What we (don’t) talk about when we talk about democracy

More than a hundred essays have now been published in the thriving Science of Democracy series in The Loop, ECPR’s political science blog. Such a broad body of scholarship reveals a consistent theme about how variously the term ‘democracy’ can be understood and applied. The thousands of adjective-types (3,539 and counting) collected by Jean-Paul Gagnon continue to enrich discussions about the plethora of contexts in which we identify democracy and democratisation. So: what conclusions can we draw so far from these writings? And how do those conclusions relate to broader questions about democracy, as a concept and a process? These questions are the inspiration behind Panel 8 (‘The role of power in the sciences of democracies’, Chair: John Min & Alex Prior, Discussant: Lucy Parry) and therefore this paper would be a valuable means to frame and contextualise that panel. These questions also matter because contributions to the Science of Democracy series do more than simply describe the democratic status quo. Rather, they also discuss how to change it. Indeed, it is the terms of ability to effect change which defines power (with Dahl stating that "A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do"). Understandings of power inform not only the means of change, but the envisaged result of that change. The terms that we use to discuss power entail different understandings of power, i.e., the means and intended results of change. In addressing the above questions, I ran NVivo tests on the first 99 entries in the Science of Democracy series. I focused my analysis on the most frequently-used term in the series – ‘democracy’ – comprising as it does two components: demos (people) and kratos (power), both of which are worth exploring vis-à-vis the essays. In doing so, I identified an asymmetry between references to people (demos) and power (kratos). Moreover, I found that discussions of ‘demos’ cluster around a small number of key terms (particularly ‘people’ and ‘citizens’), whereas discussions of power are much more terminologically diverse (for example ‘government’, ‘ownership’, ‘mastery’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘agency’). Through a discussion of these findings (and their possible causes), I call for increased attention to power, in the sense of its ability to effect change.