Electoral Participation and Non-Electoral Participatory Processes

This chapter aims to contribute to the debate on the relevance of non-electoral participatory processes for electoral participation at local, national and European levels. It first provides a general framework of analysis to better understand the idea of strengthening electoral participation, both in its quantitative and qualitative dimensions. It then looks at some of the European initiatives that have been recently launched with the aim of strengthening EU and national democratic elections. The chapter explores the most important strategies pursued at national and local levels to strengthen democracy by promoting different forms of non-electoral participation, with a special emphasis on some recent democratic innovations. It concludes with a presentation of four case-studies of different instruments/processes of non-electoral participation: the DECIDIM online platform developed by the city of Barcelona, the vTaiwan digital space for citizen engagement in Taiwan, the recent Chilean constitutional convention, and the Conference for the Future of Europe. Even if some take for granted that promoting forms of non-electoral participation is the key strategy to strengthen not only democratic legitimacy in general, but the quantity and quality of electoral participation in particular, we argue that this is not yet a foregone conclusion.