As climate crises intensify, youth inclusion in climate governance becomes increasingly important, for their presence could help mitigate the structural restraints of conventional democracies, which inherently incentivise short-term policies. This dispatch reflects what is happening on the ground and examines youth participation in climate governance, comparing three key youth inclusion models: quota-based (Rwanda), consultative (Finland), and donor-supported (Pakistan). The analysis employs a triangulated analytical framework combining Structural Injustice, Participation Ladders, and Intergenerational Justice Theories. Cross-case analysis demonstrates that all models provide partial but insufficient pathways toward intergenerational accountability and ecological sustainability. The research outlines a Youth Quotas Climate Democracy Framework combining youth quotas with safeguards for autonomy, intergenerational youth councils, and democratic innovations to systemically reconfigure democracy toward more inclusive climate governance for future generations.

The New Prometheans is divided into four sections. Section I, “The new political quadrilateral,” reviews the formation of a new quadrilateral in the United States: right-wing neoliberals, white evangelicals, Trumpian fascists, and rich tech bros. Each folds to some degree into the priorities and ethos of the others to form a larger resonance machine. It is also unstable. Section II, “Dreamscapes of the tech bros,” explores more closely the existential priorities, rage against death, crude understandings of intelligence, and economic patterns of insistence of the tech bros, focusing on quotations from figures such as Marc Andressen, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. After advancing a preliminary critique, Section III, “Steps toward an alternative onto-cosmology,” presents alternative images of nonhuman modes of production, the porosity of knowledge, the element of creative responsiveness in thinking, the ubiquity of events, and the exploration of timescapes. These provide better ways to challenge and displace the shallow and cruel images of human mastery, smartness, computer brain uploads, time, and capitalist expansion. Critique is important but never enough. Finally, in Section IV, we look at how earthbound, entangled humanists can offer an alternative to the dreamscape of escape to Mars.

This Dispatch examines how religious symbolism and anti-migrant mobilization converged in Poland in mid-2025 to perform a sanctified politics of protection. Focusing on Catholic sermons, protests, and citizen border patrols, it shows how exclusion is recast as moral duty and care. Drawing on publicly circulated materials, the analysis develops the concept of affective legitimacy to capture moments when moral rightfulness is enacted through emotion, ritual, and ethical vocabularies as institutional trust wanes. The Polish case is treated as a diagnostic vignette of an emergent repertoire in which protection is felt rather than procedurally justified, highlighting how democratic authority can be reconfigured through affective publics rather than liberal-democratic accountability.

When it comes to making political decisions about religion, decision-makers often rely on the testimonies of two kinds of religious experts: religious leaders and academic experts of religion. While such religious experts have epistemic authority for questions of religious identification and religious orthodoxy, their expertise is the wrong kind in a religiously neutral state. Questions of religious identification unfairly treat religion as being uniquely special and questions of religious orthodoxy give priority to religious traditions over individuals. Instead, only the subjective importance of commitments matters for cases of religious freedom, and only the objective interpretation of religious establishment matters in cases of religious establishment. Religious experts having no epistemic advantage here, they should not be playing any special role in making decisions about religion.

This article examines the intertwined political rationalities of “Islamism prevention” and democracy promotion in state-led programs in Germany. Drawing on critical scholarship on prevention, democracy promotion, and securitization, the article pursues two interrelated arguments. First, it shows that the politics of distinction between “Islam” and “Islamism” is not merely epistemological but constitutes a governing tool. Such distinctions racialize Muslim minorities by measuring them against unmarked standards of “proper” religion. Second, the article argues that democracy promotion programs tied to preventive rationalities depoliticize democracy by framing it as a stable order to be upheld instead of as a contested political project. This displaces deeper exclusions embedded in the modern nation-state and its racialized borders into individualized ideals like resilience, tolerance, or civic virtue.

Debates about the legitimacy of democratic decision-making often treat religion as a central category. In contrast, I propose an institutional account of democratic legitimacy that does not rely on the secular–religious distinction. On this view, religion is not politically special. It is socially special, though not uniquely so. Like science, the arts, or the family, religious practices merit appropriate treatment based on their distinctive characteristics. Thus, rejecting the idea that religion is uniquely special does not preclude democratic states from granting it special treatment. I examine Eisgruber and Sager’s egalitarian account of religious exemptions and argue that the institutional account provides a more compelling explanation of their legitimacy.

This research note critically examines the structural failures of Mexico’s post-2000 democratic transition, arguing that the rise of illiberal populism under the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) is not the cause but the consequence of a stalled and superficial democratization process. While formal electoral procedures were strengthened, underlying issues such as state capture, elite dominance, widespread corruption, and socioeconomic exclusion remained unaddressed. By reducing democracy to procedural minimalism, political elites failed to deliver substantive democratic outcomes, eroding institutional legitimacy, and fueling public disillusionment.

Working with a national U.S. sample and data collected from our work with the nonprofit bridging organization Living Room Conversations, we counter the assertions of conflict profiteers. People in the U.S. are far less polarized than imagined, there is a great deal of trust in the election system, and a subsequent “reveal” strategy of this common ground thus becomes as, if not more, important than the need to “bridge” imagined chasms between citizens. With this strategy in place, those interested in or involved with bridging can further set the conditions for democratic dialogue by designing interventions that involve more and different kinds of people in their work, focusing on long-term impacts, and stretching definitions of participation from dialogue to civic action.

Anthropology meets democratic theory in this conversation that explores indigeneity, diversity, and the potentialities of democratic practices as exist in the non-Western world. Wade Davis draws readers into the ethnosphere—the sum total of human knowledge and experience—to highlight the extinction events that are wiping out some half of human ethnic diversity. Gagnon worries over what is lost to how we can understand and practice democracy in this unprecedented, globally occurring, ethnocide.

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.

Most citizens of representative democracies do not take political decisions in their everyday lives. Although participation in periodic elections, political parties, or social movements varies, above all, according to socio-economic status, taking a political decision is, in general, a relatively extraordinary event for the vast majority of citizens. The everyday political experience of these citizens is rather structured by watching and listening to political elites. Unlike the tenor of democratic theory, this quotidian mode of passively following politics is ocular democracy's starting point. So far, the debate on ocular democracy has emphasized its shortcomings as a normative theory. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, this article illustrates the potential of ocular democracy as an analytical tool in the context of intra-party democracy. Podemos’ intra-party procedures are analyzed by complementing an institutional perspective with ocular democracy, thus showing how a party leader inclined to appear particularly venturesome undermines ambitious forms of intra-party democracy.

Democratic innovation is one way the multiple crises of democracy can be addressed. The literature on democratic innovation has yet to adequately interrogate the role of social movements, and more specifically the movement of democratic imaginaries, in innovation, nor has it considered the specific mechanisms through which movements translate democratic imaginaries and practices into innovation. This article provides a preliminary roadmap for methodological and conceptual innovation in our understanding of the role of social movements in democratic innovation. It introduces the concept of democratic innovation repertoires and argues that: a) we need to broaden our conceptualization and analysis of democratic innovation to encompass the role of social movements; and b) we need to understand how the relationship between democratic movement imaginaries and the praxis that movements develop in their quest to “save” or strengthen democracy can shape democratic innovation beyond movement arenas after mobilizing “events” have passed.

Time is among the most fundamental categories of political and, specifically, democratic life. While time in the sociopolitical world leaves traces in many (subtle) ways, we do not find it among the guiding concepts of democratic theory. This Special Issue, therefore, understands itself as part of a project that traces the centrality of time and temporality in democratic theory and practice. Our goal is to move toward an in-depth discussion of time in democratic theory by unearthing and systematizing the fragments of this emerging agenda. In this editorial, we deepen the status of time in democratic theory. We do this by discussing both the research that explicitly addresses the relationship between time and democracy and the many latent forms of how temporality shapes democratic thinking. Finally, we identify three dimensions of how time is relevant in and for democratic theory, and we locate the contributions to this Special Issue regarding these dimensions.

This article outlines a theoretical framework for interpreting the meaning and function of political protest in modern democracies and develops normative criteria for assessing its democratic quality. To allow for a better understanding of how social structures, legal institutions, and political engagement interact in protest, I combine analytical perspectives from social theory and democratic theory. A useful first distinction, I argue, is between reformist and transformative forms of protest. While reformist protest does not challenge the given framework of the modern democratic order, transformative protest politicizes the basic principles of that order. Finally, I develop four criteria to identify emancipatory traits within protest movements: 1) expanding the circle of those who benefit from the fulfillment of democracy's promises; 2) the establishment of discursive democratic spaces; 3) a balance between dramatization and exchange; and 4) a willingness to become someone else.

In his latest opus, The New Despotism, John Keane continues to challenge existing wisdom in the field of democratic theory and comparative political studies. One of the key insights of the book is that there is nothing inherently democratic about democratic innovations and procedures, and thus they can be used to prop up despotisms, rather than usher in democracy. While this insight comports with existing misgivings about elections, the book stands out in the way it explains the sustainability of using the democratic procedures in the new despotisms. For democratic procedures to further the aims of the new despotisms, the condition of “voluntary servitude” needs to be met. “Voluntary servitude” means that people willingly give in to political slavery, and become accomplices in maintaining the illusion that democratic procedures are implemented (215–222). Keane's achievement is that he creates an analytical ecosystem of interlinked assumptions, observations, conditions, and other logical connectors, which make his model of the new despotism so robust.

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.

Carole Pateman reflects on her fifty years of scholarship in conversation with Graham Smith. The discussion focuses particular attention on Pateman's work on participatory democracy and considers her contributions to debates on political obligation, feminism, basic income, and deliberative democracy.

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.

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.