Book Launch: Innovating Democracy? The Means and End of Citizen Participation in Latin America

Since democratization, Latin America has experienced a surge in new forms of citizen participation. Yet there is still little comparative knowledge on these so-called democratic innovations. This Element seeks to fill this gap. Drawing on a new dataset with 3,744 cases from 18 countries between 1990 and 2020, it presents the first large-N cross-country study of democratic innovations to date. It also introduces a typology of twenty kinds of democratic innovations, which are based on four means of participation, namely deliberation, citizen representation, digital engagement, and direct voting. Adopting a pragmatist, problem-driven approach, this Element claims that democratic innovations seek to enhance democracy by addressing public problems through combinations of those four means of participation in pursuit of one or more of five ends of innovations, namely accountability, responsiveness, rule of law, social equality, and political inclusion.

Thamy Pogrebinschi is a senior researcher at the Center for Civil Society Research, faculty member of the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences (BGSS) at Humboldt University Berlin, and associate researcher at the Institute of Social and Political Studies of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ). In the academic year 2022-2023, she is at the University of Oxford as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) and an Associate Member of Nuffield College. Previously, Thamy Pogrebinschi was a Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School (2017-2018), a Visiting Professor at the LUISS University in Rome (2015), and an Alfred-Grosser Visiting Professor at the Goethe University in Frankfurt (2013-2014). Thamy Pogrebinschi’s current research focuses on democratic innovations, new forms of citizen participation, the impact of technology on civil society, and collective intelligence in Latin America. She was the founder and coordinator of the LATINNO project (2015-2021), which built the largest existing database on democratic innovations in Latin America. Currently she co-coordinates the CoIntelBr project, which investigates the use of technologies of collective intelligence to fight disinformation in elections and to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. Pogrebinschi’s new book, Innovating Democracy? The Means and Ends of Citizen Participation in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2023) presents the first large-N cross-country study of democratic innovations to date and introduces a comprehensive typology of democratic innovations. Her research has been published in four languages in numerous book chapters and journal articles, including Comparative Politics, European Journal of Political Research, and Critical Policy Studies.