While scholars agree that democratic innovation mechanisms have to reach certain standards regarding representativeness, deliberation, transparency or impact on public policies and civic competences, far less attention to such democratic qualities has been directed to advisory councils. These “traditional participatory instruments” (Lowndes et al. 2001) illustrate a classic conception of “associative democracy”, yet, despite its closed and limited nature, have continued to proliferate over the last decades. This work attempts to provide a reliable set of measures for gauging advisory councils’ democratic qualities using an input-process-output model that intends to provide a systematic assessment tool for both practitioners and scholars. Furthermore, we test the hypothesis that process serves, indeed, as a mediator between the input and the output variables as deliberative theory suggests.

By focusing on one single participatory instrument (advisory councils) we avoid classic debates such as the trade-off between inclusion and deliberation, as advisory councils do not aim for large numbers of attendees. In the same vein, we pay close attention to the dynamics developed within the councils given its deliberative nature. Also, and given that associative democracy is not the most ambitious approach to achieve citizens’ influence over public decisions, we focus in other outputs such as the relationship between the actors involved in such councils.

In order to assess advisory councils’ democratic qualities, we rely in a dataset composed of 70 Spanish councils, gathering objective data and information obtained with several interviews per observation. The richness of this dataset allows us to inspect the relationship between the different dimensions of democratic quality, the polity level and its size, in what constitutes the first approach to the meaning of “good governance” when it comes to advisory councils.