Co-creation of democratic value: A framework for evaluating digital public participation

Abstract

Digital public participation platforms have been adopted worldwide, yet a fundamental question remains unresolved: what makes such participation democratically valuable? The core problem this paper addresses is that existing evaluation frameworks cannot detect a critical gap: a platform can run for many years on sophisticated open-source infrastructure and under a comprehensive legal mandate to consult, accumulate hundreds of thousands of citizen comments, and still achieve minimal measurable democratic impact. Current approaches tend to privilege technocratic metrics over citizen empowerment, focus on government supply rather than outcomes for citizens, conduct snapshot rather than longitudinal assessment, and often implicitly treat structural exclusions as technical problems. This paper introduces the Co-creation of Democratic Value (CDV) framework as a power-sensitive response to these limitations. CDV reconceptualizes evaluation from external measurement toward embedded co-creation, treating the definition of successful participation as itself a political question rather than a purely technical one. It operationalizes assessment through seven dimensions: Co-Design, Co-Agenda Setting, Co-Production and Co-Governance, Co-Analysis, and Co-Evaluation (five process dimensions tracking power redistribution across the participation lifecycle), plus Inclusion and Integrity (two transversal values dimensions ensuring democratic quality throughout). Five-point scoring rubrics anchor each dimension in documented evidence. As ongoing research, the paper combines the framework proposal with a proof-of-concept application: using systematic desk-research, CDV is applied to two deliberately contrasting cases — Barcelona's Decidim (3.70/5) and Greece's OpenGov.gr (1.63/5). The 2.07-point gap emerges despite both platforms operating within European Union regulatory environments and employing open-source technologies, indicating that democratic value depends on political commitment to power redistribution rather than on technological sophistication or legal mandates. The polar-case design confirms CDV's capacity to discriminate democratic quality; systematic multi-case validation across platforms of comparable quality, together with mixed-stakeholder inter-rater testing, remains the explicit next step.