This article addresses the Chinese debates on utopian and dystopian modes of democracy. It opens the black box of the one-party state and delves below the surface of the People's Republic of China's official statements on “democracy” (e.g., “people's democracy,” “democratic centralism”) by focusing on the often-overlooked “democracy” contemplations within the highly fragmented Chinese academic communities. These reflections indirectly respond to the debates and governance practices in other world regions—with the US being referred to as the main “mirror” image. The article mainly focuses on the first two office terms of Xi Jinping. Developments since this re-appointment as head of the Chinese party-state in 2022 (and 2023), however, indicate that the “democracy” frame continues to serve as core element of the Chinese role-identity narratives.

This article contributes to the growing literature around the idea of a politics of becoming by emphasizing its deconstructive dimension. It advances the notion of “detachment,” which articulates different angles of such deconstructive dimension. Detachment can draw from three different concepts: displacement (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe), unframing (Judith Butler), and disidentification (Jacques Rancière). After highlighting the key points of each of these concepts and the way they contribute to an encompassing notion of detachment, the article moves to a brief illustration of how these concepts are relevant to make sense of contemporary protests, focusing specifically on the Brazilian June Journeys of 2013.

Jacques Rancière's discussion of disidentification provides an important account of how existing inegalitarian structures and hierarchically ordered identities may be challenged. However, Rancière treats disidentification as a discursive phenomenon, centered on naming. As an explanation of how the invisible might become visible, it is problematic to overlook the body, since appearance requires our bodies to be seen, to become visible. Drawing on discussions of the subject-in-process and the idea of identity as both enfleshed and performatively constituted, this article seeks to enrich Rancière's discussion of disidentification by focusing attention on its embodied dimensions. It does so by exploring, through an analysis of the Miss America protest of 1968, the role of corporeality both in constituting spaces of appearance and in articulating democratic demands for visibility.

Socialist democracy appeared in the theory of democracy as an eminently non-western form of democracy in the period of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The concept of socialist democracy based on the theses that can differentiate socialist democracy from liberal or parliamentarian democracy: (1) the unity of the power of the proletariat, led by its vanguard political force of the communists, and (2) the setting of the framework of democratic decision-making in the field of labor. Socialist democracy was indeed a form of directed democracy beyond that it had systemic aspirations to create an alternative socio-economic model. This article aims to trace the historical-semantic formation of socialist democracy and discuss its main institutions in the years of post-totalitarian socialist Hungary between 1956 and 1989. What is remarkable in the case of Hungary is that the development of socialist democracy was accompanied by economic reforms to the planned economy from the first half of the 1960s. Thus, socialist democracy focused on the democratization and institutional system of the workplace, mainly as factory democracy and cooperative democracy. With the liberalization and capitalization of socialist economy in the eighties, however, these forms failed to manage the problems of economic incentives and social atomization.

Statecraft, under democratic principles in Tanzania in particular, is often considered as a total heritage from former colonial masters. Julius Kambarage Nyerere (1922–1999) disputed this by advancing an African theory of democracy, articulated to inform modern statecraft in Tanzania. His theory advances a form of democracy characterized by a merger of some practices from the African past and others from the western world. In this way, he articulated the centrality of democracy in organizing public affairs without compromising its African origin but also acknowledging the influence of other democratic cultures in the modern organization of a polity. This article articulates Nyerere's contribution to African democratic discourse and the extent to which his theory of democracy is relevant in the organization of contemporary politics and democratic trajectories in Tanzania and Africa in particular.

Hunger striking is a form of protest that escapes conventional forms of political participation. I argue that as a spectacular performance of death, the hunger strike not only draws attention to a particular cause or exert moral pressure on an opponent but can galvanize and strengthen a nascent political identity. Drawing on the example of the hunger strike of suffragette Marion Wallace-Dunlop, which I argue performatively constructed the identity of the disciplined “true suffragette,” I explain the hunger strike as a political becoming. Undertaken behind bars, by those denied citizenship rights, this protest should be understood not necessarily as the free expression of an already existing member of the demos but instead as a way of becoming a political subject while contesting and reconfiguring political boundaries.

In this article I recuperate a structure-oriented account of a politics of becoming from the work of Iris Young, one that rejects identity politics to focus instead on redressing structural injustice. Young offers a theorization of democracy that at once acknowledges our inner multiplicity and our individual capacity to shape our identity, and views equality and inclusion as important political goals that require eliminating structural injustice. For Young, fully embracing the multiplicity and fluidity of groups entails a shift away from conceptualizing groups in terms of identity, toward viewing groups as structural positions. Emancipation thus cannot be achieved through including marginalized identities (e.g., through group-based representation) but only through attention to how particular social positions become the site of structural advantage or disadvantage.

If we want to develop a comparative democratic theory, we need a methodology that is open for unusual data, suspends previous knowledge, and develops concepts inductively. We argue that Grounded Theory as a general methodology can be used to systematically develop a comparative democratic theory strictly rooted in empirical data. In this article we first present and discuss concepts of Grounded Theory and then use 17 exemplary speeches of politicians from three centuries and five continents to illustrate how such theory development, including unusual sources, proceeds. Finally, we discuss the results by focusing on promises and perils of applying Grounded Theory as a strategy for developing a comparative democratic theory.

The article theorizes the sovereign in recent digital democratic experiments. It demonstrates how the prevailing perspective is based on a liberal-technocratic understanding that overlooks important questions of organized collective power and identity. To address these limitations, the article contrasts the liberal-technocratic framework with a radical democratic approach. This alternative allows for reimagining the digital sovereign in two ways. First, it shifts the focus from the sovereign as a mere aggregation of networked individuals with fixed identities to one that opens up opportunities for ongoing identity construction and transformation. Second, a radical democratic approach emphasizes that the digital sovereign emerges from the individual and collective capacity to organize power.

This article formulates the concept of democracy as a configuration to overcome the rigid universalist, liberal-proceduralist dominated conceptions of democracy that define invariant core elements and combine them with culturally individualistic features. Instead, the approach presented here focuses on the basic principles behind democracy. Lincoln's often-criticized broad definition of democracy as “government by, of, and for the people” provides the opportunity for an open, transglobal approach that focuses on the premise of political self-efficacy for all citizens and portrays democracy not as a mechanism but as a way of life. Political self-efficacy can be institutionalized in different ways, so this contribution refers to specific models of democracy (e.g., liberal, republican, or communitarian).

In this discussion of democracy's conceptual pluralism(s), Frederic Schaffer holds a guiding lamp to show what researchers should take into consideration in the study of “the democracies” and their “rough equivalents” as can be found across language, culture, time, and space. This act generates a focus on practical tactics in research and knowledge dissemination. Is it, for example, best to establish an international committee of democracy's epistemic experts to gather, code, and organize the meanings of democracy and their rough equivalents as can be found in the world? And, with such a committee or something altogether different, how can we relate this information to pro-democracy institutions and activists when so many appear to be interested only in liberal conceptions of democracy? The discussion ends with considerations of an open range of research and activism in the fields of democratic theory, comparative politics, and democratization.

Incels (short for “involuntarily celibate”) have recently gained notoriety for their aggressive, often violent, misogyny, yet incels were not always an antidemocratic social group. They thus pose a challenge for thinking about democracy and identity in (anonymous) digital environments: how can we create spaces for marginalized social groups while ensuring the resulting identities remain democratic? While many scholars point to technological affordances or corporate content moderation policies as providing some solutions, in this article I propose a more democratic approach. Drawing from incel wikis and archived forum posts from two early incel communities—IncelSupport and LoveShy—I argue that a community's social norms, and the moderation practices required to sustain them, are user-directed interventions that have outsized effects in shaping group identities in democratic ways.

Almost three decades after its first publication, Anne Phillips reflects on the Politics of Presence in the context of contemporary developments from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. Granting the importance of a contingent and intersectional understanding of presence, she reemphasizes the necessity of descriptive representation. Phillips reflects on questions of anonymity, essentialism, the multiple self, unconditional equality, and the current role of feminist research in democratic theory. She also opens perspectives toward mending the divide between a politics of recognition and a politics of distribution.

Hans Asenbaum's open-access book The Politics of Becoming: Anonymity and Democracy in the Digital Age takes on some of the biggest questions in feminist and radical democratic theory. It asks, how we should understand who we are, and what implications our answer to that question has for democracy.