New democratic mechanisms of public engagement will be discussed at a seminar

The challenges that various democracies have experienced over the past decade have stimulated the creation of innovative mechanisms for public engagement, such as mini-publics and citizen juries. They have been used to seek solutions to complex problems and to strengthen democratic values among citizens and elected politicians, as well as to create more inclusive democracies.

Iain Walker, executive director at the newDemocracy Foundation, will address the issue at the seminar Democracies and Democratic Innovations, which will take place on September 19, from 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm. The moderators will be political scientists José Álvaro Moisés, coordinator of IEA's research group on the Quality of Democracy, and Sergio Fausto, superintendent at the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation. There will be live streaming on the Institute's website.

Walker cites the Arab Spring and the June of 2013 in Brazil, the election of populist leaders, and the political positions like the Brexit as "good, but not exhaustive, examples on how democratic regimes are being confronted."

"Making democracies more inclusive means to strengthen democratic values like tolerance and political trust between the citizens, but also to introduce practices of accountability and responsiveness inside governments practices. It also requires innovative reforms to include minorities into the political system and to addressing the contemporary problem of the 'crisis of the representatives,' that take apart political and economic elites from the mass of the citizens."