This workshop critically examines and articulates the multiplicity of scientific methods in democracy research, as understood, practised, or invented by democracy researchers. It contemplates what is habitually included or excluded as evidence in democracy research and scrutinises whose knowledge informs theory and whose experience tends to be relegated to data points and case studies. It showcases creative or alternative methods to researching, teaching, and doing democracy. In doing so, this workshop explicates the epistemic assumptions and methodological apparatus within democracy research. This furthers the research network’s existing conversations on the paradigms in democracy research and its interdisciplinary future.
This workshop (ECPR Network "The Sciences of the Democracies") addresses inquiries that emerged from the network’s previous workshops: the methodological and epistemic barriers to researching democracy interdisciplinarily. Some argue that a significant body of democracy research favours the procedures of democracy over the functions of democracy (Stark et al.). This overall methodological discrimination poses an ontological difficulty to understanding democracy, because the form of democracy is largely mistaken as its essence. Separately but concurrently, Banerjee, Kastritis, and Kraus diagnose that the prevalence of behaviouralist analysis within political science has created a disciplinary breakup with not only interpretivist methods, but also with evidences that cannot easily fit into a regression analysis – even if these evidences come from our cross-discipline colleagues. This consolidating epistemic hierarchy requires our urgent attention and close examination, because it reduces the tableau of connotations that democracy once had to an increasingly hegemonic, closed, and rigid category with depreciating analytical precision (Bonin). This cautious reflection is also in tandem with Gagnon and Abrams et al.’s call to the “epistemic mountain range”, which is the more-than-scholarly and more-than-textual evidence discussing democracy. Historically, democracy research has been highly selective about what constitutes its voice and whose voice can have an influence (Shilliam & Spence). Therefore, this workshop commits to the epistemic justice within democracy research on a temporal and global scale by seeking the scholarly movements through which the epistemic hierarchy and divide of the archive cease to hinder our understanding of democracy and its possibilities.
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1: What forms of evidence are habitually included or excluded in democracy research and by which method?
2: What creative methods have been or can be developed for the study, communication, or practice of democracy?
3: How does democratic theory change by recognising researchers from marginalised spaces as theory-makers?
4: Which archives, languages, or non-textual forms of knowledge have been excluded from democracy research thus far?
5: To what extent does democracy research confuse the procedures and forms of democracy with its function or essence?
1: Discussion, analysis, or critique of established methodological approaches to studying the concept of democracy.
2: Creative and new ways of studying, teaching, communicating, and practising democracy in its diverse meanings.
3: Critical assessments of how methodological approaches in democracy research reproduce conceptions of democracy.
4: Experimental or analytical work on how we perceive democracy differently using alternative methods or standpoints.
5: Discussions on how to break down the methodological splits and/or bridge the epistemic gaps in democracy research.
6: Theoretical or empirical discussions on the researcher and the researched in studying democracy.
7: Examinations of overlooked aspects in democracy research like interlocutors, coloniality, and viscerality.
8: Discussion, analysis, or critique of democracy in relation to its temporal sediments.
