Rethinking Democratic Innovation

Frank Hendriks is a full professor of Comparative Governance and a former Head of Department at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He combines Political Science and Public Administration takes on democracy in action, which he has studied widely in the subnational, national, and cross-national realms. Frank leads the research project and consortium REDRESS, focused on hybrid democratic innovations combining practices of deliberation and voting. Frank has published extensively with reputed academic journals and international publishers, including Oxford University Press. He is a council member of the advisory Council for Public Administration (ROB) in the Netherlands, a fellow at the Montesquieu Institute, the Netherlands Institute of Governance (NIG), and was visiting fellow at various universities in Europe and the US.

• Part 1: Understanding Variation 1: The layered quality of democratic innovation and reform 2: A cultural perspective on purity and democracy 3: Democratic innovation beyond deliberative reflection 4: Exploring the new plebiscitary democracy 5: Between counters and talkers: grasping the full matrix Part 2: Advancing Innovation 6: Key values for democratic-governance innovation 7: The deliberative referendum: reflections on a national-level hybrid 8: Participatory Budgeting-new style: reflections on a local-level hybrid 9: Conclusion: on the hybrid-innovations hypothesis

This wonderfully topical and highly insightful monograph deserves to become the go-to resource for anyone wanting a clear overview and sophisticated assessment of the wide array of attempts to complement, re-invigorate, and correct the current performances of representative democracies across the world. No doubt the best monograph on democratic politics by a Dutch political scientist since Arend Lijphart's modern classic Patterns of Democracy (1999).