(Illustration by David Plunkert)
In 2020, amid a global pandemic and a wave of antiracist protests inspired by the US Black Lives Matter movement, the young German nonprofit JoinPolitics prepared its first group of motivated citizens to enter politics. The organization follows a typical social-venture model through which it scouts, selects, and supports political talents with innovative ideas to strengthen democracy across different regions and levels of government. The handpicked cohort undergoes a curated six-month program that includes funding and training in a variety of skills, such as how to run a campaign, as well as access to an extensive network of politicians, entrepreneurs, civil society organizations, and foundations.
In the program, participants can pursue their ideas, such as drafting legislation to empower stateless people, establishing a lobby group to represent the interests of an underrepresented community, or consulting government agencies to recruit staff from minoritized groups. The solutions they develop address a host of sociopolitical problems that have made German democracy vulnerable to deterioration, including increasing polarization, right-wing populism, social injustice and inequality, and stagnant processes and structures. JoinPolitics is explicitly pro-democratic, but nonpartisan. It supports talents that belong to a spectrum of political parties, as well as those with no party affiliation, but it does not engage with non- and anti-democratic parties.
Caroline Weimann founded JoinPolitics in 2019 after working at a German foundation to address societal challenges. Her transition from grant maker to social entrepreneur was sparked by the realization that “the big questions of our time, be they social inequalities, climate change,” she says, “will have to be solved on a political level.”
For Weimann, as well as others, social innovation must enter politics to unlock its full potential. JoinPolitics departs from conventional social-innovation practice, which recognizes the role of policy in creating a favorable environment for the sector but does not prioritize changes in the political system. Traditionally, the practice of social innovation has stopped at the gates of political systems. Instead, JoinPolitics promotes innovation to fix or reconfigure elements in the political system, effectively liberating social innovation from the dominant narrative that has divorced it from the political realm. The focus of the nonprofit and its political talents is on finding solutions to mounting threats against democratic principles of justice, equality, representation, and civic participation in Germany.
Researching this unconventional political engagement across six continents, we found that the threats to democracy and concerns about destabilization that drive endeavors like JoinPolitics are ubiquitous. As organizational scholars, we analyzed reports documenting the state of democracy and spoke with professionals in public administration, business, academia, organized civil society, and politics. Over the past year, we have conducted more than 50 interviews with experts and players involved in a wide range of activities like those practices of JoinPolitics.
One such player is Nigeria’s #FixPolitics, founded in 2020 by Oby Ezekwesili, the public policy expert, humanitarian, and cofounder of Transparency International. The nonprofit aspires to create a democracy that works for everyone by educating and encouraging disadvantaged citizens to exert their civic rights, fostering electoral reforms, and training politicians who favor democracy. Here again, stringent problems in democracy—such as lack of political inclusion, education inequality, or social injustice—are foundational to #FixPolitics’ work.
JoinPolitics and #FixPolitics exemplify a worldwide trend to revive democratic principles through citizen-led innovation. Similar initiatives have emerged in the past decade, including: the National Democratic Institute, which incubates leaders in public service in the United States; the Innovation in Politics Institute, which facilitates exchanges of best innovation practices across borders and party lines in Europe; the nonprofit Keseb, which seeks to build a global ecosystem of pro-democracy entrepreneurs in Brazil, India, South Africa, and the United States; and the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy, which established a network of democracy schools across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
These initiatives share a desire for social innovation to “join politics.” What they do and how they operate are illustrative of what we call political innovation: the citizen-led practice of diagnosing problems in the political system and collectively working toward solutions with the objective of strengthening and revitalizing democracy. These initiatives’ efforts directly respond to critical threats to democracy, including the rise in authoritarianism. In 2022, the world saw more autocratic states than democracies for the first time in nearly two decades. Bertelsmann Stiftung’s 2022 global findings report categorized 70 of 137 countries as autocracies and declared another 11 “highly defective democracies” that are vulnerable to turning autocratic. In 2021, the US-based nonprofit Freedom House reported a new high point in the 15-year-long global “democratic recession”; countries where democracy deteriorated outnumbered those “with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began.”
In addition, the ongoing global public-health crisis compounded many antidemocratic trends, such as normalization of emergency powers and extension of state power into citizens’ private lives.1 Populist movements continue to divide societies, and, according to the 2021 Democracy Index, even countries with “stable” democracies scored low when it came to citizen participation.2 Further, while youth become more politically active, politicians in influential positions continue to represent the age groups and interests of people 50 years and older. And lack of political representation—perceived or actual—may also contribute to increased public distrust in democratic governments and politicians. According to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer study of 28 countries, 42 percent of citizens worldwide distrust government leaders and 48 percent consider government a divisive force.
Despite these deficiencies, political innovators consider democracy the most suitable form of government for ensuring political order, economic development, and societal progress. Their view mirrors society’s concerns and preferences. According to a 2021 study by More in Common and Robert Bosch Stiftung, 93 percent of Germany’s population was in favor of democracy in principle, even though one in two people did not feel as if their views were represented in government.3 However, views on what exactly constitutes a stable and functional democracy vary, and such variation informs how political innovation takes shape as either systemic reform or transformation.
Because it is a nascent field, political innovation risks fragmentation due to lack of established definition and terminology. Now, as global efforts to shore up democracy increase worldwide, we have reached a critical moment where the field needs consolidation, and our role as organizational scholars is to provide a language and structure in terms of what political innovation is and what it is not. Therefore, in this article we define the contours of the field, offer conceptual clarity, and show its linkages to social innovation.
From the Social to the Political
Political innovation encourages us to think of social change and political change as interrelated—not decoupled. The political in political innovation establishes the context of the work in politics and the political system; politics includes civic engagement (lowercase p), as well as formal engagement in political institutions (uppercase P). Innovation refers to the process of diagnosing problems; developing ideas; and experimenting with, implementing, and adapting solutions. Solutions can materialize in the form of products, methods, or technologies to solve a problem or to enact new political practices.
Political innovation encompasses changes in how we practice democracy and in the infrastructure that operationalizes democracy. We view political innovation as an ongoing and collective effort to ensure that democracy remains an effective and suitable operating system to achieve social order and progress.
Accordingly, political innovation is not distinct from but consistent with a capacious understanding of social innovation that goes beyond recognizing its potential to impact economic and political life through social change. Instead, it makes the reform or transformation of political orders central to social innovation.4 Thus, an expansive view of social innovation incorporates political innovation as a practice tailored to political change.
Challenges to democracy as well as innovative solutions to those challenges have existed for as long as democracy itself. In recognition of this history, political innovation complements and augments three long-established approaches to pro-democratic work: democratic innovation, political activism, and political entrepreneurship.5
Democratic innovation pertains to the design of democratic institutions.6 It involves elaborate solutions to problems of equal participation in political decision-making processes. In the past 20 years, for instance, citizen assemblies have emerged as a prominent democratic innovation in Western Europe. These assemblies consist of citizens selected by lottery who deliberate a political problem to seek a solution for all citizens. Similarly, the rise of e-voting or participatory budgeting (citizen-decided public budgeting) offers examples of democratic innovation and major innovations that promote elements of direct democracy. Democratic innovation thus provides the technological tools that help democratize deliberative processes in government bodies or other organizations—i.e., how decisions are made. In contrast, political innovation focuses more on people and political agendas—that is, who decides what efforts are undertaken and why.
The second approach, political activism, challenges the existing political order and, when successful, upheaves the existing system. Think of the pro-democracy protests of the Arab Spring that sought to overthrow regimes of oppression starting in Tunisia and rapidly spreading throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Political activism uses methods such as grassroots and online mobilizing, protesting, petitioning, and campaigning to achieve a transfer of power from the state to the people who act as agitators outside the formal political structures.7 Political innovation, on the other hand, seeks to maintain yet improve the system through innersystemic solutions.
Third, political entrepreneurship attends to the creation of new political parties or coalitions to fill gaps in political democratic spectra.8 One can think of new parties such as the Pirate Party or Volt—both active primarily in Europe—that challenge the traditional ways political parties are created, organized, and run. While political innovation may include the formation of a new party, it also includes efforts to improve and change existing parties.
The Practice and Its Players
The practice of political innovation integrates some of the activities associated with established approaches to pro-democratic work but aligns them with social innovation. To illustrate, social entrepreneur Max Oehl’s initiative Brand New Bundestag emerged around the same time as JoinPolitics in response to the same sociopolitical problems in Germany, but it emphasizes different political dimensions. Inspired by the US-based movement to elect working-class people called Brand New Congress, the organization uses grassroots mobilization to support progressive social policymaking and the campaigns of political candidates who advocate for marginalized communities’ interests.
Brand New Bundestag intentionally conceptualizes “progressiveness” as nonpartisan—outside party affiliation—in its mission for “fit-for-the-future” politics that facilitate collaboration across, as well as independent of, party lines. In 2022, Oehl was selected as an Ashoka Fellow in recognition of his innovative approach to pro-democracy work that unites the forces of grassroots activism and formal politics. In the same vein, JoinPolitics talent and founder of the nonprofit Statefree Christiana Bukalo was awarded an Echoing Green fellowship for her efforts to empower stateless people through legislative change first in Germany and later at the European Union level.
The field’s defining characteristics are the determination to reground politics in fundamental democratic principles and to turn to citizens as the protagonists of democracy. The former sets political innovation apart from efforts to undermine democracy. The latter reverses tendencies inherent in forms of populism where leaders supposedly represent the unrepresented by making sure the unrepresented are actively involved in democratic decision-making processes.
Central to political innovation as a field of practice are innovators, orchestrators, and enablers. They make political innovation a collective effort with distributed agency, based on a shared willingness to seek access to and constructively intervene in the political system.
Innovators | These players are solution-oriented citizens and civil society initiatives. They take on a societal challenge foremost to pursue change in political systems through action. Yet, rather than acting as outside agitators, they assume responsibility for, develop, and introduce solutions that accord with democratic principles. Their solutions address a variety of problems in democracy and may materialize in a variety of forms, such as a program that recruits women for political office to achieve parity in government, a political-education workshop series for public administrations, or a political lobby network for artists to increase the political power of this traditionally powerless group.
Innovators engage in a multitude of activities to tackle problems that are created in the political domain and must therefore be solved through political work. These activities include advocacy, advising, networking, political education, training, and research.
However, innovators often lack the funds and influence to establish innovations in political practice, since they are not structurally integrated in the political system. They sometimes use partisanship—in particular, personal connections to elected officials made through active party membership. But, above all, they rely on another type of actor in the field—orchestrators—to provide the necessary support structure to institutionalize their ideas.
Orchestrators | These players build and coordinate the field of political innovation. They shape the dynamic among the different actors and the political sphere by coordinating the flow of resources, ideas, and people within the field. Their mandate is to professionalize political innovation work. Importantly, orchestrators open communication between civil-society innovators and politics and facilitate the institutionalization of innovation by making ideas fit for politics.
Orchestrators like JoinPolitics, Brand New Bundestag, and #FixPolitics, as well as Tous Elus and Académie des Futurs Leaders (France) and Keseb (United States) share an understanding that the political system needs improvement. It drives their aspiration to systematize already existing but perhaps insufficiently elaborated efforts. The variety of their endeavors illustrates possible responses to unequal representation and insufficient civic participation in different countries. These orchestrators build bridges to politics and political offices for democracy-strengthening innovators. In many instances, their names indicate what each believes to be the necessary improvement to democracy in their respective nations—be it better access to politics (JoinPolitics), an equally representative parliament (Brand New Bundestag), structural reforms (#FixPolitics), inclusivity (Keseb, meaning “of the people” in the ancient south-Semitic language of Ge‘ez), or legitimacy (Tous Elus, meaning “all elected” in French).
Enablers | The funders of this field are mostly philanthropic actors who are unconventional in that they embrace the political and pro-democratic stance but not necessarily all political views of supported initiatives. Traditionally, philanthropy in Western Europe has invested in politics indirectly—e.g., by funding civil society organizations pursuing political change—but has refrained from direct giving to and grantmaking for political causes. In countries like Germany and the United Kingdom, foundations are even legally bound to abstain from funding the endeavors of people and institutions that are part of the formal political structure.
Contradicting this sector norm, philanthropists and foundations active in political innovation support innovators and orchestrators because they seek to achieve social change through formal political change. While they often favor entrepreneurial organizing models common to social innovation, these enablers position themselves as explicitly political and pro-democratic.
Their approach to political innovation rests on two pillars: They offer support for longer periods than are common in social innovation, and they use methods such as crowdsourcing to identify funding-worthy initiatives. Enablers we identified include funders that have had a long-standing interest in democracy, including the Open Society Foundations, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. We also identified foundations that have become active in political innovation in recent years, such as Luminate, the Schöpflin Foundation, the Hertie Foundation, the Alfred Landecker Foundation, the Obama Foundation, Multitudes Foundation, and the Daniel Sachs Foundation. The last two represent philanthropic efforts to fill the resource gap between civil society initiatives and political power. The Obama Foundation, for example, operates a host of funding programs aimed toward democracy-strengthening leadership development in public service and politics.
The activities of the different players may overlap but fulfill different purposes. For innovators, activities like networking, political education, and training form part of the idea- and knowledge-generating process, while orchestrators employ them to build the political innovation field. Similarly, orchestrators acquire and distribute resources in the field with the objective of helping innovators organize their efforts to ultimately make ideas fit for implementation, while enablers provide the necessary resources for the field to grow and sustain itself.
Democracy Work in Action
The work of the players takes different forms, activities, and practices. To understand how political innovation works and how it creates impact, we find it useful to elaborate on the democracy work and the impact pathways characteristic of political innovation. Our research specifically identified three foci of such work that together explain how political innovation strengthens democracy. Innovators and orchestrators differ in whether they adopt one or several foci. These foci are useful to map relevant stakeholders and help funders to invest and develop funding portfolios.
Citizen-focused work mobilizes citizens who are or feel left out of the political system. This work is mainly about bringing citizens and civil society back into politics and is often based on campaigns to organize citizens to enact their civic rights (vote) or engage in politics (run for elected office). Examples of such work include crowdsourcing ideas for change in politics or providing political education to the public through voter-education campaigns, simulation games, or workshops.
Leader-focused work aims at identifying and nurturing political talent. This work typically seeks to diversify the pool of political talent by scouting and reaching out to underrepresented groups, tackling the hierarchical and inertial nature of political careers, through various training and support activities. Leader-focused work is often based on establishing or using existing academies, incubators, or training centers. Examples include selecting and training candidates for office from underrepresented groups and sometimes providing funding for candidates running for office. An established player in this line of work is Apolitical, which coordinates and licenses a global network of political-leadership training institutions. Through its social-enterprise branch, the organization offers free policymaking courses developed in collaboration with governments and connects political leaders and public servants to foster peer-to-peer learning.
Structure-focused work seeks to shape the infrastructure of democracy and the rules that govern it. It can target policies that do not sufficiently address democracy-related problems at different levels. It can also endeavor to change rules in public administrations (e.g., minority representation) or laws at the regional or national level. #FixPolitics engages in structural democracy work through seeking comprehensive constitutional and electoral reforms in its legislative, executive, and judicial institutions. The organization demonstrates how political-innovation players can cater to more than one category of democracy work: #FixPolitics’ triangular strategy also includes running public campaigns and programs to produce a competent Nigerian electorate (citizen-led work) and operating a political training school (leader-focused work).
All three levers of democracy work to foster change in the political system and create impact along two main pathways: reforming democracy and transforming democracy. Both pathways are consistent with a piecemeal and gradual approach to change aimed at rejuvenating, rather than replacing, democracy.
Efforts that pursue the pathway of reform aim to update the operating system to strengthen democracy. In other words, these initiatives seek to expand the system through making it more inclusive, representative, just, and equitable while keeping its architecture intact. Such efforts could be about making sure that existing political institutions better represent the population and that public services recognize and adequately respond to citizens’ needs. Along this reform pathway, existing political institutions are tools for change. Consider, for instance, minority representatives being elected to office to increase representation of these minorities in a cabinet.
JoinPolitics talent Tiaji Sio cofounded the initiative DIVERSITRY, which pursues the reform pathway by tackling undemocratic processes and representation in German public institutions. Utilizing Sio’s experience as a public servant at the Federal Foreign Office, the DIVERSITRY team formed a cross-departmental network of people of color working in public administration. They advise ministries on how to enhance representation and justice in recruiting and policymaking. The Australian initiative Politics in Colour also addresses racial inequities in public institutions. This organization trains and supports women of color, including starkly underrepresented Indigenous women, to become public servants or politicians, enabling them to carry their communities’ interests into the political realm.
Efforts and initiatives that pursue the pathway of transformation aim to reconfigure the operating system. These attempts assume that current institutions are not entirely fit for purpose and need more than simply updating or adjustment to current circumstances—they require structural change. Along this pathway, existing institutions are therefore the object—rather than the means—of change.
Tous Elus pursues this pathway, embodied by its motto that it is upon the people to (re-)invent democracy—its slogan, “la démocratie n’existe pas, à nous de l’inventer” translates to “democracy does not exist, it is up to us to invent it.” Tous Elus organizes its activities around the principle of democratic legitimacy. Like #FixPolitics, Tous Elus educates the public and trains young people from politically marginalized communities to become politically literate, exercise their democratic rights, and enter politics by running for elected office.
The Future of the Field
While the foci of work and their pathways provide insights about the potential impact of political innovation, evaluation of political activity is necessarily—in the words of Steven Teles and Mark Schmitt—an “elusive craft.” 9 Popular tools to evaluate and communicate impact in social innovation are inapplicable to political innovation because progress and change occur in nonlinear and punctuated patterns.
Yet while it might be impossible to develop universally applicable indicators to capture and compare impact across different types of work and pathways, tracking progress is important for individual organizations and for the field of practice.
The three categories of work we have outlined help to define meaningful measures to track activities, such as how many training sessions for political talents were conducted; capture outputs, such as how many policies were drafted and how many political innovators ran for office or graduated from academies; or report outcomes, such as innovators holding different kinds of formal power positions, policies implemented, or laws passed. However, because of the nonlinear nature of political change, we must resist the temptation to enshrine and optimize easily measurable goals.
Independent of the pathway chosen, change in the political system will most likely be slow and circuitous, with ups and downs that cannot be fully anticipated.10 Consider candidates who do not fulfill all the hopes and promises they made in their campaign speeches, because campaigning for office and holding office are two different jobs that require different skills. Or think of the numerous setbacks created by antidemocratic movements and campaigns, such as the 2016 Brexit campaign by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which was exposed for deliberately spreading misinformation to win over voters. Thus, political innovation needs to be an ongoing, collective effort based on a shared commitment to democratic principles and to mobilizing a critical mass of people and ideas to effect political change. It can never be solely the responsibility or the job of individual innovators or orchestrators.
The ultimate marker of impact for political innovation is the extent to which it contributes to a healthy democracy. Some, including the Denmark-based Democracy Fitness, consider democracy a muscle that requires continuous training and strengthening. An ambition to keep democracy healthy through rigorous fitness training, as opposed to suppressing pathologies and fighting symptoms, would also help to prevent future democratic ills and threats. Training schemes, recipes, and cures should be aimed at society, pay attention to different geographical and temporal realities, and be directed toward societal progress.
For the field to become impactful and institutionalized, we will need to think more carefully about how to relate to and/or potentially co-opt existing political infrastructures. For example, in most European countries, political parties receive public funding to support their work. In Germany and Austria, parties typically set up academies and develop programs to identify, nurture, and recruit political talent. How can we make sure that these institutions live up to democratic principles of equal representation and participation? How can we enable a transfer of best practices of democracy work in different countries? And, finally, how can political innovation become a beacon of democracy in flawed democracies or even autocracies?
As the field evolves, we must develop a method for how to comprehend growth and scale in political innovation. We also need a better understanding of potential trade-offs between supporting leaders and ideas for solutions. Can investing in the career of a politician be aligned with investing in the duration it takes to implement a solution? Indeed, personal characteristics matter to not only challenge but gain political power and perform in office in accordance with democratic principles. #FixPolitics uses 5 Cs (character, competence, capacity, courage, and compassion) and Join Politics relies on a Big 5 list (visionary “doer,” people person, persuasive, self-reflective, and purpose-driven) to describe the ideal political talent. We also need good ideas for solutions now to match a political window of opportunity. Therefore, we must start developing repositories of innovative democratic ideas comparable to societal blood banks. This is likely better done by promoting exchange and collaboration between diverse people who can keep alternative ideas alive, rather than recording these ideas in a dedicated structure—something that most orchestrators have already understood by emphasizing training and community building.
We will also need more experimentation about how to support and fund political innovation. Funders need to let go of impact-investing practices that foresee a hands-on engagement with grantees or investees. Political innovation as a field will only prosper and be able to strengthen and revitalize democracy when investors humbly step back from a direct engagement in their investments to ensure autonomy and independence. The current excitement and learning about trust-based philanthropy, in which funders yield more power and control to the communities they serve, might provide important insights into how to govern the relationship not only between funders and grantees but also between funders and orchestrators. However, more honest conversations are needed to understand how to translate the commitment to safeguard democratic principles in society into operating code for innovators, orchestrators, and enablers.
The rise of political innovation testifies to societies’ fear of losing democracy. It demonstrates a willingness to improve the system by use of constructive means—as opposed to radical, antisystemic means. It seeks to redefine political responsibility by rendering “the social” political and “the political” social. The players who shape this field of practice have extended social innovation to the political realm to fill the gap between civil society and politics that has made democracy so vulnerable. They know that social change requires political change. The urgency they attribute to rescuing and rejuvenating democracy manifests in political innovation. The field, its growth, and its consolidation, therefore, concern us all
Note: An earlier version of this article indicated that Luminate was part of the Omidyar Network. Luminate is a separate entity.
Read more stories by Johanna Mair, Josefa Kindt & Sébastien Mena.