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How can we theorize about democracy? We can identify the major topics that form the focus of democratic theorists (and others traversing the field), such as democracy’s meaning and value. This article focuses on the methodological lenses through which the topics have been and can be viewed. Different lenses bring into focus different phenomena, questions, and problems of democracy. It is argued that the lenses that bring conventional democratic theory approaches into view can provide an unnecessarily narrow and restrictive perspective. Donning different methodological lenses can introduce alternative perspectives, such as renewed attention to value pluralism and the “everyday.” The article sketches four “circles” that capture different potential types of and sources for theoretical work, some of them radically unconventional. It concludes by discussing the specific example of how methods and assumptions of design theory can prompt promising new approaches to theorizing about democracy.

Beginning with two vivid examples that illustrate the Handbook’s core arguments—that politics is performative, performance is political, and that both of these matter to understanding our worlds—the introduction provides a current, contextual account of the shared syntax of politics and performance. It defines key terms, such as politics, performance, theatricality, and performativity, that inform the Handbook contributions. Through accessible and provocative engagements with new ways of thinking about politics and performance in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary modes, the introduction shows that these categories are interwoven and entangled in complex and consequential ways. It outlines the states of the art in theater and performance studies and politics, respectively, capturing key points of interconnection between these discourses in order to build on, extend, and reshape interdisciplinary conversations. Finally, it reflects on key challenges and opportunities that attend bringing the two broad fields together for mutual enrichment and building a new, hybrid field of study. Underlining the co-constitutive nature of performance and politics, the introduction suggests that such a framework is critical to promoting an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the complex political world of the twenty-first century.

The twenty-first century poses serious challenges to democratic ideals and institutions. Democratic Design argues that to respond effectively—to remake and renew democracy––democrats need to think and work in new ways, using a new and versatile toolkit of concepts and practices. Drawing together, and moving beyond, the best of existing theories and models, the author builds, defends, and illustrates the democratic design framework—a new set of tools for politicians, reformers, and observers to explore creative and hybrid forms of democracy. The book encourages idealism and practicality, demanding special attention to the history and politics of diverse countries and contexts. Bringing theory and practice into close conversation, the chapter fuses insights of design thinking and the future of politics and government, showing how a comprehensive and robust approach to rethinking democratic governance is both feasible and essential.

This chapter explores the nature of specific democratic designs or plans. The latter are understood as particular, first-order conceptions of democracy emerging from systematic application of the democratic design framework to a given set of democratic concerns or challenges. The chapter discusses types of design (e.g. hybrids and transfers), and poses the question of agency—who designs. Who initiates, adapts, and ‘lives’ designs (can one have both democratic design and democratic design?). It also examines the repertoire of specific political principles, institutions, and devices that make up the raw material of democratic designs, thus underscoring the wide range of design options that are in principle available.

This chapter specifies the features at the heart of the new democratic design framework. Focusing on what motivates the framework, it details the notion of ‘democratic sensibility’ and other features of democracy’s normativity, and democracy’s minimum requirements (the ‘democratic minimum’). This is followed by specification of the critical idea of the ‘dual core’, consisting of (a) practices and (b) political principles. These two interacting elements together form the core of the democratic design framework as a whole. Central to the dynamics of the dual core is the enactment of principles through single or multiple institutionalized practices; the discussion treats this feature in some detail, along with the scope and justification of principles.

This chapter offers a critique of the current state of play in the study of democracy. It aims to pinpoint both strengths and limitations of current theories and approaches. A broad range of approaches is covered: the discourse of ‘models of democracy’; the conception of ‘liberal democracy’ that prevails in the comparative study of democratic states and democratization; the deliberative model; normative political philosophy approaches; the world of ‘democratic innovations’, including direct and participative innovations; and recent ‘pragmatic’ and problem-driven approaches. The chapter identifies through these critiques a set of lessons to carry forward, including key points about embracing plurality and the role of experimentation in rethinking democracy.

Democratic change or reform is a complex and challenging task. The democratic design framework provides a flexible but clear guide to thinking through the complexities and challenges. The framework is a versatile tool that might be put to work for many different reasons: to aid critical thinking, challenge existing power structures, generate new ideas, facilitate rapid responses, promote critical action, or to make links between different branches of democratic thinking and practice.

Can democracy be resilient in an increasingly ‘high-speed society’? Social acceleration, some critics argue, poses a serious threat to the idea and practice of democracy. Others invoke but do not develop the idea of ‘slow democracy’ as one important response to this threat. Despite its importance, the critique and response lack analytical depth. In this context, and in an effort to rebuild the debate on a stronger and more fruitful base, the article underscores the potential of political agency to shape democracy’s temporality and reframes ‘slow democracy’ as a challenge of democratic design.

Deploying a broadly interpretive approach, the article explores the extent to which, and the ways in which, equality is enacted in non-elective as well as elective representation. It argues that the fleeting and fragmentary equalities evident in non-elective representation are democratically significant, and that examining them can enhance understanding of the democratic promise and limits of different modes of representation.\ud

When interpreted as citizenship of the European Union, the development of European citizenship has prompted a series of debates on rights, membership and belonging, and democracy and constitutionalism. These debates can be enriched by highlighting the ways in which European citizenship is enacted by a variety of actors. It is argued that acts of European citizenship occur under two different dynamics: extension and assertion. Acts under the dynamic of extension are most often acts extending existing legal citizenship regimes by formal and public institutions, such as the European Court of Justice. Acts under the hitherto relatively neglected dynamic of assertion are likely to be more diffuse in location and visibility and uncertain in their goals and impacts. Understanding such acts – and the links between acts under the two dynamics – has the potential to reinvigorate and expand research agendas in the study of European citizenship.

This article interrogates the norms of good citizenship invoked in and across different social domains, using the example of citizenship education in the UK as one field in which good citizenship is constituted. It is possible to make visible the political struggle inherent in the mechanisms of framing the good citizen by unpacking the differences between citizenship as acts, status and virtues. This is a necessary step in assessing good citizenship claims in the absence of moral and political absolutes. We deploy a two-tiered account of Butler's theory of performativity to examine how ordinary citizenship acts are preceded by elite rhetorical framing. We conclude that citizenship, like democracy, is always enacted in particular contexts in which positioning, method and motives play an important part.

This special feature is framed by the conviction that developments in green political theory have much to teach those who toil in other sub-fields of political theory, and indeed other disciplines. Befitting a journal called Contemporary Political Theory, we wanted to try to capture some key threads in green theory and to trace core lines of its development. Readers will find much here to challenge received wisdom, unsettle assumptions and exemplify green political theory's rich diversity

The first dialogue with Professor Barber was recorded in Peterborough in September 2008, with later follow-up questions and responses in June 2011. Professor Barber had been part of a team helping the city of Peterborough in the United Kingdom to think about its future and strategize how the arts can be used as an integral part of a regeneration plan. His presence in Peterborough was an opportunity for a face-toface discussion about his work more generally. The further questions and responses in 2011 follow up on Professor Barber’s engagement as a political theorist with other key issues of political practice.

This article examines critically a variety of claims to be representative that are made by unelected political actors, and offers criteria for assessing these claims.

Who does, and who can, represent women? How and where do they do it? What are we to make of competing claims to represent women? Is a higher number of women in parliaments the key to better represe...

This article critically addresses the varied ways in which political parties can be said to represent. Three important ideal-typical modes of party representation are outlined: the popular, the statal, and the reflexive. Arguments are offered for countering the common view that, for example, popular modes are the most democratic, and statal modes the least democratic. Statal modes in particular are often taken to be an indicator of a decline in parties’ representative functions; however, shifting modes of party representation often have more to do with strategic choices and contextual pressures than democratic ideals. No one ideal-typical mode is intrinsically more democratic than others. Further, there is evidence that a new mode of party representation, the reflexive, may be emerging; parties may be transforming into something they never were in order to continue to do the things they have always sought to do. Whether democracy is unthinkable save for political parties is no longer the question we need to ask. Rather, we need to ask: what kinds of representative democracy are thinkable? And what forms of party claims, if any, are appropriate to them?

In recent years, political theorists and others have questioned a series of longstanding assumptions about ‘representative democracy’. There are renewed doubts as to whether our existing systems of political representation serve democracy, as well as new ideas and empirical work about what representation in politics involves. This article explores some recent innovations in thinking about representation, and in particular the idea of representation as a process of claim-making. It discusses a number of ways in which the representative claim perspective helps us to challenge several well-established ideas and practices of representative democracy, including the distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘representative’ democracy and the potential for non-elective representation in democracies.

Manipulative mixed messages from candidates to voters affect what governments are entitled to do in office. A party that wins an election gains a 'mandate to rule'. But there is a second type of mandate: a 'policy mandate' to enact specific policy proposals central to the winning party's campaign. Mixed-message politics in general can undermine policy mandates, and the use of 'dog whistle politics' - telling one group of voters one thing, while allowing or encouraging another group to believe another - makes the inferring of policy mandates especially problematic. Referendums provide only a partial remedy to dog whistle politics. Winning a clear policy mandate means forgoing dog whistle politics, despite the short term electoral advantage they may deliver.

What does it mean to be a European citizen? The rapidly changing politics of citizenship in the face of migration, diversity, heightened concerns about security and financial and economic crises, has left European citizenship as one of the major political and social challenges to European integration. Enacting European Citizenship develops a distinctive perspective on European citizenship and its impact on European integration by focusing on 'acts' of European citizenship. The authors examine a broad range of cases - including those of the Roma, Sinti, Kurds, sex workers, youth and other 'minorities' or marginalised peoples - to illuminate the ways in which the institutions and practices of European citizenship can hinder as well as enable claims for justice, rights and equality. This book draws the key themes together to explore what the limitations and possibilities of European citizenship might be.

Both the activating and the constituting are important faces of EU democracy-to-come (Derrida 2004). They bear a complex intertwined relationship. The common presentation of the ‘democratic deficit’ can be described more precisely as being an ‘institutional deficit’. But addressing the institutional deficit should be no bar to addressing the non-institutional, insurgent, assertive acts of citizenship which enact different interpretations of democratic principles – different, but by no means less legitimate in the democratic universe (see e.g. Aradau and Huysmans 2009). Given the uncountability and unpredictability of assertive acts of citizenship, their contribution to democracy may be unruly. But this may add up to a picture of Europe characterised by an unruly surfeit, rather than (or even alongside) an institutional deficit, of democracy. This surprising surfeit may be regarded as a challenging kind of excess from the perspective of core EU institutions; if so, that might be taken as a product of the latter’s limited democratic horizons.

According to current wisdom, we have entered a new ‘age of democracy’. The new global popularity of the democratic ideal appears likely to pose new challenges to democratic theory, adding yet more formulations and nuances to existing categories. Just as some key questions about democracy–such as ‘why is it a good (or the best) political system?’ and 'precisely what does it demand of us, and owe to us, as citizens?' – become daily more urgent, some worry about the RESOurces of political theory to cope with them, given the apparent shift towards scepticism and a suspicion of large-scale, encompassing claims about politics. This article focuses of four arguments from postmodernist and pragmatist writers who have given democracy a prominent part in their work. It asks whether the writers examined provide convincing justifications for the democratic ideal.

The future of democracy will hinge in part on what practices we think of as representative, and how they might be, or become, democratic. Claims and practices of diverse actors, from NGOs to celebrity activists to spiritual leaders, and new devices of governance such as participatory budgets and citizens juries, are challenging received ideas of democratic representation. Elected national legislatures remain vital parts of this picture, as the contributions of Wessels and Beetham in this volume (chapters four and six) make clear. But there is a practical broadening and diversifying of representative claims and practices that has an impact on our very ideas of democratic representation. The core task of this chapter is to scan and interrogate key tensions that extending the idea of representation brings into focus.