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A Democratic Experimentalist Theory of Institutions

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Pragmatism and the Wide View of Democracy

Abstract

This chapter introduces ‘democratic experimentalism’ as the most significant contemporary attempt to revivify and reactualize the pragmatist approach to the democratic relevance of private and public institutions. The chapter reviews the most relevant theories of democratic experimentalism in political sociology, political theory, constitutionalism, and theory of organizations, with the aim of developing a distinctive approach, which emphasizes the two factors of social learning and distributed cooperation as the main contributions of a pragmatist theory of democracy to the problem of social innovation. In the last section I propose to read democratic experimentalism as a theory of ‘realist utopias’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a similar view of the democratic function of political institutions, see Elkin (2006).

  2. 2.

    For a classical statement of this idea, see Dewey (1937).

  3. 3.

    See Frega (2006), McVea (2006), Caspary (2000), Fesmire (2003).

  4. 4.

    For a comprehensive view of social movements as pragmatist problem solvers faced with social and political problems see Serrano Zamora (2016, 2017b).

  5. 5.

    Institutions and organizations have in common the fact of presiding over the coordination of social action, and it is in this sense that in what follows the term institution must be understood as referring to both institutions and organizations. See North (1990), Ansell (2011).

  6. 6.

    For an overview of the influence of institutionalism in economics, sociology, political theory and organization sympathetic to pragmatism, see Ansell (2011, Ch. 2).

  7. 7.

    On the pragmatist epistemology of inquiry see Frega (2011b, 2012b). For a pragmatist account of the relations between science and democracy, see Kitcher (2011b).

  8. 8.

    However, in line with the German reception of Peirce, Lamla speaks rather of Kommunikationsgemeinschaft (community of communication). See Lamla (2013a, 348).

  9. 9.

    Serrano Zamora (2016) asks this question with reference to social movements.

  10. 10.

    This is a classical topos of realist theories of democracy. Among recent publications that have restated the point, see Somin (2016), Cain (2014), Achen and Bartels (2016).

  11. 11.

    See Dorf and Sabel (1998). Ansell (2011) articulates a similar perspective by observing the constant and recurring tensions which exist between centralization and decentralization in contemporary organization theory. Also Knight and Johnson (2011) insists on the benefits of coordinated decentralization, considered as the specific advantage of democracy as a system for the coordination of collective action. More recently, STS scholars have begun to study political institutions as experimental organizations in ways highly compatible with the pragmatist assumptions here sketched. For an overview, see Law and Williams (2014).

  12. 12.

    As remarked above, the tension between generality and context is a distinguishing feature of institutionalist approaches.

  13. 13.

    For an examination of the relationship between these discourses and pragmatist epistemology, see Frega (2006).

  14. 14.

    See Dow (2003) for an overview.

  15. 15.

    For an examination of the pragmatist theory of inquiry in relation to evolutionary epistemology, see Frega (2011a).

  16. 16.

    See Caspary (2000) for an account of the place of dramatic rehearsal in Dewey’s ethical and political theory, and McVea (2006) for an extension of this approach to moral dilemmas in business ethics.

  17. 17.

    For an overview of positions in this tradition, see Wright (2010).

  18. 18.

    On pragmatism and utopia see Levitas (2008), McKenna (2001).

  19. 19.

    For a critique in line with the normative core of political pragmatism, see (Frega, 2018).

  20. 20.

    See, for example, Ostrom (1990), North (1990).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, Germany

    Roberto Frega

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  1. Roberto Frega
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Frega, R. (2019). A Democratic Experimentalist Theory of Institutions. In: Pragmatism and the Wide View of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18561-9_8

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