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
Christoph Mohamad-Klotzbach
One aim of the sciences of the democracies is to find different ways of making and keeping democracy visible, argues Christoph Mohamad-Klotzbach. Practitioners and imaginers of democracies are doing this job. They help to understand and transform the realities of democracies – step by step – for the sake of democracy Read more
Reginald Oduor
Reginald M.J. Oduor encourages more political theorists to disentangle themselves from the idea that democracy and elections are inextricably bound. Through this he seeks to promote the pursuit of genuine citizen participation in post-colonial states in Africa and elsewhere Read more
Eri Mountbatten-O'Malley
Ethical democratic practices are informed by understanding what it means to be human and how we may flourish as a species alongside non-humans. This is, Eri Mountbatten-O’Malley argues, a useful way to orient ourselves in a dark time for democracy Read more
Phil Paine
Phil Paine is reminded of the caterpillar who, when asked in which order it moved each of its feet, found itself ‘distracted in a ditch, wondering how it walked’. He suspects that there are misapprehensions about the role of definitions in advancing democracy Read more
Yida Zhai
Public perceptions of democracy are diverse, and some even see democracy in authoritarian regimes. So directly using ‘democracy’ in surveys is prone to elicit biased responses. Therefore, Yida Zhai argues, it is necessary to conceptualise and operationalise democracy in an alternative manner without using the ‘D-word’ Read more
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