Abstracts:
Dryzek (co-authored with Ian O'Flynn and Jensen Sass) - "Democratic Resilience: the Shallow and the Deep"
The ability of democracies to counter shocks and threats is increasingly captured by the idea of democratic resilience. After surveying treatments that borrow unreflectively from other disciplines, treat resilience as simple survival, or repackage familiar ideas about stability, we articulate a concept of deep democratic resilience that does justice to its uniquely democratic character. This means mobilizing a polity’s core integrative norms in a fashion itself democratic. Its achievement requires elite appeal to democratic norms, public discourse about how democracy applies, and consolidation of democratic integrative norms. We show how this applies in response to shocks and threats ranging from autocratization to civil war to violent extremist attacks, while also examining what happens when polities fall short. We deploy positive examples from the United States, New Zealand, and Poland; and more problematic episodes from France, Germany, and the United States. Finland shows it is possible to plan for deep democratic resilience.
Holst - "Democratizing Expertise: the Epistemic Approach"
The article asks how contemporary expert arrangements should be (re-)designed in the face of calls for their democratization. To address this question, four philosophically grounded, ideal type institutional proposals regarding the democracy-expertise relationship is introduced, compared, and assessed. The proposals are science in democracy – an approach primarily concerned with safeguarding independent scientific institutions positioned within a larger democratic system; direct democratization – an approach that focuses on expert arrangements more broadly and the need for direct measures of democratization; partisan expertise – an approach which questions the possibility of independent, politically neutral expertise; and citizens as knowers – an approach which questions the need for expert institutions in the first place. In the way they are outlined, all proposals come with significant insights and make some valuable suggestions, and to a certain extent they are complementary. However, they come with limitations too, and a preferable fifth proposal is sketched – epistemically justified expertise – an approach focused on facilitating democratization measures which can be defended on epistemic grounds. Overall, the article intervenes on a general level to address a set of crucial institutional and philosophical questions regarding democratization of expertise, and across the scholarly divides between epistemology, philosophy of science and political philosophy.
Moore - "Deliberation and Competition"
Deliberative democrats have tended to view 'competitive' models of democracy with suspicion, for a range of reasons. Competition tends in political science to mean party competition, and talk of 'competitive' models of democracy was in the broadest sense associated with electoral reductionism, making it seem as though democracy was essentially a matter of parties and elections. Relatedly, 'competitive' was taken as code for an 'aggregative' model of democracy, a particular version of democratic competition that views politics as a market, citizens as consumers, and democratic systems as essentially tasked with aggregating diverse pre-existing preferences to locate the package of policies that optimally satisfies those. For deliberative democrats, these approaches took the context of preference formation, and the role of power in that context, out of the picture (Elster etc). Competition in the 'Schumpeterian' mode, furthermore, made political elites the active agents of democratic politics, and positioned individual voters as passive (and manipulable). Also related to Schumpeter is the association of competition with a rejection of the idea of a common good, and thus the idea that democracy could mean something like collective self-rule. Competition has been associated largely with other, more limited, goals for democracy, such as limiting domination (Shapiro 2016), preventing violent conflicts over the allocation of political power (Przeworski 1999), and resisting state capture (Bagg 2024). 'Competitive democracy' has tended to mean a more 'minimal' democracy, regarded by many deliberative democrats as insufficient and shallow. This, as with the aggregative model of democracy, is a contingent association with the concept of competition, but a powerful one, and one which accounts for some of the suspicion of competition among deliberative democrats. For all these reasons deliberative democrats have tended to say surprisingly little about democratic competition at either an analytic or normative level.