This book's analysis of social innovation (SI), the governance of SI and its potential consolidation offers a real-life mirror for reflecting on the state of democracy in today's world. Democracy has been one of the hot topics in political and scientific debates of recent times, mainly because it is increasingly considered as no longer sufficiently democratic. There are many reasons for this, of which this preface outlines four. This book offers new insights into how these four ‘democracy failures’ can be deconstructed through SI analysis and how SI practices venture new foundations for democratic practices and institutions.

To start with, there is an ongoing tug of war between representative and direct democracy. Representative democracy as we know it today is an outgrowth of mid-nineteenth-century movements and revolts led by citizens and workers. As such, the build-up of the welfare state from local cooperative initiatives – ‘historical’ direct democracy practices in the sphere of the social economy – to a nationwide system of provision of social services has been a dominant part of the establishment of today's system of representative democracy. Yet from very early on it has been questioned ‘how well’ representative democracy defends the interests of constituencies represented by ‘weak’ members of parliament or local council members, and so on. ‘Weak’ means lacking a proactive attitude or behaviour, but also refers to the tendency of democratic politicians to seek their self-interest rather than pursuing and defending the collective or common interest. This ultimately means a corrupt or single-minded ‘homme politique’, or a combination of these features. Representative democracy has also been criticised because of its lack of interest in ‘voiceless’ groups, citizens or migrants: remote communities, differently abled, the inhabitants of neighbourhoods with high unemployment, people with diverse sexual and cultural orientation, and so forth. Many socially innovative initiatives have been taken, inside and outside the state, to ‘improve’ democracy by claiming and introducing new forms of participation and co-production with the purpose of addressing the blind spots of representative democracy.