Generative Democracy: New Foundations for Democratic Theory

This book presents a new framework for democratic theory and institutional design, directed at political theorists, philosophers, economists, and others. A value theory of institutions should have three layers: a principle of evaluation, an analysis of institutions, and a resulting evaluation of institutions. Along these lines, the book first recasts existing approaches for evaluating institutions, such as Proceduralism, Instrumentalism, and Epistemism. It then identifies a fundamental dilemma for institutional design: should one focus on how institutions fit people’s psychology, or on how institutions change people’s psychology? Existing theorising and modelling practice lean to the former, and often neglect the latter entirely by taking people’s psychology to be fixed. However, psychological reactions to institutions are central causes of institutional failures and the current ‘democratic crisis’. Theorising and formal modelling cannot ignore this. The book thus introduces a new approach, Generativism, which takes psychological reactions seriously by regarding institutions primarily as influences on people, rather than merely as ‘external tools’. This leads to a new ‘generative’ defence of democracy: suitably designed democratic social orders induce more fruitful mental changes than rival social orders. The book also provides first steps towards incorporating mental change into models of institutional design.