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The German Energy Transition is one of the most important and largest infrastructure projects and one of the most significant challenges to German policy‐making. Empirical studies provide evidence for the notion that participation in the decision making process shapes local acceptance of renewable energy technology expansion. In the context of the German Energy Transition, the emphasis on participation in decision making processes seems to involve a paradox. Many different participatory measures have been implemented but many renewable energy projects do not reach a decent level of acceptability. In utilizing the concept of throughput legitimacy, we show that a major threat to legitimacy lies in the incoherent way conventional and unconventional forms of citizen participation are implemented at different scales. According to our analysis, the main challenges are to enable multi‐level participation and to transfer deliberative outcome to the representative system. In referring to innovative democratic procedures in Brazil, we present characteristics and features of participatory measures that may solve these challenges.

In Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET), information processing under the constraints of limited attention and bounded rationality leads to stick-slip dynamics in policy outcomes. Empirical work in this field often focuses on the macro level. Using the case of nuclear energy policy in the United States as proof of concept, we demonstrate how decisive budget changes in a specific policy subsystem can be linked to attention of Congress and the president. We utilize a mixed-methods data-mining approach: Maximum likelihood estimation is used to analyze the distribution of the nuclear energy RD&D budget. Then attention data of both Congress and the president are structured by means of cluster analysis and principal component analysis. Finally, these data are used in a generalized linear model to predict specific budget shifts. The article is designed as a proof of concept: In the case of nuclear energy policy, we are able to predict budget shifts without violating the assumptions of PET. More importantly: we can demonstrate that attention is not only affecting the final policy outcome but also the corridor of the possible.