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Rethinking Peace: Social Representation Dynamics and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Posted on August 19, 2025 - 10:11 am by Secretary

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has often been described as “eternal”. But it is just a child of the 20th century and its partly realized and often failed promise to establish democratic efficacy and responsibility through the representation of homogenous groups. As such, it will be overcome in the 21st century through establishing democratic efficacy and responsibility based on citizens and civil societies. Focusing on these social representation dynamics allows to foster ending the conflict through an orientation, a method, and a shared historical understanding.

The orientation is towards building a shared peaceful, just, and prospering society through solving social problems together.
The method is Civil democracy with nation-based veto powers, that is making decisions together with individualized participation and individualized representation among options that are for both sides acceptable.
The historical understanding is that 20th century thinking brought us together into this mess, and that 21st century thinking can bring us out if we apply it.

Let’s review these three in reverse order.

Historical understanding: The 20th century was the time of the promise to establish democratic efficacy and responsibility through the representation of homogenous groups. Organizing individuals in non-overlapping and homogenous groups had fostered the European ascent to wealth and power, it had replaced monarchy through democracy, and in the late 1940s, everyone expected that to be the case soon globally. The fascist extremism in making societies homogenous had killed one in three Jews worldwide, with a long threatening build-up before. So, building on continuous small Jewish presence throughout the centuries, the 20th century brought Jews in great numbers to the land, and it brought the mass expulsion of Arab inhabitants. Historians will continue for long to discuss who did what exactly.

We can, however, agree that both developments happened under the impression that societies would demand homogeneity to prosper, an impression dominant on both sides and everywhere else, not only in the West but no less in Islamic societies. In this process, a mass Jewish presence (with the state of Israel as its organization) and in response a Palestinian identity developed. Any attempt for peace demands to accept that both are here to stay. Palestinians are not just Arabs that could go to other Arab countries, and Israelis are not just Jews that could go to Europe. Both are here to stay, so any attempt for peace demands common solving of common problems in a peaceful manner.

Unfortunately, for a very long time this did not take place. In societies not organized in non-overlapping groups from the outset, the partitioning representation aspect of traditional democracy sets incentives to politicians to secure political support through constructing identity in a conflictive way. Since the 1990s, we see this in the growth of populist and exclusionary movements throughout Western societies, including the Israeli one.

But already much earlier when it became apparent that the promise of the Western democracy model would not work in Islamic societies, this mechanism had played out in the larger discourse of non-Western societies. No one saw that social representation dynamics and the lack of developing more adequate democratic institutions were to blame for the lack of social progress. Incidents of Western power exertion were taken as explanation instead, since 1948 fostering a continuous myth of “armed resistance” with the goal of “liberation”, concepts taken from cases where English or French inhabitants could easily reintegrate in true homelands.

Method: Using Civil democracy allows to overcome these destructive incentives. Democratic responsibility is ultimately the responsibility of the citizens, so they need to exert it directly through participation in all relevant decisions. Avoiding democratic fatigue demands individualizing this participation in a individualized combination with representation. Exerting responsibility through representation as precisely as possible demands to individualize it through letting individuals be presented not by just one representative but all political actors they trust. As for this function of representation political actors have to disclose their preferences on decisions, they are called ‘Open actors’, a concept embracing civil society organizations, individual politicians, experts, and traditional representatives, allowing for the necessary integration of existing traditional trust structures.

Orientation: With Civil democracy, the shared goal is building a common peaceful, just, and prospering society through solving social problems together. A society in which angry young people are no longer labeled neither liberation fighters nor terrorists but young people with problems that need a helping hand to become part of this process of building a society of peace, justice, and prosperity.

Publications on Civil Democracy at a Glance

Posted on August 10, 2025 - 9:23 am by Secretary

Cover pages of three articles and one book on Civil democracy

Civil Democracy – Key Publications at a Glance

Over the past years, Civil Democracy has grown from an idea into a comprehensive model for renewing democracy’s ability to solve urgent problems. Along the way, we have published key contributions—academic, practical, and accessible—to build the case for this new approach.

Here is your guide to core publications on Civil Democracy:

1. Why Polarization Persists—And How We Can End It
Polarization and Partitioning Representation: How an Overlooked Aspect of Contemporary Democracy Leads to Polarizing Societies / https://civil-democracy.org/1603-2/
Published in Sociology Compass, this article reframes polarization not as a cultural or psychological inevitability, but as the result of a mismatch between today’s individualized societies and the outdated “partitioning representation” model of democracy. It shows how this structural flaw disconnects voters, radicalizes party members, and rewards division—and how Civil Democracy’s flexible, actor-open model can restore representation and reduce polarization.

2. Civil Democracy and the Polycrisis
Tackling the Polycrisis Needs Democratic Innovation / https://civil-democracy.org/tackling-the-polycrisis-needs-democratic-innovation/
This article argues that the overlapping crises of our time—climate change, inequality, pandemics, geopolitical instability—are symptoms of a deeper failure in collective decision-making. Existing institutions have been designed to fit Western industrial societies but are unable to govern in societies with a structure not built on homogenous groups, be it in non-Western societies, in the West after decades of indivualization, or on the global scale. Civil Democracy is presented as a structural innovation capable of mobilizing broad expertise and participation to break through institutional gridlock and address the “polycrisis” at its roots.

3. Scaling Participation Without Losing Quality
How to Democratize Policy Design at Scale / https://civil-democracy.org/how-to-democratize-policy-design-at-scale/
Large-scale participation often means sacrificing depth for breadth. This piece explores how Civil Democracy can overcome that trade-off, enabling millions of citizens and thousands of organizations to contribute meaningfully to complex policy design. By combining flexible trust storage, actor openness, and meta-decision freedom, it offers a model for scaling deliberation without overwhelming participants or reducing decision quality.

4. The Upcoming Book – Rethinking Democracy
Rethinking Democracy / https://civil-democracy.org/rethinking-democracy/
Due from De Gruyter in late 2025, this book examines why democracies once worked, why they are now failing, and how Civil Democracy can restore what the author calls “democratic efficacy.” It blends historical analysis, institutional theory, and practical strategy to outline a path from today’s democratic malaise to a renewed system capable of solving the urgent problems of our age.

5. Reclaim Responsibility with Civil Democracy
Reclaim Responsibility with Civil Democracy / https://civil-democracy.org/reclaim-responsibility/
This earlier book, written in 2022 and available here in the shop, connects Civil Democracy to three interlinked global goals: saving the climate, fostering democracy, and ending violence. Through a mix of personal narrative, institutional analysis, and historical insight, it shows how outdated political structures block responsible collective action—and how Civil Democracy can give individuals and organizations the tools to take back responsibility for our shared future.

Rebuilding Democracy

Posted on August 1, 2025 - 2:34 pm by Secretary

Rebuilding Democracy: From Insight to Movement

The Strategy to Restore Efficacy in a Fragmented World

Democracy is in retreat. Across much of the world, citizens feel disempowered, misrepresented, and frustrated with how politics works—or doesn’t. A growing number no longer believe that voting every few years for distant politicians can shape their lives or solve urgent problems. Trust is eroding, populism is rising, and the stakes—from climate breakdown to social cohesion—have never been higher.

Yet this crisis is not inevitable. It is the result of institutions that no longer fit the societies they were built to govern. Democracy has not failed because people lost interest in freedom, but because its inherited form—based on collective blocs and party systems—no longer reflects how individuals live, work, and connect today. What has failed is a structure, not a principle.

Rebuilding Democracy is the strategy for renewal.
Building on the book Rethinking Democracy, it turns the framework of Civil Democracy into a practical roadmap for rebuilding democratic efficacy—step by step, from understanding to new institutions.

The New Framework: Civil Democracy

Civil Democracy provides the institutional architecture for restoring the link between participation and impact. It enables citizens to act responsibly together—individually empowered, collectively effective.

At its core are two freedoms:

Meta-decision freedom: the right of every citizen to choose how to participate—directly, through trusted delegates, or through combinations of both.
Actor openness: the inclusion of all actors who earn public trust—civil society, academia, associations, communities—rather than confining representation to political elites.

Digital tools make this flexibility scalable and transparent. Citizens can see how their trust shapes outcomes, and open actors must make their reasoning visible. The result is a living circuit of accountability and efficacy—a democracy that works because it restores responsibility where it was lost.

From Understanding to Movement

If democracy is to be rebuilt, insight must become action. Civil Democracy offers the model; the Movement of Movements provides the method.

Across nations and systems—democratic or authoritarian, local or transnational—citizens can begin the same journey: turning awareness of failure into agency. The process unfolds through seven steps that transform disillusionment into structured renewal.

The Seven Steps of Democratic Renewal

Understanding – Recognize that the roots of democratic failure are institutional, not cultural. The problem is structural—and therefore solvable.
Awareness – Realize that each of us has participated in a culture of delegation and must now reclaim responsibility as citizens.
Outreach – Turn insight into connection. Build networks of trust by speaking openly about dysfunction and possibility.
Platform – Create shared digital infrastructure for deliberation and decision-making at scale, governed by citizens rather than capital.
Political Capacity – Learn to act together: develop collective intelligence and coordination to make decisions that matter.
New Institutions – Translate movement into governance. Embed Civil Democracy into hybrid, federal, and participatory institutions that restore accountability.
Better Life – Experience democracy as a living system of cooperation and shared purpose—where trust replaces resentment and governance serves the common good.

A Living Dynamic

These steps do not describe a campaign with an endpoint but a rhythm of renewal. Each local initiative can become a node in a broader movement of movements, exchanging experience, tools, and legitimacy. The goal is not uniformity but connected responsibility: autonomous communities linked through shared learning and mutual trust.

Civil Democracy thus becomes both an institutional and cultural transformation. It turns spectatorship into co-authorship, complaint into contribution. Responsibility becomes the new form of freedom: not freedom from others, but freedom with others—to shape our shared world.

Learning, Responsibility, and Hope

Every act of participation generates knowledge. Through interoperable digital systems, Civil Democracy transforms this experience into a living science of democracy—learning loops that make governance self-correcting and self-improving.

This union of hope and realism defines the project’s moral core. Hope, because citizens can again govern themselves; realism, because structural irresponsibility can be changed only through structural reform. Rebuilding democracy is not about idealism—it is about competence, trust, and responsibility.

Join the Movement

Rebuilding Democracy is an invitation—to citizens, students, institutions, and movements—to make democracy real again. Each of us can begin where we stand: forming deliberative circles, connecting initiatives, testing Civil Democracy in practice.

Together, these actions will build the first planetary infrastructure for responsible governance.

Click on “Learn” to read more and create an account to join this emerging movement of movements. You find the full paper under https://civil-democracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Scholtz-Movement-of-Movements-7-Steps.pdf.

The children of tomorrow will ask: “Why did you let the old system keep failing?”
Let our answer be: “We didn’t. We built something better.”

The Uniting Element in Reconciling Divided Societies and Building Global Governance

Posted on July 30, 2025 - 5:56 pm by Secretary

Presentation title Democratic Efficacy: The Missing Link in the Too-Long Unsuccessfully Tried

Recently, the possibility opened up to present the Civil democracy approach to Rebecca Shoot, Co-Convener at the Washington Working Group for the International Criminal Court (WICC) and former Executive Director at Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS). I was especially happy because Rebecca’s recent work with CGS was aimed at global governance, while her ongoing one at the WICC has a focus on divided societies and intractable conflict, a wide areas with cases as Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, the recently reheated conflict between India and Pakistan, with cases currently seen as more historically conflictive but with ongoing potential for violence as Bosnia/Herzegovina, Cyprus, or Rwanda, or cases of societies in continuous struggles to build peaceful relations among their members and social groups, as Lebanon or South Africa. Her work thus bridges two fields in which the demand for better institutions is most present. I have worked on both areas, but at that time my theoretical conceptions seem not yet have been clear enough, so that none of that work has been able to publish so far, and I was thrilled by the challenge to present both vastly different fields under one uniting perspective and eager to see whether I would be able to communicate the advantages of Civil democracy in both fields better this time.

The second slide introduces the common perspective in form of the common problem of democratic efficacy:

Slide #3 introduces how the problem can be solved:

Slide #4 dives deeper into the “How” of regaining democratic efficacy:

And the fifth slide is already the last, describing the current perspective:

Let me know what you think of the presentation!

Rethinking Democracy: The Book for This Political Moment

Posted on June 28, 2025 - 7:22 am by Secretary

de Gruyter Hanno Scholtz Rethinking Democracy The New Model of Democracy for the New Democratic Era

What if the democratic systems we’ve inherited are no longer fit for the world we live in? What if the rising tide of apathy, polarization, and political dysfunction isn’t just a crisis of leadership—but a crisis of design?

Rethinking Democracy is a bold, timely, and necessary book that challenges the foundations of how we govern ourselves—and proposes a new model built for the 21st century. At once deeply analytical and urgently practical, it offers a roadmap out of the political impasse gripping much of the world.

Why This Book Now?

Across the globe, citizens are losing faith in democracy. Not because they want authoritarianism, but because the systems that promised self-government often leave them feeling unheard, disempowered, and trapped in partisan conflict. The vote is sacred—but is it enough?

Author Hanno Scholtz, a political scientist and democracy reform thinker teaching at the University of Zurich, argues that the core institutions of representative democracy have reached their limits. Elections every few years and decisions made by distant politicians no longer suffice in an age of complex identities, digital connectivity, and global junctions.

What’s Inside?

Rethinking Democracy is more than critique—it’s construction. It diagnoses where traditional democratic systems fall short and introduces Civil Democracy, a new model that updates democracy for the networked age. Structured in clear, accessible chapters, the book offers:

A historical and theoretical diagnosis of the democratic crisis—connecting dots from populism and polarization to apathy and institutional sclerosis.
A deep dive into how democracy can be rebuilt, focusing on three pillars: individualizing participation, individualizing representation, and shared decision-making.
Practical tools and technologies for democratic renewal, drawing on innovations like deliberative platforms, participatory scoring, and transnational cooperation.
An inspiring call to action: Democracy is not a spectator sport. The book closes by inviting readers to reclaim responsibility, engage with hope, and join a new democratic movement.

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is for anyone who senses that politics today is broken—but isn’t content to simply watch it fall apart.

Concerned citizens who want to make their voice matter.
Scholars and students looking for a cutting-edge synthesis of political science and real-world reform.
Activists and movement-builders seeking frameworks that go beyond protest to redesign.
Policymakers and reformers who know that democracy must adapt or risk collapse.

A Book That Doesn’t Just Diagnose—It Builds

Rethinking Democracy doesn’t stop at saying “something’s wrong.” It proposes something better—and backs it with institutional design, technological strategy, and social imagination. It insists that democracy is not a relic of the past but a project for the future.

If you’ve ever felt that you vote but are not heard, that politics feels more like theater than transformation, or that better is possible but invisible—this book is for you.

Rethinking Democracy will be available in November at https://brilldegruyter.com. Join the movement to rethink, rebuild, and revive democracy, before it’s too late.

Rethinking Democracy: The Brainstorming Canvas

Posted on June 26, 2025 - 9:22 am by Secretary

A large creative brainstorming session about democracy, set in a modern, light-filled room with people of diverse backgrounds engaged in animated discussion, sticky notes and sketches of institutions, arrows, and big questions on whiteboards and glass walls

When writing Rethinking Democracy, I began with a simple but challenging premise: that the crisis of democracy we are living through is not just political, but intellectual. To respond, we need more than critique—we need creativity.

This page presents a piece of the creative process that helped shape the book but ultimately didn’t make it into the final chapters: a deliberately open-ended, generative brainstorming canvas. It emerged from a mix of my own thinking, conversations with colleagues and friends, and experiments with generative AI tools. You could call it the “divergent phase” of the project, where I explored—without judgment—a wide range of directions for how to rethink democracy from the ground up.

The result is a long, eclectic list of possible avenues: some theoretical, some practical, some focused on new institutional designs, others on neglected historical or cultural perspectives. It includes wild ideas and sober ones. What unites them is their starting point: the belief that our current democratic systems are structurally out of sync with the needs and capacities of today’s societies—and that we must begin to imagine better ones.

While the book itself moves forward from this brainstorming phase into the more focused and convergent process of building a new theoretical framework around democratic efficacy, this list remains a valuable reference. It serves as both a map of early exploration and an invitation: to think more freely, to go wider before going deeper, and perhaps to spark ideas of your own.

Whether you arrived here by following a link in the book or simply browsing the Civil Democracy blog, I invite you to browse the list with curiosity. Use it in workshops, share it with students, debate it in your organization. Most importantly, feel free to contribute your own ideas. Rethinking democracy is not a task for one mind alone.

Here is what a mixture of my own brainstorming, discussions with friends, and prompting generative AI brought forward:

The Brainstorming Canvas

Expanding Theoretical Frameworks

1. Work More Interdisciplinarily – Break the silos between political science, psychology, sociology, history, and even fields like neuroscience and computer science to better understand democratic decline and renewal.
2. Apply Complex Systems Theory – Treat democracy as a system with feedback loops and tipping points, allowing for predictive modeling and resilience strategies.
3. Use More Institutionalist Theory – Focus on historical institutionalism to examine how democratic institutions evolve and become rigid, and develop more adaptive institutional designs.
4. Bring in Individual Human Agency – Shift attention to an individualist, actor-based understanding how individual agency, decision-making, and social identity formation contribute to democratic crises.
5. Turn from Negative Thinking to Positive Thinking – Instead of fixating on crises, analyze what made democracies work during their most stable periods (e.g., the 1950s–1980s) and how to recreate those conditions today.
6. Institutional Ecologies Approach – Study democratic institutions as interconnected systems affected by economic, technological, and cultural shifts, rather than isolating them from broader social structures.
7. Actor-Network Theory in Politics – Consider non-human actors (social media algorithms, climate change, economic structures) as political forces shaping democratic stability.

Methodological Innovations

8. Longitudinal Psychological Studies – Track how political values and democratic commitments change over time, particularly focusing on younger generations who exhibit declining attachment to democracy.
9. Big Data & Machine Learning in Democracy Studies – Use AI to analyze large-scale democratic trends, mapping institutional breakdowns, trust erosion, and policy failures across time and space.
10. Experimental Political Science – Implement real-world experiments testing interventions to restore democratic trust, such as deliberative town halls, digital participatory platforms, and media literacy programs.
11. Narrative Framing in Democracy Studies – Investigate how different ways of framing democracy (e.g., as a moral duty vs. a pragmatic problem-solving tool) influence public commitment to democratic norms.

New Institutional Designs

12. Designing Participatory Bureaucracies – Explore ways to make bureaucracies more directly accountable to citizens, such as through citizen juries evaluating policies or rotating citizen advisory councils.
13. Decentralized Digital Governance Models – Examine blockchain-based voting, digital deliberation forums, and crowd-sourced legislation to enhance participatory governance.
14. Rethink Political Party Structures – Investigate hybrid models of representation that combine direct democracy, deliberative democracy, party-based systems, or something completely new to better reflect modern societies.

Alternative Historical & Comparative Perspectives

15. Comparative Studies with Non-Western Democracies – Study successful democratic adaptations outside the Western model, such as Taiwan’s digital participatory democracy or Botswana’s traditional democratic institutions.
16. Revisit Pre-Democratic Political Systems – Examine governance structures from history (e.g., city-state confederations, tribal councils) to extract lessons on sustainable political participation.
17. Study the Breakdown of Other Democratic Systems – Compare past cases of democratic collapse (e.g., the Weimar Republic, post-colonial democracies) to find common failure patterns and strategies for resilience.

Public Engagement & Communication Strategies

18. Rethinking Democracy Education – Move beyond traditional civics courses to interactive, gamified experiences that engage citizens in democratic decision-making from a young age.
19. Leveraging Pop Culture for Democratic Renewal – Investigate how democracy-friendly narratives in film, TV, and literature can reinforce democratic norms and combat political cynicism.
20. Make Democracy More Tangible – Develop initiatives that allow people to experience direct democratic impact in everyday life, from neighborhood decision-making to participatory budgeting.

Policy & Institutional Action

21. Global Democratic Alliances – Study the potential of transnational democratic institutions as counterweights to national democratic backsliding, learning from bodies like the EU or Nordic Council.
22. Measuring & Benchmarking Democracy Health – Develop more real-time, multidimensional democracy indices that go beyond traditional metrics like election fairness to assess trust, polarization, and participatory health.
23. Democracy Stress-Testing – Implement structured stress tests for democratic institutions, similar to financial sector stress tests, to identify vulnerabilities before they escalate into crises.
24. Addressing Root Causes of Democratic Disillusionment – Investigate the structural economic, social, and technological drivers of democratic disengagement, from wealth inequality to algorithm-driven radicalization.
25. Think in Social Movements – Instead of top-down solutions, explore ways to reinforce democratic participation that can start from small beginnings, possibly at the municipal and regional levels, where people feel the most direct impact.

This list is by no means complete, and based on participants’ predispositions, every collective will come up with another one. One can, however, fairly expect a lot of overlap between the results lists of different groups. (With asking more AI platforms, I received a second list twice as long as this one, but for the purpose of presentation here, this shorter one suffices.)

What are your thoughts about this list? What insights do discussions with your friends spark? Share your ideas in the comments or mail me under hanno.scholtz@civil-democracy.org!

Tackling the Polycrisis Needs Democratic Innovation

Posted on June 24, 2025 - 7:21 am by Secretary

A cartooned globe with different arrows pointing towards it

The world today seems caught in a spiral of overlapping crises—climate breakdown, institutional erosion, inequality, migration, war, and political polarization. Some call it a polycrisis, others a metacrisis. Some try to ignore them, but others are caught in trying to fight each of so many of them. But that’s the wrong approach.

In my new open-access article in Discover Global Society, titled
👉 “Global Polycrisis Can Be Tackled by Institutional Innovation Towards Democratic Efficacy”,
I argue that behind today’s many crises lies one single, solvable problem: our institutions of democracy are out of sync with the structure of modern societies.

The Core Argument

From a historical and institutional perspective, the democratic model we still rely on—“partitioning representation”, where citizens vote once every few years to delegate all decisions to a few—is no longer fit for purpose. It was effective in a specific historical window (Western industrial societies, mid-20th century), but it no longer provides citizens with the efficacy—the sense that their participation shapes political outcomes—that democracy needs to function.

We now live in individualized, globalized, and mediatized societies. And yet, we still rely on political mechanisms designed for group-based identities and slow-moving class structures.

The result? Citizens feel unheard, political decisions miss the mark, trust erodes—and crises escalate.

The Path Forward: Civil Democracy

The article outlines a clear way out of this institutional dead end: a new model I call Civil Democracy, built on two key innovations:

Meta-decision freedom: Individuals choose when and where to participate, or whom to delegate their voice to—issue by issue.
Actor openness: Any trustworthy civil actor—NGO, expert, local organizer—can earn citizens’ delegated trust and become part of the decision-making process.

This model uses digital tools to scale democratic efficacy, allowing for meaningful input even in complex policy debates, while still managing the realities of cognitive and time scarcity.

Why This Matters

This isn’t just a political theory paper. It’s a proposal to replace the core mechanism driving the global democratic crisis. It applies to:

Western democracies struggling with polarization and apathy
Post-authoritarian societies disillusioned with democratic promises
Global governance processes crippled by inefficiency and nationalism

In each case, democratic renewal requires more than participation—it requires institutions that let people see their voice matter.

Read the Full Article

🔗 Access the article (open access) here:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-024-00134-9

If you’ve been asking why our political systems can’t seem to solve anything anymore, or what it would take to restore faith in democracy, I hope you’ll find this article useful. Let’s move beyond fear and design the institutions we need.

Why Polarization Persists—And How We Can End It

Posted on June 24, 2025 - 7:18 am by Secretary

Two people in a verbal confrontation at a rally

The polarization of democratic societies is often discussed in moral, cultural, or psychological terms—blaming angry voters, radical elites, or the rise of toxic media. But what if the deeper cause lies elsewhere, hidden in plain sight?

In my recent open-access article in Sociology Compass, I argue that polarization is not inevitable. It results from a mismatch between our institutions and our societies. The paper, titled “Polarization and Partitioning Representation: How an Overlooked Aspect of Contemporary Democracy Leads to Polarizing Societies”, offers a bold new theory of why democracies are breaking down—and how to rebuild them.

While much of the public debate focuses on the United States, the paper presents comparative data across OECD countries to show that polarization is a general trend in Western democracies. The United States may be the extreme case—but it is not an exception.

The Core Argument: A Mismatch Between People and Institutions

The paper introduces the concept of “partitioning representation”—the traditional way democracies represent people by assigning them to discrete, non-overlapping groups: parties, districts, or nation-states. This model worked in the industrial era, when society was neatly divided along class or territorial lines.

But today’s societies are individualized, diverse, and fluid. Citizens no longer live in homogenous blocs that match the political containers built to represent them. As a result, this mismatch creates:

Disconnected voters, who no longer feel represented and become alienated or angry.
Radicalized party members, because only the most ideologically committed stay active as broad-based alignment breaks down.
Incentivized polarization, as politicians and media actors find success in fueling division, not solving shared problems.

What appears as an emotional or cultural breakdown is, Scholtz argues, a structural failure of democratic design.

The Way Forward: Rethinking Representation

The paper’s conclusion is not pessimistic—it’s radically constructive. Scholtz proposes moving beyond partitioning representation toward a new institutional model that allows:

Dividable votes, enabling citizens to support different actors for different issues.
Actor openness, letting issue-specific organizations gain democratic mandates.
Meta-decision freedom, allowing citizens to choose when to participate directly and when to delegate.

This new system—dubbed Civil Democracy—would give people back a sense of political efficacy, restore collective problem-solving, and reduce the incentives that currently fuel polarization.

Why This Paper Matters

By shifting the lens from culture and media to the architecture of representation itself, this paper offers a powerful and overdue reframing of the polarization debate. For scholars, reformers, and citizens alike, the message is clear: If we want to heal democracy, we must rethink its institutions.

🔗 Read the full paper here:
https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soc4.70008

How to Democratize Policy Design at Scale

Posted on June 24, 2025 - 7:17 am by Secretary

A group discussing in front of a wall with post-its from a brainstorming

In times of polycrisis—climate change, inequality, institutional mistrust—there is no shortage of calls for more democratic policymaking. But how can we actually involve whole populations in shaping policies that affect everyone, without overwhelming the system or the citizens?

In my newly published article in Policy Design and Practice, titled “Large Scale Democratic Policy Design: Including Populations in Policy Design Processes”, I take up this challenge head-on. The piece offers a conceptual roadmap for scaling up democratic participation in policymaking, moving beyond the limits of small, elite-controlled deliberative “mini-publics” and toward a model that allows entire societies to participate in complex decision-making.

What the Article Argues

The Problem: Participatory policy design has hit a wall. While it holds immense promise, current methods are too narrow, too small, and often tokenistic. Efforts to include the public remain stuck in formats that don’t scale.
The Diagnosis: The core issue is the lack of scalable deliberation. Mini-publics work only in small groups. As a result, participatory processes often suffer from limited legitimacy—excluding many from input, reducing the quality of deliberation (throughput), and producing outcomes (output) that fail to carry democratic weight.
The Proposal: We need to disaggregate deliberation into measurable elements—decisions, options, rankings, and arguments—and then structure the process so it can work at scale. Drawing from how large organizations (like party conventions) already structure complex decision-making, I propose a model in which policy design becomes a series of manageable steps—augmented by digital platforms that support delegation and trust.
The Model: Citizens can choose to participate directly or delegate their influence to trusted “open actors”—from civil society organizations to subject-matter experts—using individualized trust storage. This maintains both agency and scalability, creating a system I call Civil Democracy.

Why This Matters

In a time of widespread frustration with existing institutions and rising polarization, the answer isn’t less democracy—it’s more effective democracy. But that requires more than good intentions: it requires new structures, new processes, and new technologies.

This article outlines one such structure—a way to enable mass participation without sacrificing depth, inclusiveness, or accountability.

If you care about democratic innovation, participatory design, or the future of governance, I hope you’ll take a look.

🔗 Read the full article (open access):
https://doi.org/10.1080/25741292.2025.2502201

Tyranny of the Minority: Another Well-Meaning Attempt to Help Solving America’s Democracy Crisis

Posted on April 29, 2025 - 6:26 pm by Secretary

A pair of scales, the right side with only one box in a US flag design weighs down six such boxes on the left side, with overlays of the book cover and images of the two authors

Tyranny of the Minority by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt is another well-meant bestselling account of America’s democracy crisis that will not solve it. Read my overview and review of the book:

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two political scientists at Harvard University, analyze the erosion of democratic institutions in the United States in Tyranny of the Minority. In eight chapters, they describe how a small, increasingly radical minority can permanently block the political majority through institutional imbalances, with the US Constitution as an unwitting accomplice.

“Fear of Losing” (22 pages) The book begins by examining a central psychological dynamic: the fear of losing power. The authors argue that democracies become unstable when political actors are no longer willing to accept defeat. In recent years, they say, many politicians, particularly in the Republican Party, have turned away from the basic rule of democracy—accepting election results. In a pluralistic society, it is normal to lose elections. However, when remaining in power becomes an existential question, dangerous dynamics arise. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, this fear – especially among white, evangelical conservatives – forms the breeding ground for authoritarian strategies.

“The Banality of Authoritarianism” (31 pages) Based on Hannah Arendt’s famous formulation, this article examines the role of “followers.” The authors show that anti-democratic developments are promoted not only by extremists, but also by established actors. These “semi-loyal democrats” (a term coined by Juan Linz) wear suits and formally adhere to the rules – but they tacitly allow these rules to be undermined. Similar to how conservative elites in 1930s France did not distance themselves decisively enough from the right-wing extremist mob, many Republicans today tolerate openly anti-democratic behavior as long as it serves their power. The erosion of democratic norms often begins quietly – but that is precisely what makes it so dangerous.

“It Has Happened Here” (27 pages) In a particularly stirring historical review, Levitsky and Ziblatt show that democratic dismantling is not a new phenomenon. In the late 19th century, after the end of Reconstruction, white elites in the South – including in Wilmington, North Carolina – carried out outright coups to destroy the political participation of black citizens. They relied on open violence, election fraud, and “lawfare” – legal means such as poll taxes and literacy tests. The authors emphasize that the US Constitution did not effectively protect voting rights or the separation of powers at that time – and it still does not today. The structural possibility of minority rule is not an accident, but the result of a constitutional design from a pre-democratic era.

“Why the Republican Party Abandoned Democracy” (41 pages) This is one of the central chapters of the book. It traces the development of the Republican Party into the “party of white, Christian fear.” Since the “Southern Strategy” of the 1960s, the party has deliberately rebuilt its base: away from urban and moderate voters and toward a shrinking but highly mobilizable white minority increasingly characterized by authoritarian attitudes. Rather than adapting to a changing voter majority, as would be expected in a democratic competition, the party developed strategies to secure its structural power through gerrymandering, voting restrictions, media control, and blatant election fraud. The book identifies this radicalization as one of the main causes of the current crisis of democracy.

“Fettered Majorities” (32 pages) This chapter highlights the institutional barriers that stand in the way of genuine majority democracy. The US Constitution, originally designed as a safeguard against excessive concentration of power, has become a bulwark against reform. In particular, the filibuster in the Senate—an institutional peculiarity with no constitutional basis—allows a minority of 41 senators to effectively block almost any legislative initiative. The authors cite the example of the failed background checks on gun purchases after the Sandy Hook massacre: at that time, 45 senators, representing only 38% of the population, prevented a measure that had over 80% support in polls.

“Minority Rule” (33 pages) unfolds the core of the argument: the structural overrepresentation of rural, small states in the Senate and the distortion caused by the Electoral College enable a party to govern permanently with minority support – and even to dominate the Supreme Court. Levitsky and Ziblatt impressively demonstrate that since the beginning of the 21st century, the Republican Party has never held a Senate majority that also represented the majority of the population. Nevertheless, under Trump, it was able to appoint three conservative constitutional judges in 2016 – a structural coup with a democratic facade. This “constitutional protection” creates a safe space for the GOP from democratic competition – and enables radicalization without risk.

“America the Outlier” (26 pages) In international comparison, the US Constitution appears to be an anomaly: inflexible, elitist, outdated. While Norway, for example, has reformed its constitution more than 300 times, US politics finds it extremely difficult to make any adjustments. The chapter emphasizes that the United States is not in crisis because it has lost its democratic order, but because it has never reformed it sufficiently. Compared to other Western democracies, the US is structurally less well equipped to resist authoritarian tendencies.

“Democratizing Our Democracy” (35 pages) discusses possible ways out. In 15 reform proposals, the authors call for, among other things, a nationwide guarantee of voting rights, automatic voter registration, a ban on manipulative gerrymandering, the abolition of the filibuster, constitutional reform of Senate representation, and a fundamental modernization of the constitutional amendment process. But they themselves know that these reforms are hardly enforceable under the existing rules. They argue that we need to think utopically: American history has always been marked by “rare but significant” moments of democratic renewal.

Seen from a Civil democracy perspective, Tyranny of the Minority provides a nice and fitting critique of institutional distortions in the US Constitution. But despite its analytical acuity, it falls short of what is really necessary to solve the crisis of democracy.

First, Levitsky and Ziblatt take the fear of losing power—especially among white, evangelical conservatives—as a given, rather than analyzing it as a consequence of social and institutional alienation. They portray these groups as anti-democratic without asking why entire milieus have retreated into an uncompromising defensive stance. They also largely fail to mention that Donald Trump was able to mobilize not only white evangelicals, but increasingly conservative Black and Latino voters as well.

Furthermore, they narrow the threat to democracy to the United States. However, the global crisis of democratic institutions—from India to Israel and Hungary to France and Germany—shows that we are dealing with a deeper problem. In contrast, Rethinking Democracy speaks of a crisis of democratic self-efficacy. Among Republican voters in particular, there is a strong feeling that “the system is broken” – a signal that Levitsky and Ziblatt overlook.

The reforms they propose are certainly sensible. But they are insufficient. What is missing is a strategy for mobilizing the social movement needed to achieve this. Such a movement cannot be limited to defending the status quo of representative democracy—it must offer people greater decision-making power and democratic experience.

In sum, the book’s criticism of the US Constitution is justified with regard to the Reconstruction era. For today, it is not enough. Without new democratic institutions that generate responsibility through direct self-efficacy, American democracy will not enter calmer waters, even in the (hopefully still possible) democratic victory in the 2028 elections. I sincerely hope for America that Rethinking Democracy will find a wide readership even though I am not a renowned Harvard professor.

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