“Democratic Design Under a Veil of Ignorance,” Pierre-Étienne Vandamme, KU Leuven, Belgium

DEMOCRATIC INNOVATIONS WORKSHOP

Abstract: While institutional design usually starts from a given political context to identify a specific problem and try to fix it, there is also value in decontextualized institutional design, to break with path dependency and open the imagination. The book in progress Hybrid Democracy asks what kind of democratic goals and institutions we would choose under a veil of ignorance, and argues that we would have strong reasons to embrace a hybrid form of democracy, combining elections, sortition, and mechanisms of semi-direct democracy. This talk aims to defend this approach and to introduce the main arguments of the book.

Pierre-Étienne Vandamme is FWO Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in political theory at KU Leuven, Belgium. He has published articles on democratic innovations in journals such as Politics & Society, Journal of Public Deliberation and Constellations, and he is currently writing a book called Hybrid Democracy.

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