Integrating Multiple Channels of Engagement: from Multichannel Marketing to Democratic Innovations
Increasingly cities around the world are introducing multichannel democratic innovations that integrate multiple engagement processes. This article offers a first overview of this emerging phenomenon by exploring three families of multi channel innovations: participatory budgetings, citizens' assemblies, and citizen relations management platforms. The authors introduce a series of definitions to identify some of the building blocks of these complex democratic innovations' The paper uses this framework to explore the opportunities and challenges of integrating multiple channels of engagement, and to describe the most common integration mechanisms employed by these families of innovations: managed competition, regulation and isolation. This paper constitutes a first step in a new research agenda that goes beyond the variety of labels of democratic innovations and investigates how these institutions can be modeled as different combinations of a common set of building blocks. Introduction Democratic innovations institutions designed specifically to increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision making process (Smith, 2009) have become a common feature of policymaking and governance building. Participedia, a global network of scholars that maps democratic innovations using a variety of new crowdsourcing methods, describes the fast diffusion of democratic innovations as "a transformation of democracy one possibly as revolutionary as the development of the representative, party based form of democracy that evolved out of the universal franchise." Some democratic innovations are very simple and involve a single public in a set of tasks. Town hall meetings (Bryan, 2003) many mini publics (Smith Ryan, 2014) issue reporting digital platforms (Sjoberg, Mellon, Peixoto, 2015) and participatory monitoring processes (Bjorkman Svensson, 2007) are just a few examples of single channel democratic innovations. Other democratic innovations are more complex and can be better understood as a system that integrates multiple channels of engagement, i.e. multiple online and/or offline spaces designed to promote the participation of a specific segment of the population. The most complex of these systems engage more than a million people (Aggio, Sampaio, 2013) While the existing literature has investigated the interactions between democratic innovations and other existing institutions, both theoretically (Mansbridge et al. 2012) and empirically (Wampler, 2007) very little is known about the interactions of channels of engagement within a democratic