This new phase in the Science of Democracy series sets a brisk and insightful agenda for overcoming the gridlock in democracy studies. While he embraces its key points, Peter A. Kraus argues that the ultimate and inescapable challenge in developing a democratic epistemics is the politics involved
The current crisis of democracy has a parallel crisis: the crisis of the study of democracy in political science. In our discipline, language and methods fall short of coming to grips with the deep malaise of contemporary liberal-democratic politics.
An ever-increasing number of academic conferences and publications is devoted to discussing the causes of a polycrisis that has triggered democratic backsliding all over the globe. Political science, meanwhile, continues with business as usual. Indeed, the discipline continues to rely on the conceptual and theoretical apparatus developed during the liberal consensus that secured its academic rise after 1945.
Conferences and publications are increasingly discussing the causes of a polycrisis that has triggered democratic backsliding all over the globe, while political science continues with business as usual
It is this series' great merit that it departs from this self-indulgent continuism and pushes paradigm change. This departure is not at all motivated by naïf utopianism. On the contrary, it aims to reconstruct our notion of what democracy is – and what democracies are. It does so by creating a non-hegemonic, non-ethnocentric, pluralist knowledge base with the character of an ecumenic and dynamic project.
This project will only flourish if we take it on with intellectual modesty, open-mindedness, and a sound repertoire of intercultural and multilingual skills.
Seeking equidistance from undemocratic liberals and illiberal democrats, this new phase in the 🦋 series – Science of Democracy 2.0 – emphasises the emancipatory – and thus, by definition, incontrollable – potential of democracy. It advocates a political logic that attacks all manifestations of tyranny and unjust authority, not just within political institutions, but also at the level of the workplace, the economy, and all types of social relations.
This corresponds to the view that politics is an encompassing human activity rather than a distinctive institutional sphere.
The alternative theory under such premises would then emerge from careful empirical scrutiny of how people 'do' democracy under diverse socio-political conditions. These may vary deeply according to historical paths and cultural environments. All, however, share an emancipatory thrust that questions domination and fosters participation, in particular of those groups and individuals who lack the institutional resources taken for granted in liberal-democratic manuals.
This series' main task is to offer better descriptions of democratic practices across time and space, drawing from other disciplines to produce adequate results
A key aspect of this series' intellectual modesty is that it does not aim to produce a theoretical Big Bang. Rather, it sees its main task in collecting and offering better descriptions of democratic practices across time and space. It is not afraid to draw from other disciplines to produce adequate results.
The companion book to this series sketches out a framework based on a high level of philosophical and conceptual reflectivity. Such reflectivity is essential to move democratic thought beyond the compiling of 'brute data' according to the behaviourist canon.
It is from this framework that Jean-Paul Gagnon invites us to develop a first methodological approach for describing democracy. The point is to use categories that move beyond the narrow universe of behaviourism.
This is an ambitious and arduous undertaking. I cannot help but be impressed by the scope of the agenda and the sophistication of the proposal, which combines methodological rigour with technological opportunities such as those provided by AI.
However, methodological zeal and meticulosity sometimes come close to a strategy designed to circumvent irreducible political fault lines. In terms of professional politics, this seems understandable and even wise. Nonetheless, to follow a path oriented towards achieving a harmonic balance of methodological concerns and 'deliberative' research procedures risks substituting behaviourist technocracy with conceptualist 'art for art's sake'.
Does this series intend to look for 'new doors to open' and 'to swim against the current'? If so, contributors need to explain more thoroughly why collecting 'data mountains' and navigating them by recurring to a semi-deliberative methodology will get us there.
There is a hidden tension between this series' two main aims. This becomes manifest in the oscillation between a concept-oriented descriptivism, and an interpretivism with ultimately transformative goals. The project starts with a mildly disruptive impetus, but concludes with a consensual nodding towards mainstream political science. The elephant here is the issue of a democratic epistemics.
Addressing this elephant would involve focusing on power and conflict, not only in democratic life, but in the academic discipline allegedly devoted to its study. Who holds the epistemic authority to decide on the agenda we must pursue if we want to make a smooth academic career and address substantial questions? Does the democratic renewal we bitterly need even require the renewal of political science? And to what extent can academic institutions be democratised anyway?
Who holds the epistemic authority to decide on the agenda we must pursue if we want to make a smooth academic career and address substantial questions?
I am aware that such criticism is somewhat unfair. For a start, it under-acknowledges this series' aim to overcome the crisis of contemporary democratic theory through an inclusive, ecumenic, and consensus-seeking approach. Given what is currently at stake in the field of democracy studies, I fully support the series' innovative thrust. I share its embrace of a comprehensive, diversity-sensitive, and non-hegemonic approach to the study of democratic practices.
Yet we must bear in mind the main challenge in interpreting the world: the possibilities of offering adequate interpretations may be contingent upon changing the world in a direction that transcends mere reproduction of the 'factual'. To effectively question hegemony, we require structures of an epistemic freedom-cum-equality. Such structures are unlikely to emerge without a radical renewal of our political ontologies and the institutions built around them.
Ultimately, only such renewal will sustain a culture of open and fair dispute within, between, and beyond disciplines.
