Democracy crisis and disciplinary failure

Contemporary democracy is undergoing a profound crisis whose symptoms—polarization, norm erosion, conspiracism, institutional paralysis, and the normalization of political violence—are now visible across multiple regions, not merely in the United States. Yet despite an unprecedented expansion of empirical data, conceptual taxonomies, and methodological techniques, the social sciences have proven unable to alter this trajectory. This paper argues that this failure is structurally rooted in the disciplinary architecture of contemporary academia. The escalating democratic crisis and the stagnation of democracy studies are mutually reinforcing outcomes of normal science operating within excessively siloed disciplinary boundaries. The first part situates democratic erosion within the broader polycrisis of our era and shows how mainstream scholarly responses—quantitative political science, policy-oriented reformism, and critical-theoretical diagnoses—remain trapped within disciplinary comfort zones. These approaches describe surface phenomena with increasing precision while lacking the integrative perspective required to address systemic, cross-domain transformations. This dynamic mirrors what Stark, Osterberg-Kaufmann, and Mohamad-Klotzbach identify as our difficulty in “getting to the core of democracy,” and it illustrates the limits of methodological refinement without conceptual synthesis. The second part develops a sociology-of-knowledge critique: academia has reproduced within its own institutional communication structures the same echo-chamber dynamics it attributes to social media. Disciplinary boundaries, citation economies, methodological tribalism, and professional incentives create epistemic enclaves that reward narrow specialization and penalize intellectual risk-taking. Long before digital fragmentation fractured public discourse, the sciences had already fragmented their own. This calls for re-engagement with the broader interdisciplinary traditions invoked by Frodeman, Klein, Moran, and Apter, while recognizing the institutional constraints highlighted by Trein, Trent, and Steuer. The third part outlines what an integrative science of democracy would require. I argue for a synthetic framework connecting five domains: (1) psychology capable of explaining long-term emotional and motivational shifts; (2) history attentive to institutional learning over decades; (3) sociology charting structural transformations in class, identity, and communication; (4) political science as institutional integration rather than empirical niche; and (5) design-oriented approaches that move from diagnosis to institutional reconfiguration. Democracy studies should therefore neither become a new discipline nor dissolve into post-disciplinary vagueness, but function as an epistemic meeting ground enabling problem-centered, collaborative knowledge production. To do so, we need to link this epistemic argument to the politics of knowledge production. If academia is to contribute meaningfully to democratic renewal, and more generally to solving big problems, it must rethink its own reward structures, create protected niches for synthesis, and cultivate beyond-disciplinary encounters inclusive of historically marginalized perspectives. The responsibility of democracy scholars today is not to refine existing paradigms but to open up to the integrative ambition that once defined the social sciences. Only by transcending disciplinary myopia can we hope to understand—and help reverse—the contemporary crisis of democracy, the core of the age of polycrisis we live in.