Democratic Situations

Democratic Situations places the making and doing of democratic politics at the centre of relational research. The book turns the well-known sites of contemporary Euro-American democracy – elections, bureaucracies, public debates and citizen participation – into fluctuating democratic situations where supposedly untouchable democratic ideals are contested and warped in practice. The empirical cases demonstrate that democracy cannot be reduced to theoretical schemes of conflict, institutions or deliberation. Instead, they offer an urgently needed renewal of our understanding of democratic politics at a time when conventional ideas increasingly fail to capture current events such as Brexit, Trump and Covid19.

Designing for Democracy

Designing for Democracy addresses the question of how to “fix” digital technologies for democracy by examining how the design of the built environment (whether streets, sidewalks, or social media platforms) informs how, and whether, citizens can engage in democratic practices. “Democratic spaces”—built environments that support democratic politics—must have three characteristics: they must be clearly bounded, durable, and flexible. Each corresponds to a necessary democratic practice. Clearly bounded spaces make it easier to recognize what we share and with whom we share; they help us form communities. Durable spaces facilitate our attachments to the communities they house and the other members within them; they help us sustain communities. And flexible spaces facilitate the experimental habits required for democratic politics; they help us improve our communities. These three practices—recognition, attachment, and experimentalism—are the affordances a built environment must provide in order to be a “democratic space”; they are the criteria to which designers and users should be attentive when building and inhabiting the spaces of the built environment, both physical and digital. Using this theoretical framework, Designing for Democracy provides new insights into the democratic potential of digital technologies. Through extended discussions of examples like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, it suggests architectural responses to problems often associated with digital technologies—loose networks, the “personalization of politics,” and “echo chambers.” In connecting the built environment, digital technologies, and democratic theory, Designing Democracy provides blueprints for democracy in a digital age.

r/democracy

The final necessary element of democratic space is flexibility. Flexible spaces facilitate the experimental habit required for democratic politics; they help us improve our communities. Using the work of John Dewey, this chapter explains how flexible spaces provide an environment in which citizens can develop the experimental habits required for a progressive democratic politics. In flexible spaces—spaces characterized by both variety and malleability—citizens will not only encounter difference but will also be able to use it in the process of democratic decision-making. The chapter then turns to the case of Reddit as an example of a digital democratic space. It also shows the effects of flexible spaces by comparing two subreddits: r/the_donald and r/TwoXChromosomes. The chapter concludes by suggesting how the spaces of Reddit could be redesigned to be more flexible, further facilitating the democratic practice of experimentalism.

Democracy for Profit?

This chapter evaluates Facebook and Twitter’s algorithms using the framework of democratic space. Prominent critiques highlight their opacity and users’ lack of control; tools like Gobo “fix” these algorithms by increasing their flexibility. But while these solutions might cede more control to individual users, they are insufficient for building democratic communities; the more pressing concern for both Facebook and Twitter is their lack of clear boundaries, which undermines users’ ability to recognize their communities. The chapter concludes by showing how we might “democratize” these algorithms in ways that not only increase user control over their digital environments and the algorithms that structure them, but also help to generate and sustain the communities required to exert that control democratically. Ultimately, the chapter argues that questions of ownership and control must be placed alongside considerations about the communal effects of algorithmic design if we are to build environments supportive of democratic politics.

Small Money Donating as Democratic Politics

Since 2008, the number of people in the United States making small monetary donations to political causes, both within and beyond electoral politics, has skyrocketed. While critics of “big money” in politics laud these donations because they are small, proponents of small-scale democratic political action eye them suspiciously because they are monetary. Neither group interrogates whether the monetariness of these donations might be a source of their democratic potential. Building on Wendy Brown’s conceptual distinction between monetization and economization, I argue that small-money political donations are potentially democratic not only because they are small, but also because they are monetary. More specifically, the mobility, divisibility, commensurability, and fungibility of money help make small-money political donations potentially democratic, by making them potentially accessible, non-intrusive, and collective. Money is the coin of the economic realm, but it can also be a currency of democratic politics.

Literature Analysis of the Theory of Liberative Democracy

During the political liberalization of the reform era (1998 – present), various groups have complained about the evil practices of democratic politics. One of the shooting targets is that we have made the wrong choice, namely adopting a majoritarian or liberal democracy model. In the literature on democracy theory, one of the theories relevant to improving democratic practice is TDD (Theory of Deliberative Democracy). Although still using the principle of representation, TDD, in general, makes corrections or improvements to the procedures and substance of democracy that have been poorly practised in Indonesia today. This research is based on qualitative research using the descriptive-analytical method to provide a clear picture of the object of the problem. The conclusion of this study shows evidence that there is a model of democracy—both in substance and in procedures. They are different from the mechanism of representation initially derived from the theory of representative democracy.

Reconstruction of the Civic Virtues of Several Ethnicities, as a Strengthening of Pancasila Mutual Cooperation Democracy

The long road of economic and political modernization of democracy in Indonesia has transformed Indonesian society into an industrial society that has not empowered the people's economic sectors. The ups and downs of democratic politics remain far from the culture of deliberation mandated by Pancasila. The combination of development politics that has hit collective economic, cultural wisdom with political liberalization in the past 15 years has negatively impacted Indonesian cultural identity. The following study seeks to reconstruct the local wisdom and political values ​​of Indonesian ethnic groups and communities to demonstrate the potentials of social capital to improve our democratic politics. The object of the study consists of two types: the first is ethnic groups, with a focus on Wajo and Minang, the second is the communities of several urban parks in Java. The theoretical perspective used is the theory of deliberative democracy. From the point of view of political anthropology, this study is a case study in the context of qualitative research with qualitative-interpretive methods.

PLATO'S THEORY OF INCARCERATION

In addition to its many famous innovations in popular government, the Athenian democracy seems to have also experimented with another, more ambivalent political institution familiar to modern societies—penal incarceration. In recent years, there has been renewed debate over the precise role of imprisonment in Athens, as an increasing number of voices, including Marcus Folch in this volume, make the case that imprisonment was an important point of contact between criminal punishment and democratic politics and society in Athens.