Paolo Spada on participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, and scaling democratic innovation
Ep. 50

Paolo Spada on participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, and scaling democratic innovation

•

Episode description

Paolo Spada is a political scientist at the University of Southampton working on participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, and democratic innovation. In this episode, we talk about feedback loops, scaling participation, political parties, online deliberation, and why democratic innovation needs stronger critique as it becomes more established. A central idea in the conversation is that scaling democratic participation is not mainly a technical problem. It is a political problem, and tools like AI only help when ownership, transparency, and accountability remain under democratic control.

0:00Paolo's path into democratic innovation
10:10The Canadian model of citizen assemblies
13:15Why democratic innovation needs critique
19:48Participatory budgeting and trust
29:28Consultative vs non-consultative PB
36:24Scaling democratic innovation
41:36Representation and acceptance rates
47:23Political parties and internal democracy
1:00:14Feedback loops and political commitment
1:04:12AI, ownership, and scaling
1:15:19Final message