Jean-Paul GagnonUniversity of Canberra · School of Politics Economics and Society
Jean-Paul Gagnon
PhD
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Introduction
Jean-Paul Gagnon currently works at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis / School of Government & Policy, University of Canberra. Jean-Paul does research in the philosophy and theory of democracy. His current project is focused on the 2,500+ real-existing adjectives that have been used in the English language across the ages to describe or re-version the noun democracy.
Tags: democracy , democracy meaning , representative democracy , parliamentary system , democratic countries , direct democracy , democratization , parliamentary democracy , types of democracy , parliamentary democracy
Publications
Publications (84)
This is a short submission to the Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into "supporting democracy in the [Asia-Pacific] region".
In this article we introduce an input-oriented democratic innovation - that we term 'TaxTrack' - which offers individual taxpayers the means to engage with their political economies in three ways. After joining the TaxTrack program, an individual can: (1) see and understand how much, and what types, of taxes they have contributed, (2) see and under...
Abstract: Democratic innovations such as Participatory Budgeting or deliberative citizens juries convened to decide on matters of public finance typically focus on financial outputs. The input potential of the tax-paying individual is largely absent from the conversations that join taxation, government budgets, public spending, and democratic innov...
I did not train in any of the hallmark institutions of our calling. A call to understand, a call to make it better, a call to question, a call to fight. What I know now, what I have been
through in the pursuit of trying to understand democracy as a scholar initially on the outside, busy in the peripheries, has rendered me unsuitable for anything el...
Anthropology meets democratic theory in this conversation that explores indigeneity, diversity, and the potentialities of democratic practices as exist in the non-Western world. Wade Davis draws readers into the ethnosphere-the sum total of human knowledge and experience-to highlight the extinction events that are wiping out some half of human ethn...
This introductory article to Democratic Theory's special issue on the marginalized democracies of the world begins by presenting the lexical method for understanding democracy. It is argued that the lexical method is better than the normative and analytical methods at finding democracies in the world. The argument then turns to demonstrating, mainl...
Sue Donaldson, Janneke Vink, and Jean-Paul Gagnon discuss the problem of anthropocentric democratic theory and the preconditions needed to realize a (corrective) interspecies democracy. Donaldson proposes the formal involvement of nonhuman animals in political institutions-a revolutionary task; Vink argues for changes to the law that would cover no...
As countries around the world went into lockdown, we turned to 32 leading scholars working on different aspects of democracy and asked them what they think about how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted democracy. In this article, we synthesize the reflections of these scholars and present five key insights about the prospects and challenges of enact...
This article applies spatial theory, or the view that phenomena are distributed in space, to democracy. This analysis demonstrates that plural (two or more) democratic practices are evident in three spatial categories: (1) vertical stratification (i.e. at different levels of governance), (2) horizontal separation (i.e. among different agents operat...
Samuel Moyn provides insight into how the history of democracy can continue its globalization. There is a growing belief that the currently acceptable fund of ideas has not served the recent past well which is why an expansion, a planetary one, of democracy’s ideas is necessary – especially now as we move deeper into the shadow of declining America...
Samuel Moyn provides insight into how the history of democracy can continue its globalization. There is a growing belief that the currently acceptable fund of ideas has not served the recent past well which is why an expansion, a planetary one, of democracy’s ideas is necessary—especially now as we move deeper into the shadow of declining American/...
What is democratic theory? The question is surprisingly infrequently
posed. Indeed, the last time this precise question appears in the academic archive was exactly forty years ago,1 in James Alfred
Pennock’s (1979) book Democratic Political Theory. This is an odd discursive silence not observable in other closely aligned fields of thought such as p...
Noam Chomsky and Jean-Paul Gagnon discuss positive, constructive, and contemporary uses of democracies (such as workplace or co-operative democracy). Professor Chomsky points out that power of any sort stands on clay feet - it is fragile and can be challenged.
Professor John Dunn and Jean-Paul Gagnon discuss the difficulty of knowing, of understanding, democracy.
Professor Thomas Seeley and Jean-Paul Gagnon discuss non-human democracy as observed among Apis mellifera (the western honey bee).
Professor Albert Weale and Jean-Paul Gagnon discuss the history of democracy. They focus, in particular, on how it is being broadened, deepened, and challenged by historians (of many stripes) today.
Professor Ramin Jahanbegloo and Jean-Paul Gagnon discuss the focus that democratic theorists are placing on culture. They reflect on the inherently coercive nature of real-existing democracies (even if they operate under a liberal aegis) and ask whether a non-violent democracy is ever possible.
Professor David Held and Jean-Paul Gagnon discuss whether or not the field of democratic theory has entered a new phase.
Professor Ulrich Beck and Jean-Paul Gagnon discuss democracy in the reflexive modernization frame.
Professor John Dryzek and Jean-Paul Gagnon discuss major changes in the contemporary, published, concourse of democracy.
This conversation with John Keane discusses fresh thinking, and imaginative theory, for democracy.
This conversation with Professor Francis Fukuyama discusses democracy before, and after, the state.
Conversation with Pierre Rosanvallon
This Practitioner’s Note considers the disruptive function of Little Phil, a mobile app that seeks to democratize philanthropic giving. Although many of the cultural aspects of philanthropy – such as increased control over donation, tracking the impact of one’s giving, and building interpersonal relationships with receivers – can be opened to any p...
Both “populism” and “populist” have long been considered ill-defined terms, and therefore are regularly misapplied in both scholarly and popular discourses.1 This definitional difficulty is exacerbated by the Babelian confusion of voices on populism, where the term’s meaning differs within and between global regions (e.g. Latin America versus Weste...
In 2010 Milja Kurki explained that although scholars recognize that democracy is described in a variety of ways, they do not typically engage with its many and diverse descriptions. My aim in this agenda-setting research note is to tackle this quandary by first providing a minimum empirical account of democracy’s descriptions (i.e., a catalogue of...
SUPPLEMENT A
2,234 Descriptions of Democracy: An Update to Democracy’s Ontological Pluralism
SUPPLEMENT B
2,234 Descriptions of Democracy: An Update to Democracy’s Ontological Pluralism
SUPPLEMENT C
2,234 Descriptions of Democracy: An Update to Democracy’s Ontological Pluralism
This is the editorial for Democratic Theory's forthcoming issue 4(1), 2017.
Democracy depends on a competent citizenry. Individuals composing the citizenry, for instance, need to have the knowledge, skill set and disposition that will allow them to professionally engage their elected representatives, to deeply understand the characteristics of their polities, to meaningfully participate in the public sphere and, overall, t...
SeeClickFix began in 2009 when founder and present CEO Ben Berkowitz spotted a piece of graffiti in his New Haven, Connecticut, neighborhood. After calling numerous departments at city hall in a bid to have the graffiti removed, Berkowitz felt no closer to fixing the problem. Confused and frustrated, his emotions resonated with what many citizens i...
In reinterrogating core concepts from his 2015 book, The End of Representative Politics, Simon Tormey explains the nature of emergent, evanescent, and contrarian forms of political practice. He sheds light on what is driving the political disruption transpiring now through a series of engaging comments from the field on well-known initiatives like...
This research note begins to fill a long-standing gap in the study of democracy – which is that we do not have an empirical indication for the number of ways democracy is described in scholarly literature. 1,216 of democracy's adjectives (e.g. 'American democracy', 'social democracy', 'industrial democracy', and so on) are presented in list format...
Democracy, says Wolfgang Merkel, is not in as deep of an acute crisis as many today think it to be. An examination, for example, of OECD democracies over the last 50 years does not reveal democracy’s wholesale crisis but rather crises in certain sectors of democracy – ones that change over time as the state institutions affected by crises adapt to...
The literature on the crisis of democracy is booming. Take a glance, for instance, at the number of publications stating “crisis of democracy” in their titles. Close to 50 such publications have appeared in the last two
years alone (2014–2015). There has also been more than 1,000 works published in this period that address a crisis of democracy fro...
This chapter articulates that scholars write about Human Enhancement Technologies (HET) in two ways. This is not a reflection of a reality in the literature but rather a heuristic designed to contextualize democratic citizenship within contemporary HET discussions. The first way is to write about HET as possible realities far off into the future. T...
Participation, it has been said, is a central lynchpin of citizenship and democracy. Unfortunately, studies have shown for some time that political participation is on the decline in most Western democracies. Particularly for scholars and policy analysts who define political participation in democracy purely as voting, party membership or in terms...
The introductory article to this special issue highlights three fundamental yet often neglected questions related to the current diagnosis of a crisis of democracy: What is meant by the term “crisis”? Which democracy is in crisis? And what, if anything, is “new”
about the current crisis of democracy? We answer these questions by considering the mul...
The post-1945 world is well documented for its surge in the study of and struggles over “democracy”. The Eurocentric and then Pacifi c wars were—and continue to be—in part understood as a fi ght over ideology. Ideas of fascism, nazism, and empire as well as the totality of the state came face to face with ideas like democracy. Considered the panace...
Editors' introduction to the interview: Modern environmentalism, whose genesis tracks mainly from the 1960s and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), has forced the anthropocentric emphasis of democracy to account. Nonhuman actors like trees, ecological systems, and the climate have increasingly become anthropomorphized by humans representing these...
With rapid advancements in human enhancement technologies, society struggles with many issues, such as definition, effects, participation, regulation, and control. Current and future initiatives in these technologies may not be in the participants’ best interests; therefore, it is imperative for research on humanitarian considerations to be availab...
This chapter articulates that scholars write about Human Enhancement Technologies (HET) in two ways. This is not a reflection of a reality in the literature but rather a heuristic designed to contextualize democratic citizenship within contemporary HET discussions. The first way is to write about HET as possible realities far off into the future. T...
Something is happening to democracy. A change has occurred. An entire discourse has been transformed as a result of recent logical and moral shifts in the methods of research and the ontologies of theory. Democracy is now a body of knowledge unlike that we have seen before. By democracy I mean the entirety of human knowledge about the subject — the...
Shapes — they are objects of differing dimensions, compositions and structures. Together they can make striking mosaics. On their own they can offer conceptual boundaries. Shapes are integral to one’s thinking. They give form where there often is none. They help us to understand disparate information across complex strands of space and time. Shapes...
This paper explains the idea of a synergism between cutting-edge renewable energy technologies and social services. This is designed to create 'free' services for the public. These 'free' services could occur if 'intensive' renewable energy generation technologies permitted the physical structures housing social services to sell megawatts of electr...
In this final chapter we zoom out from the material introduced in Chapters 1 to 3. The argument that basic democracy is not a human invention is first offered. We then move to answer a number of questions raised throughout the book: ‘where did democracy come from?’, ‘how did its complexity arise?’ and ‘what, in the end, is democratic?’ These are ou...
This chapter is best understood as a tale of two stories. The first half describes the type of foundational claim that places the origins of ‘modern’ democracy during the period of North Atlantic revolutions. Although a nod is given to ancient Athens it is not viewed as a legitimate democracy but rather a source of ideas for moderns to draw on. The...
This introduction offers a post-foundational analytic tool for the study of democracy across time and space. The tool helps to manage the complexity of the discourse on democracy. This chapter argues that we do not know what democracy is. The chapter is determined to offer a way forward. It establishes that this book will explain a theory of basic...
Two bodies of literature on democracy are described in this chapter. The first concerns anthropocentric works that claim wider and different origins for democracy. The history of democracy is more complex than we currently think it is. The second body of literature described concerns nonhuman democracy. The chapter offers a table that surveys mamma...
I investigate the sciences for their use of the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic’. Findings suggest that particles do not behave in democratic ways as they are driven by strict forces. The key is to investigate whether these forces allow for ‘democratic’ things to manifest when unicellular life emerges from the ‘prebiotic soup’. A small selection...
This article conducts a simple comparative analysis between Marxist theory and what is known in the extant literature about Huron government and governance at the village level. This is done to try to understand whether the Huron, prior to European contact, had a form of socialism. A spatial scale taken from Marxist theory (zero is no common owners...
This point is, and has been for some time, obvious. However, Sir Karl Popper’s (2002) method of historicism has been neglected in the analysis of the radicalisation of Afghanistan’s society in the form of the Taliban. Popper’s historicism is the idea that the past allows the forecasting of the future by understanding the state of the present. It is...
Sir Karl Popper’s (2002) method of historicism has been neglected in the analysis
of the radicalisation of Afghanistan’s society in the form of the Taliban. Popper’s
historicism is the idea that the past may allow the forecasting of the future by
understanding the state of the present in one specific line of historical inquiry.
It is argued herein...
The extant literature covering indigenous peoples resident on the African continent targets colonial law as an obstacle to the recognition of indigenous rights. Whereas colonial law is argued by a wide body of literature to be archaic and in need of review, this article takes a different route and argues the perspective that colonial law is democra...
Abstract The concept of the indigenous person or group in Africa is a contentious one. The current argument is that there exist no indigenous people in Africa because all Africans are indigenous. The obverse considers those Africans who have not been touched by colonialism and lost their pre-nation state social structures commensurate with attachme...
This paper explains, somewhat along a Simmelian line, that political theory may produce practical and universal theories like those developed in theoretical physics. The reasoning behind this paper is to show that the Element of Democracy Theory may be true by way of comparing it to Einstein’s Special Relativity – specifically concerning the parame...
Seven endemic governance problems are shown to be currently present in governments around the globe and at any level of government as well (for example municipal, federal). These problems have their roots traced back through more than two thousand years of political, specifically ‘democratic’, history. The evidence shows that accountability, transp...
The current argument is that there exist no indigenous people in Africa because all Africans are indigenous. The obverse considers those Africans who have not been touched by colonialism and lost their traditional cultures commensurate with attachments to the lands or a distinguishable traditional lifestyle to be indigenous. This paper argues in fa...
Sub-surface minerals are in most cases considered to be the proprietary right of a country should those minerals be found within its borders. PRO169 (Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, International Labour Organization) has recorded instances where the private land of indigenous peoples has been pilfered by a government – often through the sale of a contr...
Democracy has never been properly measured. This is a contentious statement as there exist many different, and popular, scales for measuring democracies around the world (Polity IV is one good example). Yet, these scales are based on vague democratic theory and namely the false understanding that institutions create democracy. It is more logical to...
The political theorization of the state can be interpreted that the state is non-other than the sum of its pluralist citizenry. The state exists because its citizens desire the state so as to organize and order their society to prevent chaos and streamline progress. But if a significant portion of the citizenry does not wish to be part of the state...
Thirty separate articles stemming from Political Analysis were empirically analysed for their use of the term ‘democracy’. It is argued, through qualitative methods, that the studies conducted in these publications could be weakened by the current use and understanding of democracy. The debate surrounding an exact, functional, and universal definit...
Queensland’s legal labour disputes history does not exhibit the current trend seen in Canada and Switzerland (Gravel & Delpech, 2008) where cases citing International Labour Standards (ILS) are often successful (which is not presently the case in Queensland either).
The two Queensland cases (Kuhler v. Inghams Enterprises P/L & Anor, 1997 and Bale...
The MDG deadline is fast approaching and the climate within the United Nations remains positive but skeptical. A common feeling is that a great deal of work and headway has been made, but the MDG goals will not be achieved in full by 2015. The largest problem facing the success of the MDGs is, and unless mitigated may remain, mismanaged governance....
Violence is detrimental to the stability of any democracy. If people are too scared to vote, or if they lack confidence in their government to bring peace, how will their voices be heard? By discussing how accountability, transparency, and ethics dissuade social confusion, improve democracy, and lessen occurrences of violence, perhaps one can incre...
The MDG deadline is fast approaching and the climate within the United Nations remains positive but skeptical. A common feeling is that a great deal of work and headway has been made, but the MDG goals will not be achieved in full by 2015. The largest problem facing the success of the MDGs is, and unless mitigated may remain, mismanaged governance....
This book details the early political philosophy of Jean-Paul Gagnon. It deals with the ideas of democracy as something endemic to human nature; with practical methods for the improvement of democracy; and a mix of other political concepts. The book also has a response to the Russian Federation's development of the 'mother of all bombs' which leads...
A collection of four progressive ideas targeted for the improvement of the human condition has been compiled in this book. They were derived from the first attempted MEDP
Australian Summit. Although the Summit itself did not meet expectations for a variety of reasons, the four ideas contained herein are gems derived from the Summit processes.
Has the debate regarding the definition of democracy (the democracy paradox) been solved? This paper will show that there is, and has been for well over 3500 years, a democracy paradox by explaining what it is and how it came about. Such will be done firstly by revealing the history of the paradox; then discussing how it came to the modern era with...
The element of democracy theory presupposes that democracy as a governance system is an organic derivative of early human society. This article argues that democracy is but an extension of early human governance systems at the level of the band. This will be shown by providing evidence that determines human bands had notions of equality, communicat...
There are seven problems, endemic to polities, which have been affecting governments for at least the past 3500 years. They include (1) accountability, (2) transparency, (3) representation, (4) corruption, (5) constitutional issues, (6) campaigning issues, and (7) a lack of long-term goals derived from the citizenry. This was seen during an in-dept...
Indigenous cultures have provided specific contributions to anti-materialist philosophy, namely in the form of alternatives to globalised consumerism in the cash-based economy. The purpose of this article is to survey how these societies provide hidden gems in an increasingly homogenous global society. By rejecting materialism, the cash-based econo...
Questions
Questions (120)
Christian Ewert states that:
"The White House in Washington DC, the Scorpions’ Wind of Change, and the 🦋 symbol of this blog series – all these disparate things might remind us of democracy."
(For Ewert's essay, see: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/can-you-put-food-inside-words-are-invitations-not-containers/ ; for the blog series, see: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/?s=🦋)
What things might remind you of democracy? Share them here!
In his essay, Alexander Hudson argues the following:
"At International IDEA, we subscribe to a rather broad definition of democracy. Our organisation understands democracy to require popular control of decision making and decision makers, and equality in the exercise of that control. We measure democracy in a disaggregated way that can accommodate different institutional forms. This means that we do not come to a single value for democracy. Instead, we measure the core attributes of democracy as stand-alone values."
Now imagine if we did not start with our own definition of democracy but rather asked others how they define democracy. How should we measure the core attributes of these many and different understandings of democracy in the world? And what do you think this approach could achieve?
Sandra Leonie Field wrote that Francis Bacon once created a "Sylva Sylvarum" (a forest of forests) book which "contained a miscellany of travellers’ tales, everyday observations, magical recipes, and botanical descriptions" (see, for more: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/data-mountains-and-usable-concepts-a-lesson-from-francis-bacon/).
Bacon's aim in this book was to generate "a collection of empirical materials on which to build a new adequate science, freed from habitual suppositions. Nothing, in Bacon's view, was too trivial, too curious, too odd, to be salient for the construction of our scientific knowledge of the world."
What if we were to do this for democracy? What, say, hundred facts about democracy would you include in such a book? What would your angle be?
Tom Theuns writes: "popular sovereignty, and self-governance, lie at the heart of many conceptions of democracy". (https://theloop.ecpr.eu/to-understand-democracy-we-need-democratic-theory/)
Is there a defensible, or ethically/morally justifiable, concept of democracy that is not premised on both popular sovereignty and self-governance?
In his essay, Andrea Felicetti states the following:
"I don’t think the absence of a singular theory of democracy is a genuine problem. I believe it is beneficial to look at complex phenomena from a variety of viewpoints."
What do you think Andrea means by "complex phenomena" and "variety of viewpoints" here? Why is the absence of a single theory of democracy not a genuine problem?
(For the record, I agree with Andrea!)
Martyn Hammersley writes the following:
"Asking ‘why democracy’ challenges the false idea that ‘democracy’ is simply ‘a good thing’."
This resonates with Michael Hanchard's statement, given some time after Hammersley's, that democracy is a problem for many. It is not a solution to their problems. See: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/democracy-as-a-problem/
From Hanchard's perspective, which I agree with, the reason is because "democracy" almost always means "liberal democracy" and electoralism. Both instruments came from a history of barons, wealthy merchants, and priests taking power from a monarch but NOT extending that power beyond themselves.
The barons, merchants, etc., formed parliaments for themselves, NOT "the people", and this helps to explain why suffrage movements arose in Europe & the colonies several empires brutally forced upon so very much of the world.
Liberal democracy & electoralism are meant to exclude the very people they are professed to empower. Both are fables spun by the powerful to placate, the bamboozle, the many. So when this "democracy" is imposed on those who do not "fit the picture of the ideal citizen" it is problem for them, not a solution.
That's my reading. It's your turn.
When, in your opinion, is democracy "a bad thing"?
In his essay, Ryusaku Yamada quotes CD Lummis to make the point that: "the word ‘democracy’ is overworked to mean different things." (For more, see: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/lost-in-translation-democracy-and-its-non-english-variants/)
We also know, and this time from the Norwegian Philosopher Arne Naess, that this bounty of meanings is not new. Seven different meanings of democracy, Naess says, can be found in Aristotle's Politics alone!
What can explain this dynamic? Why has democracy become/has always been so overworked with meaning?
"Today, democracy is facing numerous challenges. Many say it is our duty as democratic scholars to defend democracy in its present form, not to question it. They argue that our search for a more comprehensive concept of democracy opens up a Pandora's Box. It thus also puts the core norms of democracy up for discussion, which risks undermining democracy, or hollowing out its value."
This quote is from Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann, Toralf Stark, and Christoph Mohammad-Klotzbach's essay here: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/democracy-is-an-essentially-contested-concept/
Is the study of marginalised, lost and forgotten concepts and conceptions of "democracy", and the search for a "common core" among them, really putting democracy as it is conventionally known at risk today?
What do you think? If not, why?
If it does - is that not a good thing? Shouldn't we be trying to establish ever better, fuller, maximal, and pervasive democracies instead of guarding what have arguably always been racist, sexist, exclusionary, and capitalist forms of so-called "democratic rule" which are now becoming even more disfigured?
Luke Temple asks a number of challenging questions in his essay on the democracies here: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/wikis-and-music-not-mountains-and-butterflies/
Temple, for example, writes:
"A database is a resource and cannot on its own encourage innovation. People must come to it already primed for such a thing. The information this database is generating is important, but just as important are our reflections on how to use it."
Link to database: https://researchdata.canberra.edu.au/datasets/pthgd7rx92
So how would you use one or more "different" concepts of democracy to ease suffering or to, say, promote democratic innovation?
What would you use Natural Language Processing techniques for if you had access to an enormous digital library of data on "democracy" & closely related concepts?
This question comes from Agustin Goenaga's essay here: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/what-democracy-should-be-for-us/
In reading André Bächtiger's essay (https://theloop.ecpr.eu/a-night-at-the-museum-of-democracy/) on the genetic understanding of words, like democracy, I was reminded of the book Por una democracia sin adjetivos by Enrique Krauze (http://www.elem.mx/obra/datos/196027).
To memory, Krauze wanted unqualified democracy - the real thing - as adjectives are seen as a way of negatively qualifying democracy and, therefore, justifying something different: authoritarianism, oligarchy, etc.
What is to be done, though, when even a small polity is unlikely to ever hold to just one meaning of democracy? And is it not undemocratic to insist that everyone in a polity ascribes to just one form of democracy - the adjective-less or unadjectived one (and what meaning is this to hold, according to whom over whom?)?
What do you think?
"Post-foundationalist democratic theorists, such as Chantal Mouffe, would argue that it is precisely [the] never-ending battle of values that makes a democracy. For this reason, as Robin Celikates states, it is also far too important a debate to involve only researchers. Instead of [researchers] classifying the butterflies from the fleas, we should look at how people act based on values. We must study how they argue, critique, and justify – and what values they draw on as pointers of a just world. Because that’s where democracy’s essence is incessantly being forged." - Taina Meriluoto
I agree with Meriluoto's assertion above for many reasons. One of those reasons is because the cultural artefacts of democracy that have captured my attention are in majority left behind by so-called "non-experts" in democracy/democratic theory.
If we are, therefore, serious about understanding democracy in all its flavours (Meriluoto starts her essay with ice cream :) ) then we must give more time to understanding how people - right down to the individual - understand popular rule. What do they value most in/of/for/about democracy?
What do you think? Is there any emphasis you might like to place on this work and why?
In the now global discussion on the sciences of the democracies (https://theloop.ecpr.eu/?s=🦋), the Ancient Greek hero Sisyphus has been mentioned at least four times (see the four essays below).
This is done, I think, for two reasons:
The first is because democracy, and the hundreds of other words across babel that users of the word "democracy" would recognise as being more or less democratic (and vice versa), have been inscribed by people with tens of thousands (or more) meanings over time and space.
The second is because democracy (and probably most of the other words hinted at in the first reason) is morphological. It is constantly being rearticulated, revised, given new meaning, and so forth, as people's experiences, contexts, circumstances, etc., change.
Some people leave records of their perceptions of democracy behind them in the form of cultural artefacts. For example in texts, architecture, sound and photography, and so forth. We can gather these and study them. If we try to "record" to "capture" people's living perceptions of democracy (because many people won't record their perceptions in artifactual formats), which is most often done through surveys, then our so-called "data points" (I prefer research partners) grows exponentially.
All of this is given to say that we have historical, contemporary and (probably) future data on democracy that is both immense in quantity and endless.
I won't spoil our game here with an answer of why I think this is a good thing and will, instead, invite you to give that answer.
What do you think? Why is "Sisyphus happy" here?
Essays that mentioned Sisyphus:
In reading Chih-yu Shih (https://theloop.ecpr.eu/how-do-we-translate-the-meaning-of-democracy-across-linguistic-and-cultural-divides/), we can see how common ground can be found between a comparison of Confucianism and liberal democracy.
Both, as Shih, demonstrates, share "a common desire for a style of policymaking exempt from a monopoly".
If you were to compare two concepts of democratic governance which would they be? And what approach would you use to compare them?
To raise the difficulty of this discussion, what if we were to compare 3, 5 or 15 concepts? What utility/ies or outcome/s can or should we expect from such an undertaking?
In her essay, Paula Sabloff asserts that:
First and foremost, a democratic government protects people’s human rights as laid out in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Among these are the right to life, to freedom from degrading punishment or enslavement, and to follow one’s own beliefs. They also include the right to citizenship and, most relevant to dignity, the right to self-determination.
If you were asked to complete the sentence: A democratic government must ...
What would you come up with? What would be your answer or list of minimum requirements?
In reading John B. Min's essay here (https://theloop.ecpr.eu/a-democratic-philosophy-for-democracys-data-mountain/) I began to wonder about "democratic progresses" as opposed to the now all too familiar "democratic backslidings".
For me, at the moment, "democratic progresses" looks like a combination of private citizens (inclusive of residents and visitors, especially migrants), civil society (or public sphere) organisations, and public things/officials/institutions working together to develop trustworthy patterns of behaviour given to enhancing the power of people - especially marginalised individuals and groups.
These sorts of progresses are people-driven and advices are provided to them by so-called "democracy experts" (broadly conceived).
One example is the rising interest and practice in "sortive", "aleatory", or "sortition democracy".
What do you think? What examples come to mind for you and why?
Patricia Roberts-Miller begins her essay as follows:
"'Thucydides’ trap' is famous in international relations, used to describe a situation in which a rising power threatens an existing hegemon. It’s also a misnomer — it describes a 'trap' of no interest to the Athenian historian Thucydides. Neither is it applicable to the relationship between Sparta and Athens that would result in the regionally devastating Peloponnesian War, the history of which Thucydides wrote. The misnomer is the consequence of a misunderstanding of a quote from a secondary writer, and an anachronistic understanding of what it means to be a hero in classical literature."
This led to my asking: what does it mean to be a hero today especially in relation not only to "democracy" but to "the democracies" - the thousands of possible routes that we can take to be ever more democratic, ever better democratic people?
To my mind, perhaps because I am working on a book called "Democracy Therapy: Democratic Treatments for our Authoritarian Lives", such a hero tries to democratise their family, or school, workplace, condo/apartment building, local hospitals, their neighbourhood, domestic relations with non-human life, and so forth - all, notably, more social than political spaces.
What does being a hero of the democracies today mean to you?
In his essay here (https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-tension-between-the-singular-and-multivarious-conceptions-of-democracy/), Marcin Kaim argues that "the ‘total texture’ [of democracy] is a collection of models – discursively constructed and fluid – representing a multivarious / plural conception of democracy. By virtue of its nature, the total texture stands in opposition to a universal / singular conception of democracy."
Do you think we can move forward democratically without a singular conception of democracy, but rather many singular conceptions?
If yes, how?
If not, why not?
Tetsuki Tamura invokes the imagery of "democracy in and/or on unlikely places" in his essay here: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/why-concept-and-data-collection-matter/
For my own part, I've followed others (often from novels & short stories) in thinking about democracy of the moon, inter-cellular democracy (as in the case of jellyfish), democratic practices in animal societies/groups, and so on.
Andre Bachtiger and his colleagues in Stuttgart are, for example, theorising "democracy on Mars" and, of course, there have been many science fiction writers who have portrayed different sorts of democratic possibilities among extra-terrestrial life.
For Tamura, he gives the example of democracy in the family. It's an unlikely place to think about democracy for democratic theorists, conventionally speaking, as the term "democracy" often parses to political locations or the political/public sphere - not the private one.
What is an unlikely place of democracy in your opinion? Or perhaps you know of a few!? Please list them here!
In his ECPR essay (https://theloop.ecpr.eu/what-is-democracy-an-empirical-response-to-the-butterfly-collector/), Leonardo Morlino makes two statements that I'd like to highlight here.
(1) "[W]e are focusing on reconstructing the 'total texture' of democracy. What interests us, once we have collected all the material, is mapping and circumscribing the analytical space of the notion of democracy."
(2) "[I]f we privilege the empirical perspective, the 'total texture' (in our terms, the effective analytical space) is continuously changing in time and space. In a sense, it is the work of Sisyphus. We have to accept that the 'total texture' of democracy has been changing not only in space, from one geopolitical area to another, and often from one country to another. It has also changed in time; for example, from one decade to another."
In our forthcoming book, called The Sciences of the Democracies, many of us are exploring Morlino's analytic space. At the moment, we are terming it the "ethno-quantic domain". This domain, we argue, frames democracy knowledge as something that can be found across space, time, language, culture, and species.
Is there any "location" you would add to this list? In other words, where else can knowledge on democracy be found, be located?
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