What Makes Democratic Innovation Spread? New DemocracyNext Research Examines the Organizations Behind the Movement

Scaling Democratic Innovations: Features of Effective Catalyst Organisations & Future Frontiers, a new research paper from DemocracyNext authored by Claudia Chwalisz and Sammy McKinney, examines the organizations that intentionally drive the expansion of citizens' assemblies and deliberative practices in their regions — distilling six features of effective scaling catalysts, analyzing the tensions and trade-offs they navigate, and identifying five frontiers for future practice. The paper surfaces two critical challenges facing the field: coordination in increasingly crowded democratic innovation ecosystems and the precariousness of short-term, project-based funding, which undermines the long-term relationships and infrastructure work that scaling requires. For funders, it calls for five- to ten-year grants supporting ecosystem building; for practitioners, it offers a framework for understanding what makes scaling work and where the field is headed. This research directly advances NCDD's mission by providing the dialogue and deliberation community with rigorous, actionable insights into how deliberative democracy spreads, what sustains it, and what investments the field most urgently needs.

---

---

Citizens' assemblies and other deliberative democratic practices are spreading globally — but they do not spread by themselves. Behind every successful scaling story sits a constellation of organizations doing essential, often invisible work: building capacity, establishing networks, advocating with decision-makers, and ensuring quality standards. A new research paper from DemocracyNext, authored by Founder and CEO Claudia Chwalisz and AI and Deliberation Fellow Sammy McKinney, examines these organizations directly. Titled Scaling Democratic Innovations: Features of Effective Catalyst Organisations & Future Frontiers, the paper makes the case that understanding what makes these "scaling catalysts" effective is essential for anyone serious about democratic renewal — and offers a research-grounded framework for practitioners, funders, and researchers to act on that understanding.

​The paper's central contribution is a distillation of six features of effective scaling catalyst organizations — the capacity builders, conveners, advocates, and quality-keepers who drive democratic innovation in their regions. Alongside these features, the authors examine genuine tensions that scaling catalysts face: balancing quality with contextual adaptation, maintaining independence while influencing power, building local rootedness while maintaining international connections, and choosing between direct process delivery and broader ecosystem building. The paper is explicit that the most effective catalysts navigate these tensions thoughtfully rather than resolving them definitively. Two challenges emerge as particularly critical: coordination in increasingly crowded ecosystems, where the growth of the field has created confusion about roles, risks of duplication, and the danger of outside organizations "swooping in" rather than building on local expertise; and funding sustainability, where most scaling catalysts survive on short-term, project-based funding even though scaling work requires patient, long-term investment in relationships and infrastructure. For funders, the paper's recommendation is unambiguous: provide five-to-ten-year grants supporting ecosystem building rather than counting one-off assemblies.

​The paper's implications extend across every audience in the NCDD network. For practitioners building or leading organizations in the dialogue and deliberation field, it offers a mirror and a map — six features to aspire toward and a clear-eyed account of the trade-offs involved. For funders, it makes a rigorous case for patient, flexible investment in the civic infrastructure that makes scaling possible — the networks, norms, physical spaces, knowledge systems, and educational pathways that sustain deliberative democracy as a permanent governance feature rather than a series of one-off events. For researchers, it identifies significant knowledge gaps: comparative analysis of what works across contexts, better theories of how practices spread and institutionalize, and systematic study of ecosystem dynamics. Deliberative democracy, the paper argues, is at an inflection point — entering the mainstream after decades at the margins — and whether that momentum holds depends on whether the field invests in the civic infrastructure scaling requires. Download the full paper and executive summary at https://www.demnext.org/action/scaling-democratic-innovations.