UC EVENTS

Good and ideal democracy: How to design it

Last year, Prof Andre Bächtiger was awarded the prestigious European Research Council’s Advanced Grant for the project ‘Designing Democracy on “Mars” and “Earth”: Exploring Citizens’ Democratic Preferences in a Deliberative and Co-Creative Design’ (DDME).

This seminar is an opportunity to learn more about the DDME project, which sets up a bottom-up, co-creative, and deliberative 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 (and feedback) 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 had the chance to deliberate, i.e. to ´weigh´ reasons regarding the pros and cons of the various conceptions and schemes of democracy in a dialogical setting with their fellow citizens.

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 (problem-based thinking and comprehensive democratic designs (such as “open democracy) rather than smaller institutional tools (such as direct-democratic instruments or minipublics) and think creatively about optimal democratic designs.

This seminar is moderated by Anne Jedzini.

About the speaker

André Bächtiger is Professor of Political Theory and Empirical Democracy Research at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Stuttgart. He is a visiting professor at the University of Canberra in February 2023.