A new phase in this series offers an innovative rethinking of democracy by embracing diversity and challenging Western-centric models. Hong Do acknowledges its ambition, but argues it risks celebrating democratic traditions without fully addressing embedded inequalities and power hierarchies within them
When most people hear the word democracy, they likely think of elections, voting booths, and representatives in government. But what if that narrow understanding misses the bigger, richer picture of what democracy can actually be? The Science of Democracy 2.0 tackles this ambitious question. This groundbreaking stage in Jean-Paul Gagnon's Science of Democracy series on The Loop, initiated in 2021, seeks to rethink democracy from the ground up — across time, cultures, languages, even species.
Rather than assuming liberal, representative democracy as the gold standard, many contributors argue that democracy has always been plural and diverse. Democracy is not a single, fixed system but a range of different practices and ideas that have evolved in various ways around the world. This includes forms of governance in local communities and even non-human examples, such as how bees or jellyfish organise themselves.
Democracy is not a single, fixed system but a range of different practices and ideas that have evolved in various ways around the world
To understand democracy today, discussants insist, we must begin the hard, empirical work of describing democracy’s many meanings as they appear across the 'ethno-quantic domain'.
The Science of Democracy 2.0 dares to think big. This next stage in the discussion proposes new research methods, new digital institutions, and even a new type of 'Fourth Theorist'. Only then can we produce better, fairer, more inclusive democratic theories fit for a truly global world.
Despite its expansive vision, the Science of Democracy 2.0 faces important challenges when it comes to questions of inclusion and power. Gagnon and colleagues' recent book, The Sciences of the Democracies, critiques the dominance of Western democratic universalism. However, in embracing cultural diversity, the authors sometimes fall into what we might describe as 'romantic pluralism'. They celebrate non-Western traditions without fully addressing the inequalities and exclusions that exist within those traditions.
In their embrace of pluralism, democratic theorists risk romanticising it: celebrating cultural diversity without fully addressing the inequalities and exclusions that exist within those traditions
Take, for example, the ayllu (Aymaran), banjar (Balinese), or fokonolona (Malagasy). These are rich and important traditions, but who within these communities gets to speak in the name of tradition? Whose voices are represented when these forms are documented or revived? Across many postcolonial and non-Western societies, indigenous institutions – but also the legacies of empire, elite capture, and social stratification while ignoring women, ethnic minorities, or poor people – shape people's notions of democracy.
Accessing marginalised perspectives and democratising theorisation is a tough project. Citizen-led research and open-access platforms could offer a solution.
One of the core problems political theorists face is balancing three conflicting roles. They are, simultaneously, experts who produce knowledge, moral thinkers who evaluate what ought to be, and participants in democratic society. In short, political theorists must walk a tightrope: if they lean too heavily on their academic expertise, they risk sounding paternalistic. Speak only as citizens, and they lose scholarly authority. Stay neutral to avoid judgment, and they risk enabling injustice and undemocratic practices.
This new phase in the 🦋 series proposes a novel solution to this dilemma: the 'Fourth Theorist'. This notional theorist is a thinker of democracy who begins not with moral judgments, but with careful description. The Fourth Theorist collects and synthesises vast and diverse sources of knowledge about democratic practices worldwide, from individuals, collectives, textual traditions, non-textual media, and non-human actors.
Only after building this broad empirical foundation does the Fourth Theorist make normative claims about what democracy should be. Their authority comes not from abstract moral pronouncements but from a deep familiarity with the diverse ways democracy is practiced and understood.
Description is never neutral. Whose experiences are documented? What voices are made visible, and what forms of silence are ignored?
Yet this approach is not without its complications. As many feminist, decolonial, and critical theorists have long argued, description is never neutral. Whose experiences are documented? What voices are made visible, and what forms of silence are ignored? Even the most expansive data collection process reflects the assumptions, interests, and power dynamics of those conducting it. Building a data mountain is itself a political act.
At this stage, the Fourth Theorist, then, does not successfully escape the trilemma of political theorists, but merely reframes it. Theorists offer a promising direction, but only if they remain self-critical, attentive to their own exclusions, and willing to confront the politics of knowledge at every step.
Despite these concerns, this second phase in the Science of Democracy project is a remarkable intellectual endeavour. It opens new avenues for research, invites methodological experimentation, and calls democratic theorists to move beyond narrow institutional frameworks and cultural biases. It offers a timely corrective to stagnant democratic theory – and rightly pushes the field to broaden its epistemic horizons.
But to fully realise its emancipatory promise, contributors must take more seriously the politics of internal exclusion and the epistemic struggles of those most often left out of both democracy and theory. Pluralism is necessary, but not sufficient. What we need is a critical pluralism which recognises diversity while also confronting inequality in a deeply unjust world.
No.112 in a Loop thread on the Science of Democracy. Look out for the 🦋 to read more
