A systemic approach to democracy: conceptualizing democratic systems

The "systemic turn" in deliberative democracy has generated productive debates on democracy, political practices, and democratic innovations. Although deliberative systems provide a rich conceptual framework to capture the interactions between various sites of deliberation, questions remain about the kind of practices they entail and their normative contributions. Building on the recovery of system thinking in deliberative democracy and recent work on a problem-based approach to democracy, we propose to shift the theoretical attention to democratic systems. In doing so, we argue for a conceptualization of political systems that goes beyond deliberation and reflects the highly complex sets of interactions and institutions that compose democratic systems. This shift contributes to the field by centring the messiness and contingency of democratic politics. The argument we put forward lays the foundations for this shift of paradigm with four key contributions. First, it clarifies the norms a political system needs to fulfill to be democratic. Second, it theorizes the vital elements of a system: its location and boundaries, the individual and collective agents operating within it, the democratic practices that these agents deploy and the institutions in which they are embedded, and the relationship between the different components of the system. Third, we elaborate from the systemic approach an analytical framework to study the numerous components of democracy, including democratic innovations, practices, and agents. Finally, we re-think models of democracy so that their normative substance remains a valuable resource to theorize democratic systems from a more decentred and contingent standpoint.