Conceptualizing the Future of Democracy: Combining Representation and Participatory Innovations
09/26/2018 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM in Frankfurt am Main (Deutschland)
In the light of declining voter-turnout, party membership and trust in representative institutions, the democratic institutions developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, seem to be somewhat out of touch with the popular demands in current societies. This leads some authors to diagnose a crisis of democracy, or even the “death of democracy” (Keane 2009). At the same time, citizens strongly support the concept of democracy. Thus, rather than democracy itself being obsolete, we seem to witness a “process of transition from one type to another“ (Schmitter 2015). Yet, how should the future of democracy look like?
The debate on how to conceptualize hybrid systems of representative and participatory institutions is ongoing. Systemic approaches to designing mixed systems are scarce (Warren 2017), but en vogue. In the roundtable, we will follow this approach and discuss the future of democracy as innovative conceptions of purposeful combinations of representative and participatory institutions fulfilling democratic tasks and being in line with citizens preferences for participation.
Participants:
Rainer Forst (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Exzellenzcluster "Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen")
Jane Mansbridge (Harvard University, USA)
Anne Phillips (London School of Economics and Political Science, UK)
Mark Warren (University of British Columbia, Kanada)
Chair: Brigitte Geiẞel (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)