Federalism Innovation and the Nexus of Participation

The subnational sphere has emerged as a critical space for innovative practices in participation and collaborative governance in multi-level governance. The panel examines how federal and decentralized systems navigate the current democratic malaise by leveraging the multilevel structure of governance to foster subnational innovation. y shifting the focus from purely territorial representation to institutional and democratic innovations, the panel addresses the nexus of participation in a reconfigured, multidimensional landscape of democratic legitimacy and effective policymaking – including questions of how federalism can guarantee pluralism, or of how subnational units can resist democratic backsliding and central authoritarianism. This goes back to one of the original purposes of federalism, being to protect against tyranny.
We argue that federalism allows localized and experimental participatory and collaborative practices to emerge, often bypassing the inertia of national-level policy. However, any decentralized approach also presents challenges regarding the institutionalization, equity, and scaling of subnational innovation. We further argue that while subnational autonomy offers space for novel practices, the success of such practices in bridging the participation gap hinges on whether multilevel structures allow for the institutional embedding of subnational outcomes.
The panel aims to reflect on the relationship between subnational democracy and participation, highlighting phenomena related to the type, extent, and quality of participation in its institutional and non-institutional forms. It aims to examine linkages between the subnational level with higher levels of government, capable of accounting for the multidimensional and multistakeholder nature of the concept of participation and for how it changes.
We welcome papers on topics including the relationship between political representation, (subnational) democratic innovations, and multilevel democracy; tensions between localized experimentation and collaborative governance; the disjointed realities of top-down frameworks and bottom-up demands; vertical and horizontal power dynamics affecting participation; connections between innovation, deliberation, and policy impact; the effectiveness of innovations in bridging representation and activism; and the role of public administration in different spheres of government in collaborative governance