The failure to examine failures in democratic innovations

Abstract

While empirical research on democratic innovations is characterised by steady growth in output, a study of the top journals in political science shows that in the last ten years the vast majority of these empirical studies focused on best practices. Empirical evaluation of the lessons that we can draw from failures in participatory and deliberative processes are extremely rare. This pattern of success and failure is not representative of reality. Various specialized monographs and studies in less prominent journals have investigated a variety of problems and failures. Why do we see this pattern of ‘failure neglect’ in top journals? In this paper we explore some of the causes of this pattern elucidating the impact of sampling bias, innovation bias, publication bias, and the loss of independence due to the difficulty of implementing participatory action research in politically contested projects. We argue that this lack of representativeness in the real-world cases of deliberation that command the attention of general political science audiences is currently a major barrier to understanding democratic improvements. Without a comparison of success and failure, our models for successful outcomes will be chronically overdetermined, which ultimately reduces their chances of adoption in practice.

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ORCID for Paolo Spada: orcid.org/0000-0002-7050-2079

ORCID for Matthew Ryan: orcid.org/0000-0002-8693-5063

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