Thinking Systemically about Democracy: Six Core Concepts

Democratic theory is increasingly going through a systems turn. This systems turn has been especially apparent amongst deliberative democrats, where a deliberative systems approach has now predominates, but it has also permeated beyond deliberative democracy. Mark Warren’s (2017) problem based approach, for instance, outlines a broad set of ‘functions’ and ‘practices’ that are intended to characterise the ways in which social relations can be characterised as ‘rule of the people’. This new development in democratic theory has brought to the fore a range of new concepts – such as functions practices, and arenas - for thinking about democracy. Nevertheless, these foundational concepts for a systemic approach to democratic theory have rarely themselves been systematically examined. Important concepts upon which the approach is based – such as norms, scales and interactions – remain mostly implicit within the current literature. This article explicitly enumerates the six key conceptual building blocks necessary for a democratic systems approach, structuring their relationships to one and another. It addresses gaps in the current thinking about these concepts as well as highlighting the important questions that need to be resolved in order to further develop the democratic systems approach.