Democratic innovations are novel institutions that are implemented to increase citizen participation and improve the quality of democratic politics. One example are so-called citizens’ assemblies, which bring together randomly selected citizens to discuss a particular topic or policy question and formulate a recommendation on how the topic or question should be dealt with. The number of experiments with such formats increases. In particular, there are more and more citizens’ assemblies dealing with climate policies and possibilities of taking action in the face of the climate crisis. This raises the question if democratic innovations could not only be a possibility to improve the quality of democratic processes in general, but also provide new impetus for a different kind of political response to the climate crisis. One problem in this respect is that citizens’ assemblies currently usually only have advisory functions. In this course, students will learn about different types of democratic innovations and acquire analytical tools to evaluate their respective strengths and weaknesses. In addition, they will study examples of democratic innovations dealing with the topic of climate and analyze the extent to which such formats could have an influence on climate politics. A particular emphasis will be put on proposals to redesign the tasks and designs of democratic innovations in the future.
- Lehrende/r: Manon Westphal