Friedel Marquardt
Jean-Paul Gagnon’s endeavour has great potential for bringing unknown or ignored definitions to the fore. However, Friedel Marquardt argues, we hinder understanding and cut its empowering potential short if the communities these definitions are about do not get a chance to speak about their democracies Read more
Mauricio Mandujano Manriquez
Jean-Paul Gagnon's data mountain for rescuing the abandoned Science of Democracy is a worthy challenge. Nevertheless, Mauricio Mandujano Manriquez advocates for giving precedence to the epistemic commitments of the scientific enterprise and their implications Read more
Rafael Khachaturian
According to Rafael Khachaturian, Jean-Paul Gagnon’s 'lexical approach' misses the interpretive dimension of democracy. Instead, we need a self-reflexive theory of concept creation that treats democracy as an unfulfilled political project Read more
Simone Chambers
This is not the time for collecting butterflies, writes Simone Chambers in response to Jean-Paul Gagnon. The threats to democracy we face today call for innovation and engagement, not typologies and definitions Read more
Kathleen McCrudden Illert
Jean-Paul Gagnon has argued that the most promising way of approaching the total texture of democracy is through words. But, asks Kathleen McCrudden Illert, what’s in a name? Many theories that we would recognise today as democratic were not, due to their historical context, associated with the signifier ‘democracy’ – and these concepts will be missing from Gagnon’s data mountain. Read more
Eva Krick
Eva Krick is sympathetic to Gagnon’s collection of ‘democracies with adjectives’ but does not fully share his optimism that this will finally make us grasp democracy’s ‘total texture’. It is but one little building block of an infinite and eclectic science of democracy. Read more
Gergana Dimova
In the 🦋 Science of Democracy series, Jean-Paul Gagnon has started an intra-disciplinary debate between democratic theory and comparative politics. The reasons to overcome this disciplinary clash are better than the reasons to embrace it, writes Gergana Dimova Read more
Frank Hendriks
Jean-Paul Gagnon takes biology as a model but overlooks that it is driven by variation as well as selection. The study of it, therefore, is sensitive to both. The study of democracy and innovation must be too, asserts Frank Hendriks Read more
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