Cultural heritage institutions are central for the creation of our common identities and histories, and are thus a cornerstone for democracy. However, they have conflicting roles, as institutions for the free dissemination of knowledge or as gatekeepers of the authorized heritage discourse. They may have historically monitored and marginalized certain groups, yet they can also actively work for a just and pluralistic society. To make heritage collections more open through digitization, participatory methods such as crowdsourcing are put forward, motivated by efficiency but also as a way to create a more diverse and polyphonic heritage. However, there is a lack of vocabulary that puts these different techniques in a wider context of established democratic theories. In this chapter we discuss practices and policies of crowdsourcing in relation to notions of democracy. As argued these participatory technologies can be seen as means to support very different notions of democracy. From our studies of five different crowdsourcing platforms in the US and Denmark, we seek to analyze how these different aspects of democracy are supported, and to develop an analytical model for participatory technologies with long term development and preservation of cultural heritage in mind.