Good and Ideal Democracy: How to Design It

MPIfG Lecture

  • Date: May 3, 2023
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: André Bächtiger
  • Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
  • Sign up: info@mpifg.de
  • Location: Cologne
 Good and Ideal Democracy: How to Design It

The talk is related to the project “Designing Democracy on Mars and Earth” (DDME), which sets up a bottom-up design to obtain a deeper understanding of citizens’ democratic preferences in two Western countries, Germany and the United States, and one non-Western country, India. Based on input from democratic theorists, DDME explores how citizens imagine “ideal” democracy (on Mars) and mend “real” democracy, i.e., how they would reform the political systems they live in (on Earth) when they have the chance to reflect or deliberate on the pros and cons of the various conceptions and schemes of democracy. DDME is the first large-scale project to delegate democratic designing to citizens adopting a systematic and global approach where citizens together with democratic theorists reflect on advanced theoretical inputs (e.g., problem-based thinking on democracy) and think creatively about optimal democratic designs.

André Bächtiger is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Stuttgart. His research focuses on the challenges of mapping and measuring deliberation and political communication as well as understanding the preconditions and outcomes of high-quality deliberation in the contexts of both representative institutions and mini-publics. His new research, “Designing Democracy on Mars and Earth” (DDME), is sponsored by an ERC Advanced Grant and focuses on how to design future democracy, taking a problem-based and citizen perspective. His work has been published by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press and has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals.

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