Modular Democracy: Building a Democratic System from Root Concepts

Debates about the future of democracy and democratic theory are currently in vogue. One promising recent direction has been the systemic turn in democratic theory, predominantly rooted in the deliberative model of democracy (Habermas 1996; Dryzek 2010; Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012). However, as Warren (2017) has argued we need to move democratic theory beyond models of democracy. His problem-based approach is one such example, but it does not go far enough and implicitly retains a deliberative conception of democratic politics at its core. Our paper builds on Warren’s approach to develop a more capacious account of the democratic system that moves from models of democracy to ‘modular democracy’. We take as our starting point the idea that democracy is a contested concept that eludes a single specific definition and single institutional realization. Drawing on a range of different traditions in democratic theory, as well as quality of democracy scholarship, we break down democracy into its root concepts, conceived in terms of democratic norms, tasks and practices. Our contention is that actually existing democracies will come in a variety of forms, emphasizing the different concepts in different ways, but will all consist of some configuration of these ‘modules’. As such we argue that democratic theory should not be separated from citizens’ normative conceptions of democracy, and that empirical and theoretical research on the future of democracy should proceed hand-in-hand.