Towards a Practice-based Understanding of Democracy

• In Event: Democratic State Power, Blind-spots, and Resistance

Abstract

Towards a practice-based understanding of democracy.
In public and political theory debates democracy is interpreted in legions of different ways (see Gagnon, 2014). Indeed, conceptual disputes over the meaning of democracy are the vital lymph that keeps the debate on this concept alive and strong. I claim that looking at democratic practices provides another valuable, though largely untapped source of inspiration to think about democracy. I argue for a practice-based understanding of democracy. Taking democratic practices as our starting point to theorize opens news ways of thinking about democratic systems. This effort is particularly important at a time when populism and innovation processes are changing our democracies (Chwalisz, 2015).
Democracy being an essentially contested concept, it should not be surprising that different democratic practices are being developed. However, conceptual contestation has received significantly more attention than difference in the ways democracy is practiced. The question “what do contemporary democratic practices tell us about democratic systems?” remains largely unaddressed to date. Taking the outstanding diversity of practices hosted in our democracies seriously allows us to refrain from the widespread tendency to seeking some fixed core to democracy around which a political system should be organized (such as elections, deliberation or participation). Instead, it invites us to consider democracy as an open-ended project whose strength consists in the ability to treasure contestation around its different meanings and around it multiple practices. Disputes over the meanings of democracy are greatly valuable. Yet, the presence of a growing variety of democratic practices is a fundamental characteristic of our democracies, which, if given due attention, can improve the ways theorists engage in institutional design of democratic systems.
In the first part of the paper I illustrate the proliferation of diverse and increasingly hybrid democratic practices. However, the theoretical implications of this development have not been duly explored due to an ingrained tendency to compartmentalization affecting the study of democracy. The debate on deliberative/democratic systems (e.g. Warren, 2017) is a promising effort to overcome compartmentalization and it provides fertile ground for developing a practice-based understanding of democracy. In the second part of the paper I first show that the most influential systemic proposals already welcome the idea that systems should allow for contestation over the meaning and practices of democracy. Nevertheless, their main concern tends to lay in the identification of some core features of systems and in designing the right set of institutions enabling such systems to perform their democratic functions. Difference in democratic practices is taken more as a given than as a source of insight for thinking about democracy. In the third and last part of the paper I show that looking at democratic practices reinforces theorists’ ability to interpret contemporary democracy and to develop not only desirable but also more effective proposals to democratize our societies.
References
CHWALISZ, C. 2015. The populist signal: Why politics and democracy need to change, Rowman & Littlefield International/Policy Network.
GAGNON, J. 2014. Democratic Theorists in Conversation: Turns in Contemporary Thought, Springer.
WARREN, M. E. 2017. A problem-based approach to democratic theory. American Political Science Review, 111, 39-53.

Author

• Andrea Felicetti, KU Leuven