LATINNO: Innovations for Democracy in Latin America

LATINNO is the first comprehensive database documenting participatory innovations in Latin America. The project collects and analyzes data on (non-electoral) forms of citizen participation in 18 countries from 1990 to 2020. Cases are registered according to 43 variables that capture their context, institutional design and impact, and comprise innovations relying on deliberation, direct voting, e-participation and new forms of citizen representation.

The main purpose of the project is to investigate what makes democratic innovations effective in Latin America, and to which extent they can (or can't) enhance the different dimensions of the quality of democracy: responsiveness, accountability, the rule of law, political inclusion and social equality.

Starting in December 2015, LATINNO has been funded by the Open Society Foundations in three phases. The first phase (2015-2017) was devoted to developing and testing our research design and conducting the first round of data collection for all 18 countries. The second phase (2017-2019) focused on completing the database and deepening the comparative axis of our research. The third and current phase (2019-2020) is aimed at including cases started after 2017 and up to 2020, and at conducting a final review of our database to encompass 30 years of participatory innovations in Latin America.

The database was launched on June 27th, 2017, during an international conference held at the WZB in Berlin, Germany. Since then it is publicly available on the project’s website: http://www.latinno.net. The website is constantly updated with new cases and currently offers data on over 2,700 democratic innovations.