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Scaledem

Scaling Democratic Innovations: From Evidence to Action

SCALEDEM (2024–2028) is funded by Horizon Europe and starts from a practical concern rather than a theoretical puzzle: Democratic innovations are proliferating across Europe, yet only a few manage to grow, endure, and meaningfully shape policies, politics, and political systems. The project responds by developing a theory of scaling that is not abstract or aspirational, but usable -—designed for changemakers operating within real-world institutional, political, and cultural constraints, within Europe and beyond.

At the heart of SCALEDEM lies a deceptively simple question: What allows democratic innovations to move beyond isolated experiments and become durable forces of democratic renewal across European societies and in transnational governance settings? To answer this, the project reframes “scaling” as a multidimensional process unfolding along four interdependent directions:

  • Scaling out - how initiatives grow and spread across places and populations, within and across European contexts, while generating transferable lessons beyond Europe.
  • Scaling high - how they embed in institutions, laws, and policies, including at the EU level and within emerging arenas of transnational governance.
  • Scaling in - how they strengthen internal robustness, quality, and continuity, ensuring processes remain credible and resilient over time.
  • Scaling deep - how they reshape emotions, values, behaviours, and civic identities, fostering democratic cultures that travel across contexts rather than remain locally bounded.

The research led by the Transnational Democracy Program builds a grounded and actionable theory of how these dimensions interact. Rather than treating context as background noise, it is brought to the centre: Institutional conditions, governance gaps, and political-cultural environments—within Europe but also in comparative perspective—are analysed alongside the mechanisms that activate change and trigger outcomes that can be experienced. This allows scaling to be understood not as linear growth but as a set of pathways that emerge from specific configurations of conditions, including those shaping transnational governance.

Empirically, SCALEDEM moves from individual cases to comparative insight. A continuously expanding Knowledge Map, which now comprises hundreds of cases, documents democratic innovations across Europe and beyond, explicitly reversing a Eurocentric gaze by incorporating experiences, practices, and lessons from other regions. This dataset is analysed using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), which identifies recurring combinations of conditions associated with different scaling outcomes. These findings are complemented by qualitative approaches that reconstruct how change actually unfolds in practice: How actors navigate constraints, activate mechanisms, and sustain momentum over time. Together, these methods shift the focus from the familiar question of “what works” to a more precise and actionable one: what works, for whom, under which conditions, with what effects, and why.

Importantly, SCALEDEM is not organised as a one-directional research pipeline but as a shared learning infrastructure. Project partners engage in iterative analysis, training, and co-interpretation through a co-developed Analytical Framework. Webinars (e.g. on ‘Scaling democratic innovations’ in November 2025) and policy-oriented outputs connect this work to practitioners, civil servants, and European-level actors, including initiatives such as the European Citizens’ Panels and the Open Government Partnership. The Knowledge Map itself functions as a public resource, making insights cumulative, transparent, and directly usable across European and transnational governance arenas.

The project’s ultimate contribution lies in translating findings into action. By 2026, SCALEDEM will deliver a grounded theory of scaling, identifying the mechanisms and pathways that enable democratic innovations to take root and expand across diverse governance contexts. Building on this and other grounds, the Scaling Compass (2028) will offer a practical navigation tool that helps policymakers and practitioners diagnose context, anticipate trade-offs, and design strategies tailored to their specific environments, from local settings to European and transnational governance levels.

Rather than prescribing one-size-fits-all solutions, SCALEDEM offers orientation in complexity: a way to navigate democratic renewal that is evidence-based, context-sensitive, and oriented towards real-world impact, within Europe, across borders, and beyond.

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The team

Principal investigator

The research team

Page last updated on 07/05/2026