How should Democratic Theory relate to Empirical Research?

Political theory has a special but difficult role within political science: it is charged with identifying, idealizing, and justifying the possible, within a domain of human activities defined by the question, as Weber put it, “What should we do and how should we live?” This kind of idealization is part of what defines political science within the social sciences. All idealizations carry with them the hazard of utopian thinking—a hazard because it will tend to overreach into the impossible, which in turn reinforces cynicism about the possible. And cynicism in turn reinforces withdrawal from politics. Political theory must, therefore, embrace empirics in order to define possibilities within realities. Democratic theory is simply a more particular case of this defining challenge of political theory. The challenge too often does not go well. Those who study democracies typically have limited imaginations, built into the dependence of research on data generated by existing political systems. Democratic theorists often work with idealizations that fail to recognize key conditions of collective organization—the conditions of scale, complexity, scarcities of political resources such as time, human capacities, and path dependencies of existing institutions. As a result, democratic theorists and empirical researchers too often work in silos. How should we think about a productive relationship between democratic theory and political science? Some general rules are these: First, democratic theorists should use idealizations to identify emerging problems, challenges, and possibilities. Empirics will be part of problem definitions. Second, democratic theorists should pair problems with possibilities, thus avoiding generalized cynicism. Third, while political science is usually concerned with norms and averages, democratic theorists should use their idealizations to identify exceptions, particularly those that are progressive. Finally, democratic theorist should treat the resulting claims as hypotheses, in this way helping to define research programs. I shall illustrate this idealized dynamic with the case of deliberative democratic theory, which has been uniquely attentive to relevant empirics, and, as a result, has defined new research programs with the study of democracy.