript does not have to adhere to this at the stage of submission, upon acceptance it should be formatted accordingly).
All manuscripts should be submitted electronically in Word format to the Series' Managing Editor at .
Sergiu Gherghina (Managing Editor - University of Glasgow)
Venetia Argyropoulou (European University Cyprus)
Paul Blokker (University of Bologna)
Marie Dufrasne (University Saint-Louis Brussels)
Raphaël Kies (University of Luxembourg)
Sergiu Mișcoiu (Babes-Bolyai University Cluj)
Monika Mokre (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Ioannis Papadopoulos (University of Macedonia)
Min Reuchamps (Catholic University of Louvain)
Yanina Welp (Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Graduate Institute)
Oya Yeğen (Sabanci University)
Working Paper No. 19/2022: "The Deliberative Type? The Role of Personality Traits in Experiences of Public Deliberation" by Marina Lindell & Kim Strandberg
Deliberative democracy views discussion between lay citizens as a key component of a well-functioning democracy. However, previous studies suggest that variations in personality may have bearing on how people experience social interaction and respond to various stimuli. Our assumption is that certain personalities are better suited for deliberation than others are. This paper thus explores the relevance of the Big-Five personality traits in relation to public deliberation. It is thus expected, that personality traits might be relevant factors in explaining how participants in deliberative mini-publics, where social interaction is a central aspect, perceive the deliberation and how they are affected by it. The study is based on data from a Finnish experiment in citizen deliberation in 2014 (N=187) about the status of the Swedish minority language in Finland. We explore how personality traits as independent variables affect citizens’ preferences for taking part in deliberation as well as their subjective experience of the deliberation—i.e. how they regard their own role in the deliberation as well as how the view the group dynamic—when taking part themselves. Early tentative findings suggest that personality does have some bearing on the dependent variables.
Working Paper No. 18/2022: "Are political parties really indispensable? An overview of the alternatives" by Paul Lucardie & Pierre-Étienne Vandamme
Representative democracy is inconceivable without political parties, most scholars seem to agree. Parties are required to recruit political leaders, aggregate demands, organise government and opposition, and mobilise citizens. However, they also close the representative process, reduce citizens’ capacity for spontaneous action and impede open-minded deliberation. While parties suffer from public hostility, alternative democratic forms have been conceived and sometimes tried out either in historical regimes or in small-scale experiments: assembly democracy, individual representation, council democracy, referendum democracy, liquid democracy and sortition. Exploring these alternatives with open-mind challenges the path-dependent assumption that parties are indispensable, but also helps to re-appreciate their roles and value. Responding to a call for more dialogue between empirical research on political parties and contemporary democratic theory, this article widens the debate on the necessity of political parties by extending it to new theoretical proposals, and maps it by bringing together insights from both fields.
Working Paper No. 17/2022: "Perceived Discourse Quality in the Irish Citizens’ Assembly Deliberations on Abortion" by David M. Farrell, Jane Suiter, Kevin Cunningham & Clodagh Harris
This paper contributes to a growing interest in process related approaches in the study of deliberative mini-publics. Its focus is on the perceived quality of deliberation in the Irish Citizens’ Assembly’s discussions on Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion, which occurred over the course of five weekends of meetings from late 2016 through to the spring of 2017, culminating in recommendations for a referendum to remove Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion. This paper makes use of survey data to examine the Citizens’ Assembly’s members’ perceptions of the quality of the deliberative process. We find that, by one measure of discourse quality (individual access to the conversation), levels of satisfaction were greatest among the less educated. Over time the levels of discourse quality (again by this measure) rose particularly among the minority of Assembly members who were ‘pro-life’.
Working Paper No. 16/2022: "Wear and Tear: Civil Servants’ Grueling Implementation of Paris Participatory Budgeting (2014–2020)" by William Arhip-Paterson
The Paris City Council began a participatory budgeting in 2014. A team of specialized civil servants was created to implement it in 2015. Most of these civil servants left the team before or in 2020, which marked the end of the first implementation mandate. It is important to understand why they did it to better understand the professionalization of participatory democracy. Thus, our research question is: Why did all but one of the civil servants comprising the participatory budgeting team leave it before or in 2020? The paper is based on a 3-year ethnography of the Paris City Council Participatory Budget team, interviews with civil servants, and documents written by them. I argue that the implementation of the participatory budgeting wore civil servants out. After voicing their concerns unsuccessfully, they decided to exit the team. The findings help to understand what implementing participatory institutions does to those performing it.
Working Paper No. 15/2021: "A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Democratic Innovations on Citizens in Advanced Industrial Democracies" by Marie-Isabel Theuwis, Carolien van Ham & Kristof Jacobs
Earlier research assesses how different types of democratic innovations change citizens’ policy attitudes, political attitudes, process attitudes, behaviour, and capabilities. Even though a considerable amount of research has been done, there currently exists no overview of the effects for each type of democratic innovation on each type of effect. It is also not clear which effects prove robust across studies and which effects require more investigation. This paper aims to look at what we know and what we do not know regarding the effects of democratic innovations on citizens. In order to do so, we systematically collected empirical studies published between 1980 and 2021 and conducted a meta-analysis. Based on this analysis, we answer the following research questions: How thoroughly has each type of effect been studied for each type of democratic innovation? What are the gaps in our knowledge? And, most importantly, what do these studies tell us about the overall effects of democratic innovations on citizens?
Working Paper No. 14/2021: "Subnational Democratic Innovations in Italy: A Tentative of Reforming the Autonomy Statute of the Region Trentino-South Tyrol" by Martina Trettel
The paper looks at how Democratic Innovations performed in the process of amending high-ranked constitutional legal sources. It focuses on two case studies: that of the Italian Provinces of Bolzano and Trento. Between 2015 and 2017 the Provinces conducted two parallel participatory processes with the aim of reforming the basic law of the Region (the Statute of Autonomy) in a participatory fashion. The paper intends to analyze the two procedures and situate the analysis in the broader framework of participatory Constitution-making.
Working Paper No. 13/2021: "Superparticipants and Equal Voice Within the Czech Pirate Party" by Petra Vodová & Petr Voda
This paper deals with superparticipants in online deliberation in the Czech Pirate Party. Based on data from online discussions followed by voting on resolutions, the paper shows who the superparticipants are with regard to position within the party, how they behave and whether their opinions can influence the voting results. The analysis does not indicate the usual problems related to online discussions such as domination by the superparticipants in discussions or extremism. Based on our findings it seems that superparticipants provide messages fitting formally and substantively into the discussions. Moreover, the activity of the superparticipants had only limited effects on the voting results.
Working Paper No. 12/2021: "When Citizens met Politicians: The Process and Effects of Mixed Deliberation According to Status and Gender" by Kim Strandberg, Janne Berg, Thomas Karv & Kim Backström
With deliberative democracy becoming increasingly incorporated into political institutions and processes, the instances of citizens and politicians meeting in deliberation, so called mixed deliberations, is steadily increasing too. While these are important steps towards more deliberative systems, the mixed deliberation setting nonetheless introduces certain risks regarding equality. This study focuses on a series of mixed deliberations about a proposed municipal merger in Finland in 2018. Using content analysis of speech acts (N=3,404) and pre- and post-deliberation surveys (N=225), we analyze patterns according to participant status and gender regarding dominance, deliberative discussion quality and impact on internal and external efficacy. The findings show that politicians dominated the discussions and achieved a higher deliberative quality than citizens. There are no patterns in gender dominance but women achieved higher deliberative quality in their speech acts. Both men and women slightly increased their feeling of internal and external efficacy during the mixed deliberation.
Working Paper No. 11/2021: "Looking to the Future: Including Children, Young People and Future Generations in Deliberations on Climate Action" by Clodagh Harris
The effects of climate change are multiple and fundamental. Decisions made today may result in irreversible damage to the planet’s biodiversity and ecosystems, the detrimental impacts of which will be borne by today’s children, young people and those yet unborn (future generations). The use of citizens’ assemblies (CAs) to tackle the issue of climate change is growing. Their remit is future focused. Yet is the future in the room? Focusing on a single case study, the recent Irish CA and Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action (JOCCA) deliberations on climate action, this paper explores the extent to which children, young people and ‘future generations’ were included. Its systemic analysis of the membership of both institutions, the public submissions to them and the invited expertise presented, finds that the Irish CA was ‘too tightly coupled’ on this issue. It concludes that targeted measures are required to include children, young people and future generations in the development of a future oriented democracy. The design and development of such measures should, in turn, include them and/or their representatives.
Working Paper No. 10/2021: "From Collaboration to Policymaking: How Collaborative and Participatory Decisions Actually Change Policy (or not)" by Edward Challies, Nicolas W. Jager, Jens Newig, Elisa Kochskämper & Maren Preuss
Citizen and stakeholder participation are often expected to improve the outcomes of public governance. Little attention has been paid so far to whether and under what circumstances the outputs of participatory processes are actually taken up by policy decisions and get implemented. This study reports on findings from a case survey meta-analysis of 143 cases of public environmental decision-making across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. The paper asks: (1) What kinds of outputs do participatory decision-making processes produce? (2) What are the key contextual conditions under which binding political decisions take up the outcomes of participatory processes? (3) What are the key process features that determine whether binding policy outputs emerge? This study takes us further towards understanding the ‘fate’ of participatory decision making in environmental governance and beyond.
Working Paper No. 9/2020: "Do political parties support participatory democracy? A comparative analysis of party manifestos in Belgium" by Laura Pascolo
In recent decades, there has been an increase in participatory practices in public action. Such a steady increase in participatory democracy undermines the role of political parties, as greater participation risks blurring their current power. The question raised by this paper is whether political parties support participatory democracy. It is indeed relevant to know how political parties approach participatory democracy, as it is also their position on these new participatory arrangements that will determine the place these new practices will occupy in democracies. The paper is based on an analysis of all Belgian political parties that won at least one seat in the federal and regional elections from 2003 to 2019. In doing so, the paper will provide a better understanding of the perceptions and use of the tools of participatory democracy by political parties, which are the main guardians of most democracies.
Working Paper No. 8/2020: "Citizen Inputs and Influence in Mexico City's Constitution-Making" by Ernesto Cruz Ruiz
This paper focuses on citizen participation in the 2016 Mexico City's constitution-making and examines the extent to which citizens contributed and influenced its making, adoption and enactment. It classifies actors in three different types according to the stage in which they joined the process and posits that first level actors open constitution-making to second and third level actors due to specific political circumstances shaping their preferences and strategies vis-à-vis the process. This paper claims that the need to legitimize and inform the constitution drove first level actors to open the process to second and third level actors, who used those opportunities due to the accessibility of the mechanisms implemented to funnel and manage their inputs. In sum, this paper contends that citizen participation influences and informs constitution-making positively, as long as first level actors open the process to diverse stakeholders, properly manage the process and have clear objectives for citizen contributions.
Working Paper No. 7/2020: "Beyond Fashion and Smokescreens: Citizens’ Deliberation of Constitutional Amendments" by Yanina Welp & Francisco Soto
Despite the increasing number of countries that have implemented deliberative processes during constitutional changes, the discussion about the criteria for these processes to be deemed fair and democratic remains open. Thus, first, this paper proposes some conditions related to the features of the mechanism of deliberative participation and the method of processing the resulting contents. Second, it is carried out an empirical analysis focused on deliberative processes of constitutional change that were regulated and/or promoted by governments or public institutions (excluding pure private and/or civil society initiatives) and were opened to citizenship (excluding the ones oriented only to experts or political parties); and were addressed to content production (merely informative or educative were excluded). Our analysis identifies five models of deliberative processes: “symbolic”, “prejudiced”, “participatory overflow”, “constituent opening” and “constituent participation”. The conclusions go beyond the sui generis commitment to implement participatory mechanisms and suggest minimal criteria that deliberative processes should fulfill to be considered democratic.
Working Paper No. 6/2020: "Ecologists and Democracy in Belgium: An Analysis of Party Manifestos" by Benjamin Biard, Jehan Bottin, Maximilien Cogels & Mathias Sabbe
An increasing gap characterizes the relationship between citizens and policy-makers in Europe. Citizens do not only lose confidence in their representatives but, more broadly so, in democracy and democratic functioning. Consequently, new political parties perform increasingly better during elections. New decision-making processes - rooted in participatory or deliberative democracy - are also gradually considered as means to revitalize and irrigate the representative system. This paper aims at developing a better understanding of the democratic preferences of the Belgian Green political parties. Traditionally, Flemish and French-speaking green parties have been the owners of democratic innovation issues in Belgium. Through the analysis of Belgian green parties’ manifestos since 1995 regarding three types of democracy - representative, deliberative, and participatory democracy - this paper investigates and uncovers the evolution of the democratic preferences within these parties. The paper helps to shed light on how the greens perceive democracy in their programs.
Working Paper No. 5/2020: "Democratic Innovations and their Consequences for Spanish Political Parties" by Oscar Barberà & Juan Rodríguez-Teruel
The literature on deliberation and, more specifically, the research strand on democratic innovations has been somewhat disconnected form party politics. This paper tries to contribute to an emerging scholarly debate form an empirical perspective. The aim of the paper is to qualitatively assess the main consequences of several democratic innovations introduced by the Spanish parties since the mid-2010s. We argue and test whether deliberative or mixed forms of Internal Party Democracy will foster more meaningful arguments, equality and diversity than the plebiscitary ones, and that offline involvement will promote wider participation and more meaningful arguments, equality and diversity than the online one. The main results suggest that the normative distinction between plebiscitary and deliberative modes of involvement is more complex than is generally exposed by the theory, and that ICTs might be playing an important role in softening their differences.
Working Paper No. 4/2020: "Invited But Not Selected: The Perceptions of a Mini-Public by Randomly Invited - but not Selected - Citizens " by Sophie Devillers, Julien Vrydagh, Didier Caluwaerts & Min Reuchamps
Random sampling offers an equal chance to all citizens to be randomly invited to a deliberative mini-public. However, a large number of randomly invited citizens usually refuses to participate, which is why larger sample has to be drawn to obtain enough positive responses to compose the mini-public. Then, a second random sampling is operated among the people who accepted to participate, usually along quotas reflecting the population at large. This paper seeks to investigate those people who were randomly invited but finally not selected to participate the citizen panel “Make your Brussels Mobility”. On the first stage, 8000 residents of Brussels were randomly invited. Among them, 377 accepted to participate. On the second stage, 40 citizens were randomly selected to compose the panel. Our paper builds on a survey sent to the 336 citizens who were finally not selected to participate and studies their perceptions of the legitimacy of the citizen panel.
Working Paper No. 3/2019: "Studying Cherrypicking: Substantive and Methodological Reflections " by Joan Font & Grahan Smith
The Cherrypicking project developed an innovative methodological strategy to assess the consequences of participatory processes. This led to a number of publications on the determinants of the fate of citizens’ proposals, amongst other considerations. The completion of the project marks an opportunity to reflect critically on our methodological choices and the substantive findings from the research. This paper considers what we learned from the project and how this relates to on-going debates about methodological strategies to analyze the consequences of participatory processes. To what extent do the methodological choices adopted condition the results reached? What are the theoretical and practical implications of our findings? Is the evidence we uncovered generalizable to different social and political contexts?
Working Paper No. 2/2019: "Beyond Utopian and Dystopian Approaches to Democratic Innovations" by Gisela Zaremberg & Yanina Welp
This paper discusses both myths of conceptualization and of assumed effects that are implicitly or explicitly presented in analyses of the so called ‘democratic innovations’ –i.e. the new institutions addressed to increase public participation beyond regular elections. It is argued that these myths, together with the (fictitious) confrontation between direct and indirect politics, have generated false oppositions and reductionisms that mask the debate and limit empirical approximations to democratic innovation. A research agenda based on the concept of ‘participatory ecologies’ is suggested for an understanding of the mechanisms of participation in a systemic way.
Working Paper No. 1/2019: "Structured Dialogue: Engaging the Under-Represented Youth in Decision-Making" by Daniel Oross & Zsanett Pokornyi
Young people are often underrepresented in planning and decision making. In order to harmonize preferences of young citizens of the European Union, the Structured Dialogue offers participatory options ranging from European youth conferences to national consultations and consultative forums at local level. Based on the evaluation framework for Democratic Innovations the paper seeks to answer the question whether the Structured Dialogue process can be considered as a democratic innovation. Via using V-Dem database and collecting data from the European Youth Forum and its member organizations the paper aims to explain the link between the participatory quality of European democracies and the efficacy of national youth organizations in reaching out young Europeans in frame of the Structured Dialogue process. Authors found that despite those shortcomings that are often characteristic for consultative processes, there is a great potential in the Structured Dialogue.