Innovating Democracy: The Epistemic and Technoscientific Construction of Deliberative Mini-Publics

Epistemic and political practices are intertwined in the development and stabilization of forms of democracy: The sciences of democracy are constitutive for democracy, they contribute to realize imaginations of collective self-governance of the people. I explain and substantiate this thesis with reference to the case of deliberative mini-publics, a special procedure of public participation that its protagonists claim is capable of expressing the collective will of the people, free from distorting influences such as lack of information and asymmetries of power, and which should therefore be taken as reference for legitimating governance. In historical perspective, it is discernible how this particular practice of articulating the collective will of the people with regard to issues of governance is being shaped and stabilized by scientific practices observing, functionally theorizing, empirically analyzing, experimentally testing and technologically optimizing it. A broader claim is that the entanglement of epistemic and political practices observed in this case is typical of the manufacture of democracy in late modern knowledge societies. Research approaches from science and technology studies (STS) are therefore gaining importance for empirical studies of democratic practices and transformation dynamics. STS approaches can help to examine the epistemic and technoscientific construction work undergirding various forms of democracy. By highlighting the specific selectivity and performativity of democratic theories and related technological construction work (“socio-political engineering”) they also open up new approaches for evaluating and reflexively engaging with ongoing democratic innovation processes.