Democracy as Life-Form: Utilizing the Political Difference for Democracy Research

Democracy, as the research thereof, is a highly contextualized phenomenon. The conceptional period of its modern version is permeated by admirable discoveries as well as highly lamentable omissions. Because many of these elements remain within todays liberal paradigm of democracy the research thereof is challenged twice. Once with a continuous investigation into the circumstances and context of the dominance of this liberal script that is only ever masking its historical contingency by reference to seemingly foundational principles such as natural rights. And twice with maintaining these nonetheless highly valuable principles which cannot be eradicated in the process of adapting Democracy to different context and cultural particularities, however necessary this undoubtedly is. To walk this tightrope, I propose to utilize the conceptual difference of institutionalized and practiced politics and the political as the instituting, form-giving dimension of a society. Within this conceptual difference, Democracy can be understood as a Regime, a political system with a distinct set of institutions on the one hand and as a way of life, a life-form on the other. With conceptual help of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Dewey, democracy as a way of life is thusly embedded inside a framework, which maintains the importance of core principles of democracy, while simultaneously offering potentials to criticize existing institutionalizations of democracy by analyzing the disruptions of the political, that can be understood as stingers penetrating an institutional form. Democracy Research utilizing this conceptual difference is tasked with theoretically describing the relation between politics and the political, which I propose to view as accompanying and not mutually exclusive, and finding innovative ways to empirically describe Citizens Beliefs, values and emotions as either an element of the former or the latter. This could not only bridge qualitative and quantitative research paradigms and open necessary discussion between empirical and theoretical approaches but also broaden the views of democracy as alternative institutional formations of democracy seem plausible, so long as the democratic life-form is informing this way of conceiving of social order. In a final step, I will exemplify such research by exploring how emotions could be understood as either an element of politics or of the political, thereby offering a possible explanation for the division of anti-democratic practices and pro-democratic attitudes. As democratic notions of communal creation of social order, which indicate a democratic way of life, might be turned into anti-democratic emotions and actions as citizens are utilized within the political process, where affect management often means political gain.