Representative democracy benefits from new combinations of deliberation and voting

Persistent problems of representative democracy can be addressed with clever combinations of deliberation and voting, for Dutch democracy particularly: the structural complaint of citizens that they are not heard and seen and the 'stop and go' culture of governing. So argues Frank Hendriks, Professor of Comparative Governance at Tilburg University, whose book Rethinking Democratic Innovation came out recently. In Rethinking Democratic Innovation, Hendriks discusses both the theory and practice of democratic innovation worldwide. Compared to many countries discussed in this book, Dutch democracy is actually not doing so badly, Frank Hendriks states. But there are always reasons for democratic renewal, both positive and negative. Positive reasons are related to the emergence of new opportunities for public learning, driven by new technologies and experiments that proved successful. Negative reasons, when it comes to the Netherlands, are two main ones: the lack of responsiveness of political democracy and, as a result, the feeling of many citizens that they are not heard and seen; and the "stop and go" culture of governing - jumping to conclusions in policymaking where pause and reflection would have been better; standstill where things should be pushed through and implemented.