Mapping Democratic Innovations: A Bottom-up Empirical Perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT Literature in democratic innovations highlights format or process-centred strategies to classify democratic innovations. However, both format and process-centred classification strategies suffer from conceptual stretching, leading to cases' omissions or overlapping typologies. This research proposes a new analytical approach to classifying democratic innovation based on prototypical radial categorization. Prototypical radial categorization classifies objects considering their similarity to a central category and empirically establishes how observations are related to normative accounts of democratic innovations. The proposed categorization strategy is empirically evaluated on real-world democratic innovations drawn from Participedia, the largest crowd sourcing platform in democratic innovation. Participedia database is analyzed through multiple factor analysis (MFA) and hierarchical clustering on principal components (HCPC). The analysis highlights four clusters that are a subset of two main groups that coincide with the normative categorization of participatory and deliberative democracy.