Normative Reflections on Democratic Innovations

Abstract

This panel will offer a largely normative perspective on recent developments in the field of democratic innovations. More especially, it will seek to assess the extent to which innovations embody – or fail to embody – principles of deliberative and participatory democracy. As part of that, the panel will reflect critically on those principles and, in their light, suggest new avenues of empirical research. For example, we know that deliberation and participation are different types of activity that can be hard to reconcile. Yet since it would be difficult to imagine a democratic system that did not make room for both, we need to know a lot more about how these activities fit (or do not fit) together, and about the costs of any potential trade-offs for a system’s overall democratic quality. In addition, it is necessary to think about the ways in which empirical research has missed valid normative points. For example, we need to know more about political systems’ capacity to deal with outgroups in a just or fair manner. The current refugee crisis is but one obvious illustration of the normative challenges that need to be addressed here. The panel invites both theoretical and theory-driven empirical papers.

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