Towards democratic diagnosis: Building a framework to identify context-specific problems of democratic systems

Contemporary democracies face several challenges for which democratic innovations can represent fruitful solutions. From the focus on the democratic merits of single innovative devices (e.g. mini-publics; participatory budgets), the literature in democratic theory turned some attention towards "the big picture", that is the complex interconnection of these democratic innovations with the other institutions and practices of existing democratic systems. In addition, democratic innovations as "one-size-fits-all" solutions are increasingly challenged by more context-sensitive approaches to democratic design. Such developments have brought (back) to the fore essential features of democracy: the contingency and complexity of institutional architectures and their constant transformation; the connectivity between democratic elements; people's agency and the necessity of bottom-up self-governance in the (re-)design of democracies. In this paper, I show that social systems theory properly understood highlights exactly these features, and that a systemic perspective over democratic complexity offers an analytical and evaluative frame of dynamic and ever-evolving democratic systems within their broader societal environment. First, this frame enables to observe and map existing political systems with common lenses while being flexible enough to capture their contextual specificities. By conceptually articulating political functions, democratic practices and democratic principles, this framework of democratic systems transcends models' boundaries (deliberative, representative, participatory, etc.) and is useful to track and evaluate in context potential trade-offs between democratic expectations such as participation and deliberation, or between practices enacting different understandings of representation (e.g. election or sortition). Second, instead of providing allegedly universal criteria to measure democratic quality, this systemic framework paves the way for the diagnosis/identification of context-specific democratic problems. While the literature increasingly acknowledges that designed democratic solutions must be context-specific, little attention is given to the identification of context-specific problems to be solved. Beside suggesting a systemic framework to orient scholars' efforts of democratic diagnosis, I argue here for the development of a critical democratic agenda: the constant diagnosis/problematization of democratic shortcomings, by citizens themselves and through democratic processes (including democratic innovations). Finally, this paper justifies democratic diagnosis as a necessary function of self-governing democratic systems and argue that efforts of democratic (re-)design would benefit from a prior identification, framing and prioritization of political problems by citizens themselves.