Towards a framework for democratic evaluation

Although the political dimension of technological innovation is widely acknowledged, there remains a gap between empirical research into this politics and normative research into its democratic quality. Especially methods for evaluating the democratic quality of dynamic and non-formal forms of innovation politics are lacking. This paper develops a framework for analysing the politics of innovation in terms of displacements of issues. It first argues that decision-making about design and use generally takes place in a multitude of settings and that this circumstance calls for theoretical investigation of displacements between settings. Based on an elaboration of the notions of ‘issue’, ‘setting’, and ‘displacement’ a conceptual framework is construed that might be helpful in the democratic evaluation of the politics of displacements. The framework is applied in a case study of public transport innovation, which shows how subsequent displacements served to silence serious concerns and objections.