Democratic innovations: is the local scale (still) the ideal laboratory for democracy?

The local scale has long been considered the ideal laboratory for democracy because the proximity between electors and elected officials is believed to pave the way to participatory policymaking and democratic improvement. The paper unpacks this assumption by examining tensions emerging from the design and implementation of Democratic Innovations in western countries. The main argument of this paper builds on the acknowledgement that local innovations have become an asset of multiple state levels, multi-actor networks, and constituencies. The local scale holds the potential to be an ideal laboratory if democratic innovations are put into the historical, political, economic, and social context of multi-scalar democracy in different localities.