Democratic Experimentalism

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As developed by Sabel, Dorf and Cohen, and John Dewey before them, democratic experimentalism is based on premise that current democratic practices are no longer able to deal with central and pressing social and political problems. Beginning with criticism of democracy as command and control, Dorf and Sabel show how current democratic practices are part of problem rather than solution. Even as democratic experimentalists have successfully explored democracy beyond state in European Union, I argue that they have not fully transnationalized democracy or fully appreciated the new circumstances of politics. With emergence of pervasive forms of interdependence, Rousseau's conception of democracy as self-legislation is no longer adequate, despite its cogent normative assumptions. Instead, new transnational circumstances of justice suggest stronger conception of democracy as self-determination. In order to minimize domination and maximize self-determination, cross cutting constituencies must achieve shared democratic minimum, through which democracy may once again become means to justice.One of distinctive features of recent political order is that democracy is no longer confined to national state. More than being applicable in variety of contexts, democracy is no longer about the People, whoever they are. Rather, it must be applied in complex, pluralist, globalized contexts characterized by extensive, multiple and overlapping constituencies that cut across boundaries as well as space and time. Democracy can no longer be thought to be sole provenance of territorial nation state. While many emphasize new non-state forms such as European Union, it could be done so more consistently and rigorously by seeing these developments in context of larger shift away from long held view that democracy is self-legislation, act of constituting a People that is subject and author of law. However much we have presupposed self-legislation in thinking about democracy at any level, it is not only misleading under current circumstances; it is also no longer best way to realize democracy under current circumstances. Rather, it has become increasingly clear that self-legislation has now become more regressive than progressive, in that its current realizations now promote rather than minimize domination. Indeed, primary goal of current theories of democracy is to identify progressive possibilities as they emerge under new and still emerging circumstances of politics.In arguing that self-legislation is no longer progressive, I do not mean to deny its normative power and historical significance as practical conception of democracy. Rousseau provided perhaps first and also clearest statement of this view. Here law that we give ourselves collectively is same law that we would each give to ourselves individually, assuring basis for shared self rule. Democracy is accordingly based on ideal of equality, in that all are protected from arbitrary laws to extent that each has an equal chance to influence collective decision making. Indeed, this conception of equality is present in both participatory theories of democracy as well as most forms of deliberative democracy. This particular idea of self rule based on equality is also at core of social contract theory, although they have been realized primarily by voting and representative democracy. As much as this conception has long guided our practices, it is now unable to deal with problem of very mutual vulnerability on which it was founded. Indeed, political equality has long been solution to fact of shared vulnerability, even as putative democratic polities are no longer able to maintain their conditions of equality across various territorial constituencies. Once these more directly deliberative features are lost, higher level forms of decision making begin to predominate, often based on delegation of citizens as principal to agents who execute decision as well as its implementation. …