Democracy and its futures between governance and counter-public spaces – DemoFutures

For quite some time, the uncertain futures of democracy have been debated by social scientists and philosophers. DemoFutures will analyze current trends and possible futures in the mid- and long-term, bringing together perspectives from sociological theory and political philosophy in a critical perspective. It will focus on the contrast between, on the one hand, the instrumental logic of governance that dominates most “official” democratic politics, and, on the other, the expressive and subjective logic of public criticisms and protest.

In many countries, citizens experience an “erosion crisis” of democratic practices and institutions. One of the factors behind it is the increasingly powerful logic of governance, which reaches from the local to the global level, and which is superimposed upon, and often replaces, democratic forms of decision-making. It leads to a sense of inauthenticity and an experienced “lack of alternatives.” Nonetheless, we can also observe public mobilization, criticism and protest, which often crystalize around specific issues, e.g. local infrastructure projects. They lead to the development of critical publics off the beaten tracks of the dominant public space. The deliberation that take places within these spaces offers the potential to turn into counter-publics, in which alternative futures can be imagined. It is worth noting, however, that the dynamics of these protests and movements in France and Germany – two democracies that are otherwise very similar, and both part of the European governance framework – take on rather different dynamics, a fact that requires further analysis.

In order to understand possible futures of democracy, two dimensions of these movements need to be understood: their subjective logic and their perceived expressive meanings – which are explored by critical sociology – and the practices and institutions of deliberation – which are explored by theories of deliberative democracy. Hence, DemoFutures aims at bringing together a team of French and German researchers from these two disciplines. Junior and senior researchers from the Université Paris Descartes – Université Paris Sorbonne Cité and from the Hochschule für Politik an der Technischen Universität München will collaborate in a series of parallel and intertwined lines of research, and organize a number of events in order to create a French-German network of scholars who work on the future of democracy.

The project will develop an interdisciplinary account in which these two perspectives are intertwined, and it will analyze “exemplary cases” from France and Germany in a comparative perspective. Attention will be paid in particular to the background conditions of the digital public space, and the relations between experts and agents of protest. Thus, French-German synergies will be brought about both on the level of methods and approaches, and on the level of the objects of analysis.