Increasing Accountability and Reducing Polarization through Evaluative Voting with Dr. Pierre Etienne Vandamme

The Center for Critical Democracy Studies presents: Increasing Accountability and Reducing Polarization through Evaluative Voting with Dr. Pierre-Etienne Vandamme (UC Louvain).

Democracy is a contested concept, which includes representative, aggregative, associative, and deliberative models, among others. These concepts differ to various extents: should democracy be reduced to vote? If voting is to play a major role, what kind of voting systems and voting rules should we favor? What are the role and function of deliberative areas and experimentations? Is democracy undermined by massive economic inequalities? These questions are normative and empirical and require careful investigation, to explore the question of which type of democratic system is most adept at navigating the multifaceted challenges of our era.

Our discussions will scrutinize key conditions such as social trust, homogeneity, solidarity, agreement, and the pursuit of common interests, through the analysis and explorations of key philosophers (Rousseau, Habermas, Rawls, deliberative theories, and so on). Simultaneously, we will analyze challenges arising from radical pluralism of political views, diversity in people and cultural backgrounds, and issues like polarization, distrust, and populism, therefore trying to build bridges between philosophical theorizing and empirical transformations in our societies.