The is and the ought of democracy

We academics tend to write about democracy in two quite different ways: empirically and normatively. Empirical accounts of existing democratic systems focus upon institutionalised arrangements, describing them in a ‘realist’ spirit and offering explanations for patterned and predictable events, trends and behaviour based upon what are conceived as being ‘value-free’ modes of investigation. Typically, empirical scholars of democracy pursue an instrumentally rationalist approach to political motivation and interaction. For them, democracy as a research object is not that different from the study of the planetary system by astronomers. They stick to what's there – ‘the facts’ – beyond the bounds of which they leave matters to the theoretical conjectures of philosophers.

Normative writings about democracy are prescriptive and evaluative. They highlight the values upon which democratic claims are made and justifications legitimised. They offer propositions about what democracies should be like. They do not eschew ideal-based theory, arguing that it is only on the basis of normative qualities that empirical democracies can distinguish themselves from other political arrangements.

In the political science literature – and especially that sub-field focused upon the study of political communication – empirical and normative accounts of democracy have not tended to sit together easily. Proponents of each complain about the limited vision of the other. Normative scholars of democracy sometimes wonder whether the relentless amassment of empirical accounts of democratic ‘realities’ are adequate when it comes to hold democracy to account. While even the most normatively timid of empiricists would accept that there are standards against which democratic performance can be measured, they are much more reluctant to evaluate the relative significance of such norms, let alone their sufficiency in the absence of norms that have yet to be acknowledged or developed. At the same time, empirical democratic scholars can become irritated by the apparent unworldliness of normative critiques that seem to judge real-world democracies according to the standards of utopia rather than pragmatic politics.

Why do such intellectual tensions matter? After all, there is no shortage of both empirical and normative studies of democracy. Sometimes they even speak to one another. Democracies are getting along quite well despite these academic strains … Ah, that's why it matters: because democracies are not getting along quite well. In fact, they are more fragile, torn apart, unconfident and deeply contested than they have ever been. I do not mean by that democratic objectives, values and preferences are deeply contested. That would be a good thing for democracy. Democracies exist as the most enlightened and sophisticated way we know of managing disagreement and contestation. I mean that what constitutes good, effective, meaningful democracy is more deeply contested than ever before. For example, whether Trump-like figures are refreshing voices, projecting the unheard cries of the hitherto marginalised and neglected or fascist violators, at war against the very foundations of democracy cuts to the core of what counts as democracy. Whether campaigns specifically targeted at voters with a view to reducing turnout is smart electoral strategy or a criminal conspiracy to subvert autonomous agency raises questions about what falls within and beyond the proper norms of democracy. How we determine the normative boundaries between democracy and its debasement is both an empirical question about whether institutions exist that can mediate such determination and a normative question about the terms of such judgment. If we are only intellectually equipped for one of these tasks, our capacity to protect democracy in the face of peril is precariously diminished.

In what threatens to become a post-democratic world dominated by individuals and shady groups that regard democratic principles as obstacles to be stepped over we need normative studies that test ‘real-world’ accounts of democracy against the ideals they purport to uphold. And we need empirical studies that hold normative ambitions to experiential scrutiny. With these challenges in mind, I have been reading three recently-published books, each excellent in their own way in proposing ways of studying democracies in troubled times.

The first is Zizi Papacharissi's After Democracy: Imagining Our Political Future (Yale University Press). Written with great flair and displaying vivacious intellectual creativity, this is a rare example of an academic exposing her own normative uncertainties without in any way losing her authoritative capacity to guide readers through complex conceptual terrain. The research involved asking seemingly random people from a number of different countries three questions: What is democracy? What does it mean to be a citizen? What would make democracy better? (p. 7) Papacharissi's purpose was not to discover how hopelessly naïve, uninformed and uncivic her globally diverse interviewees were, but to learn from them how they dealt on a daily basis with the vexing gaps between personal experience and official meaning of democracy. As she puts it, ‘I believe citizens have the answers …, but they are rarely asked to provide them and almost never listened to’ (p. 5). Unsurprisingly, these answers did not take the form of undergraduate essays, replete with stock definitions and pat references. Instead, the researcher's questions were met with reflective, sometimes embarrassed and nonplussed pauses:

Eyes shift away from what was previously direct contact. Some smile nostalgically. Others nod and ponder in silence for a minute. Some make a sarcastic gesture, affectively nodding at the impossibility of the question (p. 26).

These forms of human response remind me of the multi-dimensional citizens whom Nina Eliasoph's encountered in research for her wonderful book, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (CUP, 1998) as well as the all too human characters who appear in my own books, How Voters Feel (CUP, 2013) and How People Talk About Politics: Brexit and After (Bloomsbury, 2021). Such interviewees might not provide succinct essay answers in response to our seemingly penetrating questions, but they exude layers of lived experience, often expressed in a disarmingly unaffected manner. As Papacharissi notes, ‘As scientists we often record what we are told, and are curious about what is left unsaid. This silence is a sign to be interpreted’ (p. 26). Too right it is.

Papacharissi's interviewees know from experience that there are problematic boundaries between the normative offer that democracy promises to them in its textbooks and election campaigns and their empirical experience of rarely enjoying the empowering dividends that the system claims to confer upon them. They have been told that in democracies all voices count and that the first task of representatives is to listen to and act for the represented. But they tell Papacharissi over and over again that ‘equal access to voice means nothing if no one is prepared or interested in listening to us’ (p. 101). Here is a striking illustration of how normative and empirical approaches really need to support one another. Formulating norms of democratic listening is pretty pointless unless there are practical mechanisms for hearing, summarising and acting upon the voices of citizens. At the same time, empirical exercises in consultative listening are rather meaningless unless their precise purpose in the democratic process is identified, shared and legitimised. If, as I have long thought, populism is primarily a response to inadequate mechanisms of acknowledgement and recognition and broken promises of democratic listening, then one of the great political pathologies of our era is only ever going to be addressed by an imaginative package of normatively-framed practical action.

The second book on my list, Jan-Werner Müller's Democracy Rules (Penguin Random House, 2021), provides an admirable mix of vivid description and energetic finger-wagging. What it lacks in theoretical depth it compensates for in its insistence that something is wrong with democracy that need not be allowed to calcify into a new norm. Like Papacharissi's volume, Müller's is written with an admirable tone of hesitancy when it comes to asserting what democracy is. Instead, the author invites his readers to think about what would need to be in place for democracy to exist in any meaningful sense. He refers to this as democracy's critical infrastructure, which I regard as a very helpful term, transcending the limited connotations of writings about constitutions or public spheres. Chapter 3 is devoted to this concept of critical infrastructure and was for me by far the most illuminating part of Müller's book. It is here that he argues that essential to any critical democratic infrastructure are institutionalised norms of public communication capable of promoting and containing practices of perspectival pluralism. This does not mean that ‘everyone gets to choose their own reality but that everyone, ideally, finds a perspective on particular realities informed by different value commitments’ (p. 102). For such a pluralistic communication ecology to emerge architectural choices must be made that, as well as opening up space for competing social representations to flourish, actively close down space for practices of strategic disinformation and targeted hatemongering. Democracy does not mean that anything goes, but that what goes is a matter for people to decide, inclusively and reflectively, rather than leaving it to elites, bureaucracies, investors or the random unpredictability of market forces. A strength of Müller's book is his willingness to engage with the necessity of tough normative choices.

Klaus Bruhn Jensen's A Theory of Communication and Justice (Routledge, 2021) is systematic in its exposition of normative choices that will either make or break democracy. Focusing upon the communicative prerequisites for effective (as opposed to sham) democracy, Jensen's argument is dense, complex and theoretically serious. In an attempt to make accessible the wide range of concepts employed, the book offers an ongoing glossary of terms at the margins of each page. I was not convinced by their helpfulness, but others might be thankful for them. Jensen addresses the necessity of normativity with considerable clarity, pointing out that ‘A great divide in the history of ideas has separated questions of what is from questions of what ought to be: facts as opposed to values, and current states of affairs compared to future prospects’ (p. 2). He goes on to argue that ‘As an intellectual commitment and a public service, communication research could reasonably be expected to work out the potentials and limitations of communication as a condition and constituent of justice’ (p. 18). Jensen is here setting out a prodigious ambition. It is not enough, according to his formulation, for democratic communication to be empirically tested case by case and context by context. The bigger question concerns how much can reasonably be expected from democratically just principles of communicative engagement and what sort of limits, structural or otherwise, can be reasonably anticipated.

It is in chapter 7, entitled ‘The Communicative Position’, that Jensen offers his most coherent response to his own intellectual challenge. He argues here for two principles of communicative justice that he believes to be feasible. The first is that ‘Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal rights of information, communication, participation, and privacy …’. The second is that communicative ‘institutions, practices and discourses’ should be ‘open to all under conditions of fair equality and opportunity’ and that compensatory communication resources should benefit ‘the least advantaged’ members of society (p. 192). One might like to hear more from the author about what exactly he means by ‘a fully adequate scheme’ and how ‘the least advantaged’ are to be identified – or self-declared. But the broadly Rawlsian nature of these principles of communicative justice are basically helpful in setting a standard against which the quality of democratic communication can be evaluated. Between pages 201 and 214 Jensen sets out a series of norms of communicative justice built around the four key themes of his first principle: information, communication, participation and privacy. What makes Jensen's argument so appealing is his departure from rights-conferring language whereby philosophers or policy-makers tell people what they need, and his turn to the language of capabilities’ theory in which people must ask themselves what they need in order to function as fulfilled members of a just society. In the context of Jensen's focus upon communicative justice, capabilities refer to those elements that enable a person to flourish as an agent who can learn what they need to know, say what they need to say, participate where they need to act and preserve elements of selfhood from external colonisation. We can argue about whether Jensen has successfully or exhaustively identified what these capabilities should be – or whether, as others have argued, the identification of capabilities and entitlements should be deliberatively determined by those most likely to benefit from them (Coleman and Moss, 2016). There is indeed an important normative question about who gets to define democracy and who gets to give it a clean bill of health.

In her book, Papacharissi also concludes with a series of proposals for making democracy better. These arose, she tells us, from her conversations with citizens. It seems to me that, placed alongside one another, Papacharissi and Jensen's recommendations each tell half a story. The value of Papacharissi's eclectic menu is that everything on it came from (mainly dissatisfied) consumers at the democratic restaurant. They had not received what they thought they deserved. The indifferent taste did not match the tempting pictures of the dishes in the window. Through their interactions with Zizi Papacharissi they had engaged in a moment of democratic agency that may well have led them to think ‘If we can say here what we need from democracy, why can’t democracy be more about asking us what we need from it?’ Jensen, on the other hand, connects the notion of democratic need to material questions of capability. He is less interested in disappointed restaurant consumers than ways of getting them to take over the kitchen. However, it is only Jensen's voice that we hear: benign, liberal, intellectually committed for sure, but without their presence he can only hope to be a ventriloquist for the demos.

My conclusion from reading these books – especially Papacharissi's and Jensen's – is that there is a bigger project still to be undertaken. (There always is.) At the level of normative theory, this should address the nature of communicative capabilities that must exist before democracy can be said to work effectively. Müller's critical infrastructure will be central to any coherent account of sustainable democratic capabilities. At an empirical level, this project would follow Papacharissi's footsteps in the direction of listening to and learning from lived civic experience. I was struck by her methodological openness to both the said and unsaid of quotidian testimony and share her sense that if we are to get to grips with democracy's troubles we need to delve beneath the pauses and silences, even if that leads us at first into a furrow of unsettled affect.

Quite how badly damaged contemporary democracy is depends upon where you’re looking from and what you think democracy should be at its best. All three of the books that I read for this review essay reflected more anxiety than complacency about democracy. I suspect that if I read 30 more books about democracy published in the past decade the same would be true. The language of democratic despair has become so common that it is not always easy to find words to describe the latest disappointment. Perhaps that is because we are relying too much on our own tried and tested vocabulary and that it is to the people who do not write books that we should look for the most poignant expressions of the is and the ought of democracy.