The Systems Approach to Democracy in Empirical Research: The Role of Digital Technologies

The systems turn in normative theory has introduced a novel approach to conceive the concept of democracy. Prominently, Mark Warren (2017) defines democracy in his seminal piece “A Problem-Based Approach to Democratic Theory” not in terms of a set of institutions, but in terms of a set of “problems” that a political system ought to solve in order to count as democratic (e.g., establishing a “collective will formation”). Importantly, he separates on a conceptual level the normative standards of democracy from how they are realized. This makes the systems approach extremely versatile regarding specific manifestations of democratic rules; the definition enables to account for a great variety of potential institutional settings: Both, a representative democracy with parliament of a large nation as much as a small city with citizens assemblies and referenda count as democratic as long as they realize defined normative standards. In turn, this makes a systems account of democracy particularly apt for empirical democracy measurement efforts (cf. Warren 2017). However, the operations within a system have not yet been conceptualized in the literature (Dean, Rinne, and Geissel 2019). As a result, it remains unclear how a system does – or does not – realize the normative standards of democracy. In this sense, the systems turn prompted clarity about the normative criteria of democracy at the cost of conceptual fuzziness regarding how proceedings in real-world democracies relate to these normative criteria. As a result, the conceptual tools that are available in the literature are not sufficient for utilizing a systems account for empirical research systematically. This paper reflects on the potential of using research tools of the digital age to achieve the cumbersome task of conceiving the complex operations in democracy. To that end, I draw on graph theory and elaborate, first, the conceptual tools to conceive the operations in terms of networks of individuals, arenas, and links between them. Second, I lay out how this conceptualization enables to employ various “big data” techniques to conceive the operations of real-world democracies in terms of network models. The bandwidth of research tools ranges, for instance, from generating data using text-mining (e.g. to assess what communication moves through links) to analyzing patterns using neural network models (e.g. to assess which channels individuals predominantly use to participate in the will formation). Third, I elaborate how to use the data on networks to assess the system’s democratic quality. To that end I specify how to evaluate to what degree the networks realize the different normative standards of democracy.