The field of democracy studies—which includes democratic theory, democratization, and many traditional inquiries in political theory/science—is far more short-sighted than it needs to be or even should be. Democracy’s researchers, for all their insights, continue to study only fragments of democracy in isolation from each other. TheSciences of the Democracies proposes a means to study democracy more holistically. It begins by describing five sources of knowledge that can be tapped by researchers to better understand democracy & cognate terms—or, hereafter, “the democracies”. These sources are (1) individual people, (2) groups of people, (3) non-textual media, (4) texts, and (5) non-humans. This book details how pursuing the inclusion of these five sources across temporal, spatial, cultural, linguistic, and species contexts – or what we term the“ethno-quantic domain” – leads to the discovery of democratic practices and institutions hitherto unknown or unfamiliar to the conventional “Western” mind. It also promises to generate a new class of democratic theorist (the “Fourth Theorist”) and the potential for generating better-founded—that is, less arbitrary and more inclusive—democratic theories. The book takes pause to consider the philosophical, institutional, educational, and methodological difficulties of the scientific understandings and undertakings it proposes. The authors’ ambition is to offer a touchstone text for government/public officials; citizens, residents and visitors; researchers and practitioners; and philanthropists(big and small) who are participating in what is an already burgeoning global discussion on how to study and practice democracy equitably and differently.
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