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The study of democratic innovations has long been situated in the deliberative paradigm. Today, however, a new scholarly generation conceptualizes democratic innovations from various theoretical angles. This article reviews participatory, agonistic and transformative accounts of democratic innovations. This multiperspectival analysis presents democratic innovations in a new light. The term changes its meaning, going beyond institutions designed by experts to include the remaking of the structures that govern our everyday lives. Democratic innovations interrupt established modes of governance and create spaces for systemic transformations.

Since its inception, a core aspiration of deliberative democracy has been to enable more and better inclusion within democratic politics. In this article, we argue that deliberative democracy can achieve this aspiration only if it goes beyond verbal forms of communication and acknowledges the crucial role of non-verbal communication in expressing and exchanging arguments. The article develops a multidimensional approach to deliberative democracy by emphasizing the visual, sonic and physical dimensions of communication in public deliberation. We argue that non-verbal modes of communication can contribute to public deliberation when they (1) are used as part of reason-giving processes, (2) enable the inclusion of marginalized actors in public debates and (3) induce reflection and encourage new ways of thinking about the public controversies at hand.

Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens’ engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and impedes the freedom of self-expression. To tackle this problem, this article seeks to identify ways to increase the freedom of the subject to explore its multiple self. Understanding the self as inherently fugitive, the article investigates participatory, deliberative and agonistic concepts of self-transformation. As all of them appear limited, it introduces a transformative perspective in democratic thought. Enriching the transformative perspective with queer and gender theory, the article generates the concept of a politics of becoming, which, through radical democratic practices of disidentification, advances the freedom of the subject to change.

Over centuries, democratic theory has developed emancipatory ideals of inclusion, agency and transparency. These ideals, however, have scarcely been applied to the process of theorizing itself. Democratic theory is a product of the academic ivory tower. This article sets out to confront this problem and formulates democratic theorizing as an alternative to established approaches to theorizing democracy. It does so by conceptualizing democratic theory production as a democratic innovation. Democratic theorizing needs to include affected people, empower those on the margins and facilitate transparency. The proposed approach attempts to realize these ideals by bringing together three methodological traditions: grounded theory (in its critical indigenous version), participatory research and assemblage theory. The resulting approach of democratic theorizing draws on an ongoing engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement. The article discusses nine guiding principles of democratic theorizing and presents concrete building blocks to shape a democratic theorizing project.

This article develops the concept of cyborg activism as novel configuration of democratic subjectivity in the Information Age by exploring the online collectivity Anonymous as a prototype. By fusing elements of human/machine and organic/digital, the cyborg disrupts modern logics of binary thinking. Cyborg activism emerges as the reconfiguration of equality/hierarchy, reason/emotion and nihilism/idealism. Anonymous demonstrates how through the use of contingent and ephemeral digital personae hierarchies in cyborg activism prove more volatile than in face-to-face settings. Emotions appear as an essential part of a politics of passion, which enables pursuing laughter and joy, expressing anger and experiencing empowerment as part of a reasoned, strategic politics. Anonymous’ political content reconfigures nihilist sentiments, frustration and political disenchantment, on one hand, with idealist world views, on the other. This enables the cohabitation and partial integration of a great diversity of political claims rooted in various ideologies.