Latin America’s democratic innovations at scale: bridging deliberation and participation

Abstract How can democratic systems connect deliberation to mass participation? Recent debates on deliberative democracy have sharpened this question by highlighting the tension between the deliberative quality often associated with small-scale forums and the democratic imperative of broad citizen inclusion. This article addresses that challenge by examining democratic innovations in Latin America that enable participation at large scale without relinquishing core deliberative properties. Drawing on the LATINNO dataset and focusing on two recurrent types of democratic innovations – multilevel policymaking and participatory planning – the article develops an analytical framework centered on three design features: open participation, sequential deliberation, and institutionalized collaboration. I argue that, when combined, these features allow large numbers of citizens and civil society organizations to enter deliberative processes while sustaining core deliberative properties such as iterative justification and preference refinement, and strengthening the prospects that policymaking institutions will take up the resulting outputs. The comparison shows that multilevel policymaking and participatory planning constitute two distinct routes to large-scale deliberation: the former relies more strongly on cumulative sequencing across territorial or deliberative stages, while the latter operates through the integration of heterogeneous inputs across multiple spaces and modalities. By bringing Latin American democratic innovations into dialogue with contemporary deliberative theory, the article expands the range of institutional designs through which deliberation can be connected to the mass public.