This article identifies three central axes in the contemporary constellation of democratic theory and practice: (1) redefining the roots of democratic power, or kratos, in response to new challenges to popular participation in democracy; (2) the rescaling of the demos given the growing dissatisfaction with liberal cosmopolitan approaches to global democracy; and (3) the de-parochialization of democracy within a multipolar world in light of democratic erosion in liberal democracies across Europe and the Americas. This article arrives at these axes by way of revisiting the relation of the two concepts constituting democracy's etymological roots—demos and kratos—in recent work in democratic theory. It concludes by urging to move beyond the post-Cold War social imaginary by exploring the question “What demos and kratos for the twenty-first century?”

This issue of Democratic Theory aims to contribute to critical social science by bridging the gap between democratic theory and critical political economy (CPE). Despite a common grounding in a normative commitment to emancipation, these fields have lately spoken past each other. Democratic theory is relatively voluntarist, focusing on the realization of normative principles through institutional design. However, it has often overlooked capitalism's influence on democracy, and accepted the artificial separation of the political and economic realms in ways that constrain the possibilities for democratic expansion. CPE, on the other hand, has developed realist and historical analyses of capitalist constraint and dynamism. It can offer a structural compass for democratic theories’ interventionist energies, while also being moved beyond pure critique by them. The central theme of this issue, “democratizing the economy,” shifts the focus toward a deeper exploration of the potential for democratic designs to transform economic structures.

Is it possible to rescue the concepts of ‘the people’ and popular sovereignty from their use and abuse at the hands of right-wing populist politics? In this article I look at two competing challenges to populist ideas of popular sovereignty. Underpinning a liberal critique of populism is a constrained view of democracy that either rejects any ideal of popular sovereignty altogether or reserves popular sovereignty for hypothetical moments of constitutional justification. The second view, which I call democratic pluralism, defends a dispersed view of popular sovereignty in which the people are conceived of as both inclusive and as ruling. In conclusion, I argue that this second option offers the most adequate answer to the populist challenge.

Our article sheds light on two enduring debates within the cooperative literature: the degeneration thesis and the spillover thesis. While the degeneration thesis suggests cooperatives are doomed to failure, the spillover thesis suggests otherwise, contending that the experience of democratic control furthers social change beyond the cooperative itself. By turning to critical theory, we are able to bring new insights into these conversations. The early Frankfurt School placed a primacy on the subjectivity of social actors, arguing that capitalism serves to impact the consciousness, rationality, and depth-psychology of subjects, acculturating them to market societies. By exploring this in conjunction with the literature on cooperatives, we are able to add weight to the degeneration thesis and to demand further concessions from advocates of the spillover thesis. Ultimately, the article stresses the lack of importance placed to date on subjectivity within cooperative studies and argues that this needs to be remedied.

This article assesses the constraints and capacities for Canadian state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to enhance economic democracy. Constraints include the democratic deficit produced by the commercialization of SOEs, which shifted away from historically privileging the social outcomes of public enterprise, together with the construction of a global governance architecture with binding and enforceable trade agreements that constrain democratic decision-making and state activity. Capacities include opportunities for SOEs to address deleterious economic outcomes through a rejuvenation of the socially oriented public enterprise tradition in areas of vexing policy concern. The article argues that SOEs can be an important component of enhanced extended state democracy through their redistributive outcomes that provide non-market income support for social infrastructure and services.

Hélène Landemore's Open Democracy (2020) offers both a normative conception of popular rule and an institutional schema intended to advance it. This schema is grounded in a normative conception of popular rule that associates democracy with the values of inclusion and equality. But this association misses a historically important dimension of popular rule—popular sovereignty—which requires the people as a whole to play a critical part in decision making. Landemore's dismissal of popular sovereignty informs her institutional schema, which relies upon both sortition and self-selection. It leaves no significant room for the people as a whole to act, either directly (via referenda) or indirectly (via election). Landemore never explicitly defends this dismissal of popular sovereignty from her conception of popular rule. Given the historical importance of this dimension of popular rule, and its continuing intuitive appeal, any such dismissal requires careful justification.

How can we ensure that global public institutions such as those associated with the United Nations will address the pressing global problems of our time without committing abuses of power? In republicanism, participation by citizens is the primary condition for the protection of liberty. In particular, citizens are expected to be vigilant—to maintain awareness of and protest domination when and where it occurs. Global republican scholars such as James Bohman (2007) have been sensitive to this demanding ideal of citizenship. However, the grounds and mechanisms for fostering allegiance to the state—such as a joint history or language, public education, and the practice of joint participation in political decision making—are still largely absent at the global level, and this has implications for the robustness of non-dominating global public institutions. This article considers whether and how globally vigilant citizenship may be encouraged or cultivated in the short- to medium-term.

The increasingly obvious unsustainability of neoliberal capitalism creates an urgent need to understand how societies can meet their needs in a just and sustainable fashion. The new theoretical framework of the “Foundational Economy” may provide answers, as it explores a holistic transformation of essential reliance systems, such as food provision, energy, care, and housing. However, its conceptualization of democratic agency needs to be strengthened.

This article addresses this need by expanding the Foundational Economy framework with insights from the literature on social reproduction theory (SRT) and the solidarity economy (SE). SRT highlights the gendered and racialized hierarchies of essential reliance systems as key targets for transformation, while the SE encompasses participatory and non-capitalist practices that can democratize those systems. This expanded framework is applied to the UK agroecology movement, which aims to build democratic, sustainable, and non-capitalist alternatives to the food system, while subverting its classed, gendered, and racialized inequalities.

We argue for consideration of deliberative democratic pathways to governing infrastructure systems to enable a planned reduction in economic activity. Given the dominant perspective is “infrastructure facilitates growth”, we first consider contemporary criticisms of growth. We critique the large-scale, complex infrastructures implied, and the forms of democratic governance envisaged. Such infrastructures drive forms of economic activity that advocates of degrowth demonstrate are incompatible with attempts to reduce resources consumed by contemporary economies and their emissions. We argue any deliberation on infrastructures must acknowledge they are not simply physical objects but rather bundles of relationships. With dominant economic relationships challenged by the view that infrastructures ought to be managed as commons we argue that the relational perspective sets the stage for deliberation over physical, social, and environmental infrastructure that escapes what are incorrectly assumed to be insurmountable path dependencies.

This article defends a set of three apparently mutually inconsistent claims and shows how they can and should be simultaneously held. First, that one of the most pressing normative problems we face is constituted by the wealth of opportunities for transnational domination—of states by other states, of states and individuals by supranational organizations and institutions as well as transnational corporations, of vulnerable individuals by powerful ones. Second, the most appropriate way to tackle this issue, far from being the implementation of a cosmopolitan agenda, is the strengthening of states and their problem-solving capacities. Third, this agenda toward the (re-)strengthening of states requires a demanding form of transnational solidarity, if one that significantly differs from more traditional liberal notions of cosmopolitan solidarity.

This conversation with Nancy Fraser explores her work on the crises of capitalism, democracy, and participation. Fraser has argued that much scholarship in political science and democratic theory on these issues is hampered by “politicism”—an inclination to view the political in separation from other social spheres, which fails to appreciate the structural nature of contemporary crises. Fraser argues that the political arena is important because it is here that collective regulatory powers are exercised, however it needs to be situated within a broader understanding of the social totality to understand how it is affected by crisis dynamics in other spheres and how it might contribute to attenuating, or resolving, these. Our conversation begins by exploring these arguments in relation to Fraser's recent work on the critique of capitalism, and then traces how this relates to her work on the public sphere, participatory parity, and utopian thought.

The article claims that the dominant interpretations of the current crisis of democracy have many implicit normative assumptions as background and basis, previously established according to particular theories of democracy. Unraveling such assumptions may allow us to understand the theoretical limitations of such approaches as well as point out the politically self-destructive alternatives they project of either returning to the institutional model before the crisis or succumbing to authoritarianism. Examining the case of the functioning of Brazil's political system in recent decades, that initial approach should allow us to understand the specificity of the crisis of democracy in this country. As in the case of dominant explanations of the current crisis of democracy more broadly, the development on Brazil will also show the part that dominant explanations in political science play in it, and how it obscures the understanding of ongoing changes and the fight against the current authoritarian threat.

The constituted legal status of “Union citizenship” has added another democratic static to the European Union's institutional architecture but it is not yet a status of full political empowerment. What is missing is a citizen-centered opening-up of the (technocratically disguised) European level as a political arena. This article argues that the idea of European citizenship can function as a normative reference point for struggles of political empowerment and institutional reform. Democratic innovations such as sortition-based citizens’ panels organized within the framework of the Conference on the Future of Europe have a socializing function, paving the way for a European-wide public debate on issues of common concern and opening up a chance of (re)appropriating the European Union's institutional structure as a political space. But in order to support lasting democratic transformations they must be backed up by institutional reforms that make European political rights more effective.

This article proposes a definition of the concept of postcolonial justice in view of elaborating a fruitful theoretical framework for connecting distinct demands for racial, cultural, epistemic, memorial, and spatial justice that have been emerging on a global scale in the last two decades. The article conceives postcolonial justice as both critical and reparative, maintaining that reparation claims must be considered a crucial pillar in a theory of postcolonial justice. It also argues that postcolonial justice is better understood as a complement to a radically egalitarian conception of global social justice, which is anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. Finally, it concludes that while reparations are relevant for an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial theory of global social justice, the reparative grammar of postcolonial justice is not sufficient to target current distributive inequalities that depend on existing infrastructures of domination. The latter cannot be repaired and should instead be abolished.

This article uses Arash Abizadeh to illustrate the appeal and difficulties of the claim that random selection is a more democratic way to select a legislature than election. It agrees with Abizadeh that representative democracy cannot be reduced to the right of voters to choose their legislators. However, it challenges his view that elections are inherently inegalitarian because they enable voters to discriminate unfairly among electoral candidates and his assimilation of gyroscopic to descriptive representation. Finally, the article highlights the difficulties of justifying random selection while rejecting election on egalitarian grounds. It therefore concludes that democratic equality requires more, not less, attention to the ethics of voting and to the conceptual, moral, and political dimensions of citizens’ claims on elected office.