Democracy in Practice: A Report on Innovations in Participatory Governance

Abstract

Americans' disconnect from their elected officials has reached crisis levels. What potential do citizens' assemblies and participatory decision-making hold for restoring people's trust in their democracy? This essay explores three case studies of participatory governance at three levels – in California, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and in Fort Collins, Colorado; virtually and in person – and finds that Americans are ready and willing to participate in well-designed deliberative processes and are willing to accept the outcomes of deliberative bodies. But representativeness and accountability in those processes are essential and not easy to come by. This analysis invites the question of whether these democratic experiments can scale up to where they are needed most: our national politics.