Systemic approaches to democracy: taking stock and looking forward

The study of democracy and democratic innovations has been marked in recent years by the recovery of systems thinking (e.g., Dryzek 2010, Mansbridge et al. 2012, Owen and Smith 2015, Elstub, Ercan, and Mendoça 2016; Warren 2017, Saward 2021). This turn has generated a raft of new empirical, conceptual and theoretical studies and broadened our understanding of democracy by shifting the emphasis from specific sites of politics to the ways they interact with one another. While this framework constitutes a productive development in the literature, the various systemic approaches also present a new set of theoretical and empirical issues. This survey paper proposes to take stock of this development by reviewing key contributions and identifying further areas of inquiry. We put forward at least four broad areas. First, we explore the normative foundations of systemic approaches to deliberative democracy and democratic theory and discuss how they might overlap, complement, or conflict with one another. Second, we ask whether these normative ideas might be considered sufficient for fulfilling a democratic or deliberative system or if we need to consider other conditions to support them (e.g., economic equality). Third, we reflect on the problems regarding the interactions between the components of a deliberative or democratic system (e.g., system boundaries, ecology of citizen participation, coupling). Finally, we discuss the relationship between theory and empirics by reviewing the challenges and opportunities associated with both the methodologies used so far and the questions necessary to operationalize a normative systemic framework.