Failure to Launch: Tracing the Trajectory of Democratic Innovation Adoption in Canada

Abstract Canada is regarded as an early adopter of democratic innovations, including the high-profile BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. To what extent has Canada maintained this trajectory? We examine this in the context of breadth and depth by examining trends in adoption over time across Canada and case-level adoption according to the dimensions of influence and temporality. While case studies of Canadian democratic innovations exist, these do not provide analytical capacity to understand trends in the breadth of adoption; we thus contribute a novel dataset of democratic innovations in Canada from 2000 to 2020. To analyze the depth of adoption, we present a two-by-three framework, which we apply to interpret our dataset of Canadian democratic innovations. We find that while there is an increase in the total number of democratic innovations, a low quantity is observed that exhibits high influence and permanence.