Welcome to the website of the Democratic Theorizing Project!
Democratic theory emphasizes the need for equality, bottom-up participation, and pluralism. Yet, democratic theorists hardly apply these ideals to their own work. Rather, democratic theory is generated in exclusive academic circles. It is a product of the “ivory tower”.
The Democratic Theorizing Project challenges this exclusivity. It sets out to apply democratic values to the process of theorizing and hence democratize theorizing itself. To this end, it invites non-academics, activists, and politically interested people into the project of making sense of democracy.
Democratic theorizing is oriented towards three democratic values:
Inclusion Shifting the focus to those who are marginalized or underrepresented in public discourse.
Agency Realizing the agency of participants throughout the theorizing process.
Transparency Communicating findings to participants and the broader public through an ongoing dialogue.
Democratic Theorizing Project 
Great initiative.
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Thanks a lot!
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Very important and much needed initiative!
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Thank you, Luz!
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Sounds like a great project. I hope to get involved and see how it develops!
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Thank you, George. Feel free to get in touch anytime!
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I appreciate the sentiments here, but are inclusion, agency, and transparency the most important factors for a democratic theorist?
I’d suggest that the right focus is the need for democracy to be….
+ as participative, efficient, and consensual as possible.
+ sustainable (i.e hard to disrupt by bad actors) – so resolute and robust in itself.
+ as wise as it chooses to be (because a good democracy has to make a decision about how much it invests in it’s wisdom and if it prefers to be scientific or folksy
All of these features would be subordinate to the need for it to be as fair as possible.
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Hi Paul,
Thanks a lot for your thoughts! I think these are really important features of democratic participation. I feel like my inclusion and agency are reflected in your idea of making democracy more participative. There are lots of debates about what the most important features of democracy are. That’s the beauty of democracy. We don’t all need to agree. Democracy is constantly re-interpreted and re-invented.
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