Explore the vast range of titles available.

While existing research has increasingly emphasized the need to embed democratic innovations within formal political structures to ensure their sustainability, analytical frameworks are largely rooted in normative democratic theory and often lack tools for understanding the processes of institutionalization of democratic innovations. We draw on the framework developed for analyzing the institutionalization of National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs), using it as an analogy to better understand the mechanism of these processes, with a specific focus on the roles of the socio-political actors involved. While we acknowledge the structural differences between NHRIs and democratic innovations, we argue that this analogy provides a valuable perspective and theoretical model that could be used for analyzing mechanisms and the roles actors may play in these processes, especially in the context of increasing international support for participatory norms. Ultimately, we contend that successful institutionalization depends on the parallel efforts of state actors, civil society, participation professionals, academics, and international organizations, whose actions may unfold independently yet contribute collectively to the institutionalization of democratic innovations and suggest that the model we propose should be further refined and validated through empirical research.

Democratic innovation and institutionalization processes both seem to aspire to achieve the same goals: to ensure that democracy can evolve and thrive over time and to generate and embed new modes of functioning that can include more people and respond to emerging needs. However, both conceptually and in practice, the two approaches tend to be depicted as apart, as some scholars of democratic innovation take a critical stance toward institutionalization, while those researching modes of institutionalization struggle to account for the messiness of emerging practices that evolve in unexpected ways. This article aims to reflect on how a strong dualism in debates about democratic innovation and institutionalization risks that certain forms of change go unnoticed and therefore under-theorized. By drawing on the concept of political creativity, this article introduces an anti-dualist perspective and advances new critical reflections within existing democratic innovation literature. Interestingly, the scholarship on political creativity has so far not entered the democratic innovation debates, despite some interesting points of contact and shared concerns with recent publications in this field. Drawing on practical cases, this article advances three main suggestions for re-thinking institutionalization beyond the dualism in democratic innovation, which all directly emanate from the political creativity scholarship and concern the importance of taking into account the dimension of time, the concept of relationality, and a novel understanding of order as assemblages.

Institutions play a crucial role in organizing, systematizing, and simplifying public life, enabling the planning of activities and structuring the behavior of individuals. In Poland, various institutionalized and formalized instruments of civic engagement are commonly used at the local level, particularly in municipalities (Kołomycew, 2023). However, since 2013, there has been a surge in democratic innovations, such as participatory budgeting and, since 2016, citizens’ assemblies (CAs), which serve as deliberative instruments of a quasi-decisive nature (Gerwin, 2018; Podgórska-Rykała, 2020; Pospieszna & Pietrzyk-Reeves, 2024; Ufel, 2022). This article explores the process of institutionalizing CAs in Poland by analyzing the evolution and content of their Rules of Procedure (RoPs). We focus on Poland due to its unique position as one of the first Central and Eastern European countries to join the deliberative wave (Carson & Gerwin, 2018; OECD, 2020). Using a triangulated theoretical approach that draws from neo-institutionalism, structuration theory, and critical institutionalism, this article investigates how formalization, practice, and political creativity interact in shaping this democratic innovation. The study is based on a comparative analysis of 10 local climate assemblies organized between 2016 and 2023. Its findings suggest that while RoPs serve as formalizing scripts, they also reflect evolving practices and localized reinterpretations that expand the civic potential of CAs.

Life courses are studied in sociology and neighboring fields as developmental processes, as culturally and normatively constructed life stages and age roles, as biographical meanings, as aging processes, as outcomes of institutional regulation and policies, as demographic accounts, or as mere empirical connectivity across the life course. This review has two aims. One is to report on trends in life course research by focusing on empirical studies published since the year 2000. The other is to assess the overall development of the field. Major advances can be observed in four areas: national individual-level longitudinal databases, the impact of institutional contexts on life courses, life four under conditions of societal ruptures, and health across the life course. In four other areas, advancements have been less pronounced: internal dynamics and causal linkages across life, the interaction of development and socially constructed life courses, theory development, and new methods. Overall, life course sociology still has far to go to reach its full potential.

Since the beginning of the cash transfer era in Kenya, there have been efforts by some politicians, civil servants, and international actors to broaden, evenly allocate, and localise the provision of social protection. Simultaneously, there have been consistent efforts by international donors, particularly the World Bank, to narrow the provision of social protection to the poor and improve the efficiency of poverty-targeting through institutional reforms. The latest example of this is the development of a national social registry supported through a World Bank loan. A social registry is a large-scale data system that holds socio-economic data on households and is used to administer social policy provision. This article argues that, despite social registries being framed as a bureaucratic and neutral administrative practice, they are underpinned by residualist ideas about social policy provisioning. This means the development and institutionalisation of the national social registry touches on core contestations within the sector, regarding poverty-targeting, local registration processes, and the visibility of coverage expansion. This has exacerbated a longstanding tension between two competing visions of social protection in Kenya and their respective institutional supporters. Due to these implicit political tensions, the institutionalisation of the social registry has exacerbated contradictions and dysfunctions within social protection provisioning rather than resolved them.

Over the last few decades, the setting up of deliberative processes has gained prominence in many democratic countries. These processes, which can be considered as small parentheses in longer and complex policy-making processes, are designed and managed so that citizens can discuss and confront a plurality of viewpoints and arguments together with politicians, public officials, experts, and stakeholders, and can then convey reasoned recommendations to improve the design and implementation of public policies. Research on deliberative democracy has dealt with several issues pertaining to the quality, legitimacy, effectiveness, and sustainability of these democratic innovations. One of the issues that has attracted the attention of scholars concerns the legal institutionalisation of these practices, a recent and controversial phenomenon, which could strengthen or weaken the embeddedness of public deliberation in democratic systems. This article is aimed at addressing the issue of whether legal institutionalisation helps to embed public deliberation in democratic systems. It presents the findings of an empirical analysis of Italian deliberative processes, where a legislative framework made so-called “public debates” compulsory throughout the national territory between 2021 and 2023. Thereafter, in 2023, a new reform was introduced that substantially dismantled the policy. The short parabola of Italian public debates on major public works offers an opportunity to analyse the short-term effects of legal institutionalisation. The empirical findings of this case study suggest that the legal institutionalisation of public deliberation involves several trade-offs in the short term, so that embeddedness may be strengthened and weakened at the same time.

Over the last few decades, growing public dissatisfaction with institutions of representative democracy has become unignorable. Similar problems affecting representative democracy occur within the policy process, as traditional top-down policymaking within the institutions of representative democracy has proven inadequate to include citizens. As a potential solution, some have turned to deliberative mini-publics (DMPs), which are slowly overcoming their experimental phase, and more attention is being placed on their institutionalisation within the political system and policy process. In this article, we are looking to articulate the necessary conditions for the institutionalisation of DMPs within a policy process. In doing so, we articulate six necessary conditions that aim at making DMPs an inclusive and effective member of the policy subsystem.

This book develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. Different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and resources. Thus democracy is preferred by the majority of citizens, but opposed by elites. Dictatorship nevertheless is not stable when citizens can threaten social disorder and revolution. In response, when the costs of repression are sufficiently high and promises of concessions are not credible, elites may be forced to create democracy. By democratizing, elites credibly transfer political power to the citizens, ensuring social stability. Democracy consolidates when elites do not have strong incentive to overthrow it. These processes depend on (1) the strength of civil society, (2) the structure of political institutions, (3) the nature of political and economic crises, (4) the level of economic inequality, (5) the structure of the economy, and (6) the form and extent of globalization.

Why do some movement parties successfully institutionalize into a functioning party organization while others struggle? This paper argues that not all movement parties institutionalize in the same way. Movement parties that emanate out of a long-term social movement organization face a qualitatively different set of challenges than those that form out of a short-term movement. Routinization—the process of parties developing rules, regulation, and predictable behavior—is a particularly crucial component for short-term movement party institutionalization. When parties emanate out of long-standing social movement organizations, they are advantaged because they already have existing formal rules and regulations. Short-term parties however, are disadvantaged because they lack these organizational structures. Further, short-term movement parties not only need routinization, but must make it a priority; the sequencing of their institutionalization matters. I demonstrate the importance of routinization with the case of Taiwan’s New Power Party, a movement party formed out of the 2014 Sunflower Movement. This case shows how struggles to routinize early for short-term movement parties leads to crucial causal mechanisms hindering party institutionalization instead of helping it.