Inleiding bij het themanummer ‘Democratische innovatie en burgerparticipatie’

To say that democracy is under pressure is like kicking in a door that is wide open. Many (local) governments are therefore working to innovate that democracy. A frequently used way to escape the democratic malaise is to give citizens more direct input into government and policy. In practice, citizen participation comes in many different forms, from referendums and citizen surveys to citizen panels and consultation meetings, to citizen budgets and experiments with co-creation in which citizens and government join forces to develop and deliver public services. The many experiments with citizen participation have not escaped the attention of researchers in Public Administration and Political Science: there is a growing range of insights into this form of democratic innovation. In this special issue the guest editors, Albert Meijer, Frank Hendriks & Bram Verschuere, present the state-of-the-art contributions of Dutch and Flemish researchers from various universities.