Democratic Diagnosis: Normative Foundations, Empirical Lessons and Design Guidelines

The notion of a democratic crisis permeates academic, political, and public discourses. While widespread agreement exists on the tumultuous state of democracy, pinpointing the exact nature of these turbulences and their root causes remains a subject of ongoing debate. Democratic systems are commonly evaluated with standardized indexes and barometers, but such a linear approach fails to take into account the dynamic and context-specific interplay of factors that contribute to the democratic quality of political systems. We contend that a diagnosis oriented towards reform requires a more fine-grained and context-specific analysis of democratic shortcomings. This paper therefore offers a theoretical, empirical and design contribution. First, it provides an overview of the key theoretical frameworks that supply the normative and analytical foundations for mechanisms of democratic diagnosis. Second, it reviews examples of diagnosis processes, with a particular focus on democratic audits in Scandinavian countries and the recent Analysis of Democracy and Power in Denmark, reflecting on the advantages and disadvantages of each. Third, taking stock of the past decades of democratic innovations’ experimentations, it suggests some general guidelines for the design of context-specific processes of democratic diagnosis. We conclude with the opportunity to experiment with innovative venues of democratic diagnosis, where citizens and researchers conjointly identify democratic problems and co-design appropriate solutions. This article makes a normative case for the necessity of citizen-based diagnosis of democratic crises and for designing practical venues to perform it within contemporary democratic systems.