Methodology as Democracy: Live Action Roleplay and the Democratic Practice of Political Theory

Normative political theory has long evaluated democracy as an object of analysis, yet rarely treats democracy as a constraint on its own practice. This paper argues that democratic commitments extend to methodology itself. Under conditions of pluralism, persistent disagreement, and wicked political problems, the authority structures embedded in verdict-driven and epistemically hierarchical methods become normatively contestable. The paper develops an account of democratic methodology defined by three features: distributed epistemic authority, shared normative risk, and interpretive rather than verdictive outcomes. It then examines live action roleplay (larp) as a methodological case through which these features can be enacted. Unlike conventional approaches that concentrate interpretive authority in the figure of the theorist, larp structures normative inquiry as a collective, embodied, and socially negotiated practice in which participants co-produce political meaning through action, contestation, and reflection. The paper makes two contributions. First, it offers a systematic framework for assessing the democratic qualities of methods in normative political theory. Second, it shows how methodological choices shape authority, expertise, and the conditions under which democratic judgement is imagined and practised. Broadly, it reframes political theory not only as a discourse about democracy, but as a practice that must account for its own democratic credentials.