We need to break democracy out of the disciplinary boundaries of political studies. Reimagining it using a fresh, multidisciplinary approach, argues Mouli Banerjee, could be the antidote to the global democratic anxiety we are facing
Scholars of democracy tend to agree that democracies around the world are weakening institutionally, and becoming increasingly unpopular. Anxiety is palpable in the scholarship – we are frantically looking for answers to why democracies die, how they fail, and how to revive them.
This second phase of The Loop's Science of Democracy series makes an interesting proposition that is as simple as it is possibly overlooked. It says that how we have defined and understood democracy historically has determined our measurement of democracy’s failures or strengths. We have excluded vocabularies of democracies that could enrich our knowledge of people and power, and solve some immediate problems.
Contributions propose an aggressively pluralistic approach to finding evidence of democracy in the textual, non-textual, visual, collective, and non-human. To do this well, and to tap into the promise of democratic abundance, we must look afresh at multi-disciplinarity, beyond tokenism.
Democracy exists not only in institutions, but in the everyday practices and ideas of people around the world.
Its conceptualisation must be viewed beyond the current boundaries of institutionalised liberalism. We locate democracy in people's congregations. We witness it in instances of problem-solving and design thinking employed by Indigenous communities. And we spot democratic abundance in the natural world.
This is reminiscent of similar impulses in Latourian Actor-Network Theory. It runs a similar risk, too – of getting lost in the metaphors. Each possibility of democratic abundance leads us further from what we can envisage as outputs from this project. This abundance thus necessitates some caution.
Democracy exists not only in institutions, but in the everyday practices and ideas of people around the world
A remarkable thing about this discussion is that it is wonderfully self-aware in its design. For example, the book by Jean-Paul Gagnon and colleagues that kickstarted the 2.0 phase of this series includes three chapters that touch upon possible imaginations of Gagnon's 'Fourth Theorist'. It also tackles the role (and associated worries, perhaps) of Artificial Intelligence, and trepidation against the technocratic overtake that an unbound pluralism might precipitate. This embedded critique allows us to represent what it is: the beginning of a longer, ongoing conversation around a constantly unfinished, indefinitely extending project.
Would one, perhaps, need to differentiate the democratic from the collective, the plural, or the massified in these examples? How do the knowledges of democracies that we encode (or as the Fourth Theorist eventually encodes) account for these differences, once we open the floodgates and no longer 'gatekeep' democracy?
Contributions to this series intuitively understand the need for cross-disciplinarity. Authors envisage outputs that require interdisciplinary methods and working groups. The series acknowledges that 'the field of democratic theory is… deeply transdisciplinary'. It frames itself in opposition to a liberal, positivist (and limiting) understanding of top-down, institutionalist democracy that the disciplinary boundaries of political science and political studies embedded through the 1950s and 1960s.
There is an untapped potential here for the Science of Democracy 2.0 that remains unexplored. What have we lost by creating a disciplinary hierarchy that determines what institutional spaces produce knowledge about what democracy means or how to define it? We find democracy’s vernacular iterations not only in other languages. We find them, too, in concepts that do not explicitly refer to ‘democracy’ or its institutionally standardised synonyms.
This series challenges the liberal, positivist (and limiting) understanding of top-down, institutionalist democracy embedded in political science through the 1950s and 1960s
This series commits to interdisciplinary knowledge products, but interdisciplinarity has arguably suffered from overuse in the social sciences today. This presents an opportunity to go beyond a token acknowledgement of democratic theory’s transdisciplinary origins and to investigate the epistemological politics of democracy.
We may find that the limitations of our conceptualisation of democracy, and the institutional anxieties they generate, overlap with the disciplinary boundaries of political science. Knowledge about democracy from different disciplines charts very different epistemological journeys. Will the reimagination of the many sciences of democracies overcome this hierarchy? Is it possible to do so within the disciplinary boundaries of social sciences, which generates most definitions of democracy? How much of the vernacular of democracies is lost in disciplinary translation? How would the Fourth Theorist deal with this loss?
A cynical reading would be to fear that the technocratic, omniscient Fourth Theorist, might swallow all disciplinary nuances. An optimistic reading, however, would hope that this project could enable a fresh conversation on disciplines and interdisciplinarity, rescuing it from its trite usages in the social sciences today.
I choose the latter, more optimistic reading for now, because it better suits the spirit of the series. I began with the sense of fear and anxiety, not just among democracy scholars but also the readers and audiences of contemporary democracy scholarship. In contrast, this project is rooted in what I would term epistemological optimism.
Contributions to this Science of Democracy series reveal democracy's ungraspable quality; it consistently seems to elude boundaries and escape definitions
There is a certain ungraspable quality to the enterprise that the contributors to this series have brought to life. Democracy seems to consistently elude boundaries, escape definitions. The methods to study these iterations of democracy, and the ways to archive this knowledge multiply, too, beyond museums of democracy, art exhibitions, and collaborative projects.
The academic response to this is to worry about how this helps tackle contemporary problems of anti-democracy that surround us. But it also allows for a more long-term, hopeful perspective beyond our immediate panic in the face of weakening institutional democracies. From this perspective, we collaborate to find evidence of democracy flourishing, despite institutional barriers, everywhere.
