Towards an architecture of democratic infrastructures

Without conditions to express themselves in a democratic way, citizens resort to expressing themselves in anti-democratic ways. Voter turnout drops, and far-right populist parties grow (Cf. Habermas 2018). The paths that a vote travels before it is cast in a voting booth, influence its outcome: is it cast at all, or does a voter feel that their voice does not matter? Is it a protest, a choice out of habit, or hope? The informal dimension of democracy – everything that happens before the voting booth – is crucial for how sentiments and experiences are expressed politically, especially at a time when feelings of being ‘left behind’ are weaponised politically (Koekoek and Zakin 2023; Hochschild 2016). Yet democracy is often equated with formal institutions like elections, and political theorists and architects often focus on formal democracy, overlooking spaces where democracy is practiced on an everyday basis (Tully 2008; Forman, Owen, and Tully 2022; Von Redecker 2021; McNay 2022). Despite their importance for a well-functioning democracy, and for understanding current challenges, informal democratic practices remain understudied. In addition, everyday gathering spaces are neglected and underfunded.
Towards an Architecture of Democratic Infrastructures explores the importance of spaces that connect informal and formal democratic practices of political articulation. The premise of the PhD thesis is that certain material and practical conditions are needed to express lived experiences or sentiments in a democratic way, doing justice to plurality and equality. I refer to these conditions as democratic infrastructures. In the absence of such spaces and relations, far-right populism has become the dominant route to politically articulate feelings of loss or fear. We can understand this in terms of what Bonnie Honig calls the “shock-politics two-step” of deprivation and oversaturation (2021, 14). Neoliberal policy hollowed-out the contexts, including community centres and cultural spaces, where disagreements can meaningfully be addressed. In their absence, the shock politics of far-right populism then flooded the senses with what seemed like an alternative. As the Dutch political scientist Tom van der Meer observes, the only available choice in this political landscape is between reactionary populism or neoliberal technocracy (van der Meer 2024; Cf. Fraser 2016). But neither option offers a democratic response to the current climate of ecological and political crises (Cf. Koekoek and Zakin 2023; Koekoek 2024a). Populist responses seem to answer to the call of voices claiming to be unheard, but simultaneously erode the conditions for people to articulate and organise themselves democratically. Technocratic responses disavow plurality by presenting a singular knowledge regime as the only reasonable answer.
In seven chapters, the dissertation presents an original theory of democratic infrastructures that is both conceptually and methodologically innovative. It combines conceptual analysis of political articulation and the role of truth (chapters 1 and 2) in politics with three interdisciplinary case studies of democratic infrastructures (chapters 3, 4, 5). These include a history of community centres in Rotterdam from 1918 – 2011; an ethnographic analysis of queer-feminist bookshop Savannah Bay in Utrecht (van der Beek and Koekoek 2024); and a long-term collaboration with participatory community theatre Het Rotterdams Wijktheater (RWT). The final chapters lay out 5 characteristics of democratic infrastructures and put them to the test. Democratic infrastructures make space for self-articulation in one’s own voice, creating vertical and horizontal links amongst formal and informal practices. In analysing democracy as a process that includes practices of institutionalisation and contestation, the thesis draws from both deliberative and radical democratic sources. The notion of democratic infrastructures offers a novel theoretical tool linking moments of interruption with formal institutions, bridging this theoretical divide. By focusing on everyday and informal practices of democracy, my research provides a concrete way out of the democratic deadlock of anti-democratic populism and technocracy.