To kickstart another round of essays, Jean-Paul Gagnon recaps four years’ worth of discussions in The Loop's Science of Democracy series. He explains where this ever-growing community of scholars has got to so far – and where it aims to go next
I thought I had the measure of our field, be that democratic theory or democracy studies more broadly, when I said – four years ago today – that there is a better way to study democracy. My point, which seemed to me novel back then, was that we only know a lot about very little when it comes to the word 'democracy'. Understudied, or plainly ignored and certainly forlorn, remains the fate for most of democracy’s meanings.
This sparked a debate which resulted in over a hundred essays in response. Let’s call that Science of Democracy 1.0. Colleagues across the globe extended or challenged what I had to say. Most evident was that words are not democracy’s sole source of knowledge and, most challengingly, that it’s dangerous to look too far from democracy’s liberal meanings – especially in times like these.
But it also led to an ECPR House Series roundtable (2022), an APSA meeting in Montreal (2022), an ECPR General Conference Section (2024), a Research Network (2023) and now two Joint Sessions Workshops (2023 and 2025).
The 2023 Joint Sessions led to writing a book, pictured, with UCL Press, that sought to summarise where discussions have got to. I’ll speak from that now.
If we wish to understand democracy to its fuller sense, we need to better organise knowledge about it. For example, knowledge on democracy is held by individuals (you, me), groups (us, them), texts (anything written in any language), non-texts (think buildings, ruins, objects, instrumental music, etc.,), and non-humans (yes, as in meerkats, jellyfish, bacteria and so on). These entities are located somewhere in space, time, culture, species and they usually have some form of language to get by.
If you aren’t used to thinking about democracy in this way, which most aren’t, this usually comes across as an outlandishly large set of sources to draw from. The requirement is also to try to find these informations across a gargantuan plane (we call it the ethno-quantic domain). Not shying from the challenge, which Michael Freeden called our academic audacity, we came up with a few ideas. One is to attempt an open access, online, resource that plots knowledge of democracy – of whatever kind – in time and space. Find it, plot it, simple.
Mere description of democracy is not enough. What of defining and describing what’s been plotted? What of adjudicating each bit added for its democraticity?
But mere description is not enough. What of defining and describing what’s been plotted? What of adjudicating each bit added for its democraticity? And who will do that work? One of the great debates to emerge from our discussions is whether the study of democracy needs to organise itself akin to stratigraphers – with their advice on the earth’s sedimentary layers – or chemists with their guidance around the periodic table. Useful stuff, but not typically open to non-experts, and not easy to defend on democratic merit.
There is no David Attenborough of democracy or Spatika Jayaram of democratic innovations. It’s embarrassing to admit, but even though the Anthropos – our fellow humans – are generally the intended end user, audience even, of our works, most know nothing of them. People tend to know more about quasars than linked democracy.
How much of a problem is this? Those who see democracy as an ever-flowing fount of the people (whoever and wherever they are) deem efforts to communicate democracy science to them ill fated. Won’t it just be a bunch of experts, or that dirty word technocrats, despoiling the source of truth about democracy by getting their ideas into people’s heads?
If scholars cannot communicate democracy science effectively, how can the democracy-curious try out new techniques and gain the gift of new ideas?
Conversely, those who see people as limited for whatever reason in their capacity to be democratic, ask: is it not our duty to do all we can to share information about this or that form of democracy? It is only by communicating democracy science, like the Attenboroughs and Jayarams do for biology and neuroscience, that the democracy-curious can try out new techniques and gain the gift of new ideas.
Jimi Hendrix once presciently sang that castles made of sand fall into the sea, eventually. Our book, The Sciences of the Democracies, offers challengingly original ideas and unusual names and words from different languages – that is, unusual to the habitually trained student of democracy. Which, again, is most of us.
We realised, in the end, that we must confront the unforgiving truth that there are simply too few of us to do all the work that needs to be done. We really do suffer from a capacity problem. Our only option is to encourage governments and philanthropists, big and small, to invest in training and supporting democracy’s professional students of all shapes, stripes, and callings. Whether inside or outside of universities.
Democratic theorists must confront the unforgiving truth that there are simply too few of us to do all the work that needs to be done
It is, for instance, all too common for whole universities to have none of our craft or kindred and for some universities to have just one. Centres of democracy’s students, those anyway who have managed to flee the confusion that democracy means one very specific and narrow thing, are rare – just a few in the world. Too many of us are intellectual prisoners of empire, unable or unwilling to part from an imperial social history that backs just one form of democracy at the expense of the rest.
Maybe the plan should be to start small with our big ideas. Proven results – and funding – would keep them from falling into the sea. Or falling off the side of the mountains of data we’ve proposed to build (Matthew Flinders’ worry). For now, I keep coming back to Michael Saward’s encouragement for democracy’s students and its lovers alike: get to know each other’s languages of democracy!
No.111 in a Loop thread on the Science of Democracy. Look out for the 🦋 to read more
