Democratic Self-Diagnosis: Theoretical Frameworks and Empirical Lessons

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 chapter therefore offers a theoretical and an empirical contribution. First, it provides an overview of the key theoretical frameworks that supply the analytical foundations for a 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. We conclude on the opportunity to experiment with innovative venues of democratic diagnosis, where citizens and researchers conjointly identify democratic problems and co-design appropriate solutions. This chapter makes a normative case for the necessity of citizen-based diagnoses of democratic crises and to envision practical venues for performing them within contemporary democratic systems.