Seema Shah
Seema Shah argues for putting the lived experiences of historically marginalised communities at the centre of democracy measurement. By doing so, she says, we can meaningfully reshape our understanding of democracy as a practice Read more
Simone Belko
Simone Belko invites us to imagine research into democracy as an 'artful science'. Without mediation by experts or representatives, but only through open civic intelligence, we can together determine the total texture of democracy from the bottom up. This self-referential poetics has the potential to define democracy in still untold ways Read more
Julian G. Waller
The lure of typology is irresistible for social scientists, yet commonly used schemas classifying authoritarian politics still miss key variation. Our frameworks often rely on organisational assumptions set one level of abstraction too high. Julian G. Waller demonstrates how a closer look at constitutional structure can confront this problem Read more
Adrian Bua
Adrian Bua argues that a critical democratic realism, grounding democratisation efforts upon critique of the capitalist social order, is the best way to navigate Jean-Paul Gagnon's ‘data mountain’ – and put it to work for democracy Read more
Thomas Bunting
Inspired by Jean-Paul Gagnon’s call to build a data mountain on different democratic forms, Thomas Bunting emphasises the need to theorise sport as a crucial space for democratic spectatorship and action. He uses the Qatar World Cup as an example of how major sporting events can generate democratic insights and protest Read more
Hojjatollah Sadeqi
Hojjatollah Sadeqi reads Jean-Paul Gagnon’s 'definitions of democracy' project through Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods. The result? Gagnon has, by necessity, placed us in a dark and complex city of 'democracy'. The only way to understand this city is to do all we can to describe it Read more
Michael Hanchard
Michael Hanchard argues that there is no singular scientific method that is the property of democracy. Instead, we should, as WEB Dubois suggests, treat democracy as a problem replete with many possibilities for expansion and contraction, regardless of its normative and conceptual status as an aspiration and ideal type Read more
Matthew Barnfield
Political scientists use experimental methods to study cause-and-effect relationships in politics. Sometimes these approaches involve exposing people to false information about their political reality. Matthew Barnfield argues that this practice of misinformation is not only unethical, but also an ineffective way of learning about the political world Read more
