Truly Comparative Empirical Research on Democracy: A Call for the Inclusion of Non-Western Thinking on Democracy

With the emergence of Comparative Political Theory (CPT) since the 1990s, the study of political ideas within Western Political Theory (PT) has changed. While for non-Western colleagues the study of the history of Western political ideas and their contrast with their own culturally specific theorists has long been considered normal, the reverse has only recently become increasingly true - with a few exceptions. A look at current works on democratic theory reveals a strong Western centrism, which is based in particular on European and North American theorists. It is therefore not surprising that Empirical Democracy Research (EDR), which emerged in a Western context and works comparatively, has developed its considerations on the development of measurement concepts based on the idea of PT. Although the focus of EDR is particularly on the measurement of a liberal model of democracy (e.g. Freedom House, Polity), projects such as Varieties of Democracy (VDem) or the Democracy Matrix show that the PT certainly has a greater variety of models of democracy to offer, which can also be found in the real world. At the same time, however, the findings of the CPT show that further adherence to Western ideas and a fading out of non-Western political ideas is no longer appropriate in today's globalized world. Weiss (2020) has therefore recently advocated expanding the classic canon of Western democratic theories and transforming democratic theory (DT) into comparative democratic theory (CDT) in order to take greater account of the democratic theoretical considerations of non-Western theorists. This inclusion of non-Western thinking about the idea of democracy is currently hardly taken into account in empirical democracy research. However, if we take the premises formulated by the CPT and CDT seriously and do not close our eyes to the different concepts of democracy that exist in reality, including at local and regional level, then we cannot avoid thinking about how such an endeavor can succeed. In order to realize Comparative Empirical Democracy Research (CEDR), we need to think about how the inclusion of non-Western theories of democracy in empirical democracy research can work without softening or stretching the idea of democracy to such an extent that it is no longer viable as a scientific concept.