Global Meanings of Democracy II: Comparative Normativity

Comparative Democratic Theory is the attempt to reformulate norms and concepts in democratic theory before the horizon of the global diversity of democratic thought. As any non-universalist approach in Political theory it has to solve the problem of generating normativity on an inductive grounding. But how to construct and justify norms or build normative concepts without (too much of) a priori assumptions? Comparative Democratic Theory claims the possibility of building up normativity by advancing from context to context and, thereby, collecting context-overarching normative relevance within the particular. For this procedure, various approaches are on the market, among them ‘grounded normative theory’ (Brooke Ackerly), ‘serial contextualism’ (David Armitage), or ‘iterative contextualism’ (Sune Lægaard). The contribution discusses their benefits and pitfalls and shows at the example of non-Western democratic thought ways of inductive norm building which is a corner stone for a global orientation of democratic theory.