Abstract:  Democratic innovation and institutionalization processes both seem to aspire to achieve the same goals: to ensure that democracy can evolve and thrive over time and to generate and embed new modes of functioning that can include more people and respond to emerging needs. However, both conceptually and in practice, the two approaches tend to be depicted as apart, as some scholars of democratic innovation take a critical stance toward institutionalization, while those researching modes of institutionalization struggle to account for the messiness of emerging practices that evolve in unexpected ways. This article aims to reflect on how a strong dualism in debates about democratic innovation and institutionalization risks that certain forms of change go unnoticed and therefore under-theorized. By drawing on the concept of political creativity, this article introduces an anti-dualist perspective and advances new critical reflections within existing democratic innovation literature. Interestingly, the scholarship on political creativity has so far not entered the democratic innovation debates, despite some interesting points of contact and shared concerns with recent publications in this field. Drawing on practical cases, this article advances three main suggestions for re-thinking institutionalization beyond the dualism in democratic innovation, which all directly emanate from the political creativity scholarship and concern the importance of taking into account the dimension of time, the concept of relationality, and a novel understanding of order as assemblages.

Keywords:  critical institutionalism; democratic innovation; institutionalization; political creativity

Published:   Ahead of Print

Issue:   Vol 14 (2026): Towards an Innovative Democracy: Institutionalizing Participation in Challenging Times (In Progress)