Landmark 100th instalment for The Loop's influential 🦋 Science of Democracy blog series

Back in summer 2021, philosopher and political theorist Jean-Paul Gagnon of the University of Canberra pitched us an idea for a provocative blog piece. His premise? Democracy scholarship is in such a shambolic state that it requires 'rescuing'.

In his quest to find democracy's 'total texture' Jean-Paul had, since 2010, been working with a community of scholars to create an online database recording the thousands of adjectives that have been used to modify the noun 'democracy'. Entries span the gamut, from 'representative' and 'liberal', to 'pirate', 'Waldorf' and 'Tlaxcallan'!

To help him scale yet further the dizzying heights of democracy's 'data mountain', Jean-Paul began soliciting essay-length contributions from democratic theorists the world over. The result is The Loop's 🦋 Science of Democracy series thread, which has published pieces on subjects as widely varied as fatness and democratic exclusion, why democracies need children's suffrage, 'sporting democracy' — even 'fractal patterns' in democratic representation. 

Landmark 100

Fast forward to summer 2023. The Loop has just published its 100th contribution to Jean-Paul's thriving series — and there's no sign of it stopping! 

Global reach

Along the way, we have published pieces by 106 individual authors, (some pieces are co-authored, some authors have written more than one contribution). Our contributors hail from an impressive 27 different countries worldwide.

Representing the Far East, we have Yida Zhai from China, Kei Nishiyama and Tetsuki Tamura from Japan, James Wong from Hong Kong, Sor-hoon Tan from Singapore and Chih-yu Shih from Taiwan. Our first contributor from the Mid-East was Iran's Hojjatollah Sadeqi. And from the continent of Africa we can offer pieces from Peter Donkor in Ghana, Reginald Oduor in Kenya and Remi Chukwudi Okeke in Nigeria. 

Our top ten reads

At the time of writing in June 2023, the ten most-read instalments in the 🦋 series are:

	Alexander Hudson How to measure democracy: A practitioner’s view	2,343
	Jean-Paul Gagnon Rescuing an abandoned science: the lexicon of democracy (foundational piece in the series)	1,793
	Paula Sabloff Democracy preserves dignity, a means to an end, not an end itself	1,674
	Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann, Toralf Stark, Christoph Mohamad-Klotzbach Democracy is an essentially contested concept	1,365
	Henry Giroux The critical pedagogy of democracy in dark times	997
	Laurence Whitehead Democracy: what's in a word?	805
	Hans Asenbaum Making sense of democracy – not without the demos!	770
	Sor-hoon Tan Is Chinese democracy democracy?	686
	Simone Chambers Democracy is under threat, and we must use theory to save it	660
	Kei Nishiyama If democracy is hard to love, how can we teach it?	615

Broadening the field

The gender balance of our 🦋 series currently stands at 33% female contributors. As the series develops, we will aim to redress this imbalance with positive discrimination in our commissioning strategy. We also aim to reach out to more scholars in the Majority World, particularly in Central and South America, which are currently unrepresented. 

Series stalwarts

Several scholars have contributed more than one piece to the series. Special mention goes to Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann, Pablo Ouziel, Rongxin Li and Toralf Stark, who have each written two 🦋 apiece.

And a hearty Loop thank-you to the University of Würzburg's Christoph Mohamad-Klotzbach, who has contributed no less than three articles to the series, as a solo author, and in collaboration with colleagues. 

The 'Butterfly Collector'

None of this would have been possible without the tireless efforts of our series editor par excellence, Jean-Paul Gagnon. Not only does he have a book in the works based upon this series, he is also planning to establish an ECPR Research Network to connect like-minded scholars and advance this flourishing corner of the discipline.

Jean-Paul's unflagging enthusiasm has produced a substantial and important body of work. Its timeless quality will prove a valuable scholarly resource for democratic theorists for many years to come. We are deeply proud to have helped bring it to fruition. From all of us on The Loop editorial team, mille mercis, J-P!

Keywords: Democracy, Political Theory