A Democratic Ethos for Democracy Research

in Heyne, Lea and Ewert, Christian (eds.) (2022): PhD Confessions: From Democracy Scholars, Students, and Supporters, Norderstedt: BoD, p.41–46. I always had a strong sense of social justice. In school, I was known for defending less popular kids and standing up to bullies. When I started studying political science at the University of Vienna, I was looking for a “political home.” Although I engaged with subjects such as the political economy or the social state, it wasn’t until I came across radical democratic thinking that I felt like I had arrived. Strangely, it took a long time for me to realize the deep gap between these radical democratic convictions and the academic structures and practices within which I studied them. In other words, I was taught about equality in the midst of hierarchy. Academia appears as an exclusive black box, who admits only a select group of people, which first must pass a series of gatekeepers. Academia works according to neoliberal capitalist principles which stage an increasingly gamified competition between researchers. The system disciplines its participants into thinking and acting in a particular way. As a result, the knowledge produced through academia is rather uniform.