Governing mass societies is a complicated enterprise. As populations have grown, and become more interdependent, maintaining the democratic legitimacy of collective decisions has become ever more challenging. Increases in external constraints, especially financial, on representative government's capacities to govern both nationally and locally are well documented in the vast literature on globalization. Authoritarians and populists have capitalized on the inconsistencies in delivery of democratic goods by existing institutions. Citizens of traditional democracies increasingly react with a mixture of anger and despair when they feel the blunt consequences of decisions that seemingly were made without their obvious consent and often without much regard for their collective benefit or cost. Perhaps the most glaring example of this in modern times is manifest in the continuing fallout of the global financial collapse of 2007–08, now exacerbated by 2020–21's pandemic.

Liberal democracy in the 20th century provided citizens with the opportunity to choose rulers and to hold them to account as well as to form interest groups and pressure rulers to respond between elections. These equalities and freedoms when practised in large numbers were the great bulwark that democracy promised against decisions that would not work in the interests of the citizenry. Increasingly, those institutions do not appear to suffice, producing outcomes that large swathes of citizens recognize as neither democratic nor just. While support for the principles of democracy has risen worldwide, participation in the traditional institutions of government in democratic states (elections and political parties) has fluctuated and generally declined since at least the 1970s (Mair, 2013; Stoker, 2017). In response to this crisis of legitimacy, some democratic rulers have actively begun to invite citizens to take a more direct and ongoing role in political decision-making.

It is important to emphasize that this phenomenon of government actively seeking sustained and often substantial citizen input into its work is historically rare. For a whole host of reasons, people who have power, especially political power, do not normally voluntarily give it over to others. Notwithstanding the long history of direct democratic practices, particularly where town meetings or referenda are part and parcel of political culture, Mark Warren has identified an increasing worldwide trend towards ‘governance-driven democratization’ (2009).