Abstract | What does it mean to design democratic innovation from a systems perspective? The demand of the deliberative systems approach that we turn from the single forum towards the broader system has largely been embraced by those interested in designing institutions for citizen participation. Nevertheless, there has been no analysis of the practical implications for democratic innovation. Is it possible to design differentiated but interconnected participatory and deliberative settings? Does this better connect democratic innovations to mass politics? Does it promote greater legitimacy? This article analyses one such attempt to design a deliberative system in the real world: the ambitious NHS Citizen initiative. Our analysis demonstrates, while NHS Citizen pioneered some cutting-edge participatory design, it ultimately failed to resolve (and in some cases exacerbated) well known obstacles to institutionalization, and generated new challenges. To effectively inform democratic renewal and reform, a systems approach must evolve strategies to ameliorate these challenges. |
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