Towards democracy research beyond disciplines? Interdisciplinarity discourses, concepts, and democratization in legal academia

Democracy research cannot escape the attention to law which shapes democracies in manifold ways, but ‘legal scholars’ are generally at unease with the study of democracy, relegating it to ‘non-legal’ disciplinary scholarship. Notably, Hans Kelsen, a pivotal 20th century Weimar emigree who completed his career as a professor of political science in the US, was at pains to separate his ‘pure theory of law’ from his democratic thought, inspiring generations in doctrinal legal academia not only in civil law jurisdictions. Today, these academic communities tend to conceptualize democracy in a minimalist, sheer majoritarian manner, presenting constitutional values such as the rule of law or human rights as constraints on, rather than components of, democracy, thus obscuring its many richer meanings (e.g. Gagnon 2018). This paper studies the potential and limits of attempts to democratize ‘legal science’ with the aim of fostering alliances between scholars who do not self-identify as social scientists and yet can contribute to understanding and practicing democratization in democracy research from the internal point of view of law as a ‘professional’, rather than exclusively ‘academic’ (Balkin 1996) discipline. To do so, I argue for developing a research agenda that utilises genealogical approaches and case study design, focusing on various forms of presence and intertwining of law in ‘disciplinary’ social science discourses in academia. Given elements of global impact and availability of resources, the paper zooms in on US academia and specifically the interaction between law and political science, as manifested in the publication patterns of leading US-based political science journals. I explore the impact of the ‘behavioural revolution’ and the rise of disciplinary specializations on publishing patterns, alongside the growing discourses on ‘interdisciplinarity’. The latter are significant because of the prominence of these discourses in contemporary academic settings, including in democracy research. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the discourses on interdisciplinarity in segments of political science referring to phenomena they understand as linked to law, and the implications of these discursive evolution on the (de)democratization of the study of law. This allows to explore how the rising references to interdisciplinarity might be negatively correlated with an (if limited) de facto access to academic discourses on the study of law. The genealogical approach can add further nuance by arguing for the study of the extent to which discourses on interdisciplinarity have been fuelled by the studies of the ‘other’ in a dominating fashion—historically marginalized communities or those believed to hail from other cultures. In delineating the new research agenda, I argue for particular attention to how the study of concepts linked to law but transcending disciplines, starting with the very concepts of democracy, might prompt virtuous circles of democratic renewal within and beyond academia. Traces of such studies require to be explored beyond the dominant academic environments, with particular focus on those non-hegemonic as well as smaller academic communities that simultaneously exercise academic freedom and have a longer trajectory of accommodating diverse voices.