Re-Engaging Normative and Empirical Democratic Theory: Or, Why Normative Democratic Theory Is Empirical All the Way Down

ABSTRACT Historically, many philosophers and social scientists have sharply distinguished between “normative” and “empirical” forms of inquiry. In response, some have called for a re-engagement of these forms of inquiry. Here I offer a novel way of justifying such re-engagement in democratic theory. Drawing on classical pragmatism, I argue that normative democratic theory is a form of practical reasoning, hence inevitably involves empirical inquiry. Thus, in reasoning about what democratic processes ought to look like, we should avoid sharply distinguishing normative from empirical forms of reasoning, just as we should avoid sharply distinguishing theoretical from practical forms of reasoning.