Debating a (potential) paradigm shift in democracy research

The Sciences of the Democracies (or SOTD) Research Network is a formal research body, with a membership of 77 (as of early November 2023), that is supported by the European Consortium of Political Research. The aim of the Network is to try to ease confusion about the term "democracy" and its cognate words in other languages. Therefore, research questions that seek to explain different types of democracy, that explain different concepts of democracy that do not use that sign or its root (e.g. manapori, faatemokalasi, ប្រជាធិបតេយ្យ (brachathibtey), etc) are most welcome. Furthermore, the Network is also interested in better understanding how all concepts of "democracy" can be understood as a whole, and compared, across time, space, language, culture, and species or the "ethno-quantic domain". All methods are welcome. Pursuing such lines of inquiry could lead to a change in how we look at the world of political regimes (or the empirical forms of democracy in general). At the same time, however, it could also mean that intercultural comparisons might not be dominated by just one perspective (currently the Western one), but that the symbiosis of Western and non-Western meanings and understandings of "democracy" (Osterberg-Kaufmann et al. 2020) could give way to analytical concepts that offer different approaches for examining political reality. This could mean a change in the previous liberal paradigm of democracy, which, while questioning the hegemony of the liberal understanding of democracy, at the same time argues for a broadening and opening of the paradigm without wanting to negate the idea of liberal democracy whilst so doing. This section proposed to the 2024 ECPR General Conference hosted by the University College Dublin is given to explore these different approaches for studying democracy and, in the end, to debate if a paradigm shift really is afoot. Are we unmooring liberal democracy as the category for measuring democracy in the world by studying the many other variations available to us on the theme of "people’s self government"?