One of the most productive veins in current democratic theory is in reimagining the role of this ancient practice in contemporary democratic institutions (see Smith 2009: ch. For most of the last three thousand years elections were associated with oligarchy and democracy with sortition. Bernard Manin (1997) has, for example, demonstrated that the seemingly fixed association between democracy and elections is actually a historical oddity. These debates are evident in the variety of models of democracy ( Held 2006), usually distinguished by an adjectival descriptor focused on a specific kind of practice: representative democracy, participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, agonist democracy, and so on. However, debates about what constitutes democratic practice lie at the heart of much contemporary democratic theory, which suggests that the mainstream political science account has missed the mark (it is precise in its claim about electoral democracy but not democracy's many other variants). Downs 1957 Schumpeter 1976), as well as the related concepts that form the bases of its legitimacy, such as accountability, representation, and legitimate coercion (e.g., respectively, Warren 2014 Mansbridge 2003, 2014). Democracy is about the competitive selection of elites, and thus much democratic theory is oriented toward theorizing how this process operates (e.g. Mainstream political science, for example, gives the impression that democratic theory is settled on the question of what democracy is: the core practice of democracy is competitive elections. This “what?” question in turn stipulates what it is that democratic theory should theorize. Therefore, asking the what, where, who, when, and why questions of democracy – and how they have been approached by democratic theorists – allows us to cast further illumination onto a dynamic field of thought, onto the question of “what”, more exactly, “ is democratic theory?”ĭescribing what democracy is constitutes a key – but not the only – task for democratic theory ( Dahl 1956 Deligiaouri and Suiter, this issue Ewert and Repetti, this issue). There is no agreement even about whether it is a set of institutions or an ethical ideal. The diversity of democratic theory and, therefore, the difficulty of defining it is undoubtedly linked to the slipperiness of democracy as an object of study if only because democracy has a multitude of linguistic, geographical, and historical referents. In this editorial we draw on the contributions to this special issue as well as the broader literature to explore the diversity of democratic theory across five planes: (1) what, (2) where, (3) who, (4) when, and (5) why. Nevertheless, simply recognizing and embracing this diversity only gets us so far. In addition, many contemporary democratic theorists share a pluralist ethic concerned with avoiding an autocratic closure around what constitutes democratic theory (see, e.g., Bader 1995 Blokland 2011 Erman 2009 Held 2006 Martí 2017 Moscrop and Warren 2016 Paxton, this issue). Robert Dahl (1956: 1), for example, famously argued that “there is no democratic theory – there are only democratic theories.” There are, too, a litany of rival claims, now mostly historical, to the heart of democracy, and more than twenty-two hundred adjectival descriptors of democracy have so far been documented ( Gagnon 2018). Even the question of what topics it should include is the subject of wide disagreement.” Perhaps the only thing democratic theorists could agree about democratic theory is that it is diverse, even inchoate in nature. Pennock (1979: xvii) does not answer the question himself he leaves that labor to posterity, only stating that “the phrase is often used as though it stood for a clearly demarcated and agreed upon body of doctrine but that is far from the case. The premise of this special issue is, therefore, to pose the question anew and break this forty-year silence.Īnswering this question turns out to be rather more difficult than posing it. 2 This is an odd discursive silence not observable in other closely aligned fields of thought such as political theory, 3 political science, 4 social theory, 5 philosophy, 6 economic theory, 7 and public policy/administration 8 – each of which have asked the “what is” question of themselves on regular occasion. 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. What is democratic theory? The question is surprisingly infrequently posed.
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