by Sarah Brown and Allegra Fullerton
Welcome to our first themed collection of 2025, featuring our most popular, recent research published in Policy & Politics! Our first collection centres around themes of Democracy. Whether you’re preparing to teach a unit on democracy or doing research in that area, or are just interested in keeping up to date with the latest concepts in democratic innovations, we hope you will find these highlighted articles interesting!
Our first article in this collection, is a conceptual article which presents a new theory of robust democracy. In this powerhouse of an article, authors Sørensen and Warren argue that such a theory is needed to strengthen the capacity of liberal democracies to adapt and innovate in response to change. While many democratic theorists recognise the necessity of reforming liberal democracies to keep pace with social change, the authors argue that what enables such reform is rarely considered. The authors posit that liberal democracies are politically robust when they are able to continuously adapt and innovate in ways that enable them to serve their core democratic functions, even in the face of disruptive political demands and events. These functions include securing the empowered inclusion of those affected, collective agenda setting and will formation, and the making of joint decisions. This theorising becomes all the more urgent in response to three current challenges that the authors highlight which urgently demand the adaptation and innovation of liberal democracies to become more politically robust: an increasingly assertive political culture, the digitalisation of political communication and increasing global interdependencies. The new theory suggests that when a political system serves these three core democratic functions, this not only deepens democracy, which is justifiable on its own terms, but it also increases political robustness.
Our second article contributes to our understanding of participatory forms of governance – a central tenet of democratic engagement. Based on the democratic principle that effective citizen participation in policy decision making depends on the support of all democratic actors involved: citizens, plus also politicians and civil servants, authors Verschuere et al. analyse policy actors’ preferences for different modes of governing in local government. Drawing on data from over 4,000 respondents, they explore the existence of so-called ‘multi-actor clusters.’ These clusters are groups of people who are characterised by a positive (or negative) stance towards different modes of local policy decision making, irrespective of their formal-institutional role (politician, civil servant or citizen). Their analysis shows two large clusters of respondents that clearly prefer participatory over representative policy decision making as well as a substantial cluster of respondents who prefer representative policy decision making modes over participatory ones. In addition, it shows that a democratic actor’s cluster membership is better predicted by individual (ideological) variables (such as left-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation), compared to contextual (like governing capacity, democratic quality, and social capital of the municipality in which the actors work and/or live).
In conclusion then, the authors argue that, on the one hand, some citizens, politicians and civil servants favour increased citizen participation in policy decision making. On the other hand, one should be careful with framing or advertising citizen participation as a solution for decreasing democratic legitimacy or lack of governing capacity. After all, the extent to which citizens, civil servants and politicians perceive democratic innovation via participatory decision making as legitimate is also driven by their specific ideological positions. Indeed, a considerable number of democratic actors are hesitant about increased citizen participation. For them, the legitimacy of policy decision making may increase only if citizen participation is clearly positioned in the larger scheme of representative democracy. In this way, this research calls for a more complex and contextualised understanding of what citizen participation means, beyond the often assumed dichotomy between representative and participatory democracy.
Our final article in this collection on democratic innovations focuses on deliberative mini-publics and their governance. Deliberative mini-publics are forums for citizen deliberation composed of randomly selected citizens convened to yield policy recommendations. These forums have proliferated in recent years but there are no generally accepted standards to govern their practice. This article asks: should there be? By way of answer, the authors bring together the scholarly literature on citizen deliberation in dialogue with the lived experience of those who study, design and implement mini-publics. Their analysis identifies five distinct perspectives on the integrity of mini-publics and maps the structure of agreement and dispute across them. Their findings show that, across the five viewpoints, there is emerging consensus as well as divergence on integrity issues, with disagreement over what might be gained or lost by adapting common standards of practice and possible sources of integrity risks. This article provides an empirical foundation for further discussion on integrity standards for this important democratic tool in the future.
Don’t forget, you can access the original research which is free to access until 30 April by clicking on the links below!:
Sørensen, E., and Warren, M. E. (2025). Developing a theory of robust democracy. Policy & Politics 53, 1, 2-21, available from: https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000050
Verschuere, B., Roets, A., Steyvers, K., Wauters, B., Berkvens, L., De Smedt, N., Goutry, W., Pittoors, G., Van Severen, R., and Haesevoets, T. (2025). Analysing policy actors’ preferences for different modes of governing in local government. Policy & Politics 53, 1, 22-43, available from: https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000048
Parry, L. J., Curato, N., and Dryzek, J. S. (2024). Governance of deliberative mini-publics: emerging consensus and divergent views. Policy & Politics (published online ahead of print 2024), available from: https://doi.org/10.1332/03055736Y2024D000000043
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