In the face of evolving challenges to democracy, the ScaleDem project is exploring how democratic innovations can be effectively scaled. In this interview, Ulrike Liebert, principle investigator at the European University Institute (EUI), and Max Povse, a researcher at EUI’s Florence School of Transnational Governance, share their insights on the project’s objectives and progress.
Missions Publiques. Can you briefly introduce yourselves, your roles within the ScaleDem project, and what motivated you to join the project?
Ulrike. At the EUI, I am the principle investigator responsible for developing the qualitative comparative research design and methodology. While EUI is the lead of ScaleDem Research Work Package (WP1), we are working together in cooperation with other scientific partners (Université Catholique de Louvain and Dublin City University and the other partners). This project extends my previous research, which focused on the waves of democratisation and break-down of democracies in the first half of the 20th century, and their Europeanisation and transnationalisation in the second half into the 21st century. Today, democrats are faced with new threats and opportunities, democratic innovations being one of the latter !
Max. I am a researcher at the Florence School of Transnational Governance of EUI and am working on building the project’s dataset. I have worked with democracy promotion and support in one way or another my whole career. In later years, it has become apparent that we need to rethink the way we conceptualize democracy for our analyses and in our role as researchers, practitioners, and activists. This is what ScaleDem is after, so actively participating in a project that looks for better ways to scale democratic innovations is too good for me to miss.
Missions Publiques. You are very busy now, working on building the project Knowledge Map ! Can you tell us what it is exactly?
Max and Ulrike. We are looking at databases from all over the world, including the one from our sister project Nets4Dem, for cases of democratic innovations with a remarkable potential for scalability in the four dimensions that we investigate. These include scaling high (impacting laws and policy) scaling out (impacting greater numbers), scaling deep (impacting cultural roots and individual attitudes and behaviours) and scaling in (impacting practices and building capacities). This means that, at the same time, we need to systematically look at as many cases as possible and inventively identify the key conditions that make a democratic innovation scalable. This process requires quite a lot of time writing descriptions and spreadsheets, but, more importantly, team discussions to build shared knowledge about the cases. After all, this is the knowledge we are mapping as the basis for the scaling theory we want to create.
"Our ambition is to build a 21st century grounded theory of scaling democratic innovations that will serve policymakers, public authorities, practitioners, civil society researchers.
Ulrike Liebert
Investigator at the European University Institute (EUI),
Missions Publiques. What are some of the key challenges that you have bumped into so far while constituting this database? Were there also some ‘good surprises”, like a type of solution that you had never heard of, and found extremely interesting?
Ulrike. Research on democratic innovations has been skyrocketing over the past twenty years, and the EU Cordis database alone shows more than 300 EU funded projects being relevant for us. These yield rich but fragmented findings that call for a coherent conceptual and analytic framework if we want to explain how and why the scaling of innovative solutions works. This is the challenge our research team strives to resolve.
Max. One of the key challenges has been finding in-depth analyses of the cases’ outcomes or level of success, which has required a much more nuanced perspective to mine the data out of reports and briefs. Consequently, in some cases, we gather the data and reconstruct the case to look at the conditions we need to map and later analyse them to find the levels, dimensions, and paths toward scalability. However, we have looked at cases that, through theoretical analysis or pilots on the ground, have discovered these conditions, which help us refine our dataset and question how we think about the relationships between the different scaling dimensions. A good surprise in this sense has been looking at cases that perhaps do not focus primarily on democratic innovations but on other policies and have discovered mechanisms between citizens and governments that are extremely interesting for our analysis.
Missions Publiques. What is the next step for you? I imagine the work does not stop with the Database and the Knowledge Map!
Max. We are building the dataset to analyse it later and generate a theory of scaling democratic innovations. Our next step will be consolidating our data to study it through a method called Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). With this, we want to find the necessary conditions to scale different types of innovations successfully and identify what hinders their success. With this method, we can further analyse significant cases to help us build the theory of scaling afterward.
Ulrike. Ultimately, our ambition is to build a 21st century grounded theory of scaling democratic innovations that will serve policymakers, public authorities, practitioners, civil society researchers as a compass for engaging citizens in new democratic practices between and beyond elections.
"I think the lessons from this project will help implement bottom-up innovations in my country that empower citizens and do not merely include them sporadically.
Max Povse
Researcher at EUI’s Florence School of Transnational Governance
Missions Publiques. Ulrike, you are from Germany, and Max, you are from Argentina. How does the work that you are doing with ScaleDem resonates with you personally: what future do you see for democratic innovations in your native countries?
Max. Argentina is an exciting country for democratic innovations, as local governments are especially receptive to participatory and digital innovative types. However, we are far from integrating more deliberative and direct kinds of citizens’ decision-making into policies. In this sense, I think the lessons from this project will help implement bottom-up innovations in my country that empower citizens and do not merely include them sporadically.
Ulrike. Germany too has a track record of regional and national level mini publics where randomly selected citizens deliberate about policy recommendations. Why such recommendations thus far have been rarely consequential, whether, where and how citizens’ panels could become a permanent practice, and where not – these are some of the questions we expect our work in ScaleDem will help us answer!
– Our project presentation
– The ScaleDem website
– To follow the project on social media, follow the LinkedIn profil
