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December 13, 2021

🦋 How to measure democracy: A practitioner’s view

Alexander Hudson

How we measure democracy matters, writes Alexander Hudson. For practitioners, measuring the component parts of democracy is just as important as using an integral concept of democracy

December 8, 2021

🦋 Data mountains and usable concepts: a lesson from Francis Bacon

Sandra Leonie Field

Scholars of democracy must look beyond received paradigms. With his democracy 'data mountain', Jean-Paul Gagnon is challenging us to do so. However, drawing on Francis Bacon's analogous project for natural science, Sandra Leonie Field wonders whether a database of adjectives is indeed the best method of reaching this goal

November 29, 2021

🦋 To understand democracy we need democratic theory

Tom Theuns

Tom Theuns argues Jean-Paul Gagnon’s ‘data mountain’ project cannot achieve its goals because of fundamental problems of over-inclusion and under-inclusion, problems that can only be solved by recourse to democratic theory. But that is not to say that the project is without value

November 25, 2021

🦋 On different ways to intend democracy, and to study it

Andrea Felicetti

Andrea Felicetti writes that Gagnon’s data mountain is not a guarantee against biases and partiality. In addition to words, we must pay attention to people, their customs and practices, to better grasp what democracy entails

November 19, 2021

🦋 Democracy: not just what but also why

Martyn Hammersley

Martyn Hammersley argues that, since there is no essence of democracy, clarification is always required when this word is used. And any assumption that what it refers to is always desirable must be questioned: in each context, we should ask ‘Why democracy?’ as well as ‘What is democracy?’

November 11, 2021

🦋 Lost in translation? Democracy and its non-English variants

Ryusaku Yamada

Based on English language terms, Jean-Paul Gagnon’s democracy data mountain faces considerable problems in translating non-English words which have no exact equivalents. Ryusaku Yamada uses the example of ‘mass’ (as in ‘mass democracy’), and a Japanese word, ‘taishū’, to reveal the potential comprehension gap in any translation exercise

November 5, 2021

🦋 Democracy is an essentially contested concept

Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann

To strengthen democracy, we need new, innovative thinking, write Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann, Toralf Stark and Christoph Mohamad-Klotzbach. They propose to identify the core norms underlying a universally valid concept of democracy, opening up dialogue between empirical and theoretical approaches, and linking inductive and deductive methods

November 1, 2021

🦋 Wikis and music, not mountains and butterflies

Luke Temple

Wikis and music are better analogies for Jean-Paul Gagnon’s data mountain than butterflies, writes Luke Temple. Our reflections on how to use his database, not the database in itself, will contribute to democratic innovation

October 27, 2021

🦋 What democracy should be for us

Agustín Goenaga

Jean-Paul Gagnon’s project to collect a lexicon of ‘democracy’ is promising. But not for the reasons he himself states, writes Agustín Goenaga. His database documents how thousands of people have thought about democracy. We can use those insights to reconsider what democracy should be for us

October 25, 2021

🦋 A night at the museum of democracy

André Bächtiger

Adopting the perspective of a museum curator, we can spot the pitfalls of Jean-Paul Gagnon’s proposal to build a data mountain on democracy, argues André Bächtiger. But this perspective also helps identify how we should construct the museum to further our understanding of the concept

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