What is a “Democratic Experiment”?

This paper examines a key concept of democratic experimentalism, asking what is a "democratic experiment"? Starting with Donald Campbell's argument in favor of an experimenting society, I critically examine whether randomized controlled experiments should be the gold standard for democratic experimentalism. I next suggest that a more compatible conception of experimentalism might be found in recent work on design experiments that iteratively improve design through real world application. Avoiding verificationism, Dewey's treatment of experimentalism as a basis for modem democratic authority adopts a more general interpretation of experimentation as a form of cooperative inquiry. Finally, I examine the meaning and application of experimentalism in the area of adaptive management, an approach to natural resource management. This analysis finds many of the same tensions in practice as they are described in theory, particularly between "experimental" and "collaborative" forms of adaptive management, pointing to the challenges of making experiments democratic.1. IntroductionPragmatist philosophy holds experimentation in high esteem. Experimentation is a leitmotif that captures, in a single stroke, the Pragmatist commitment to fallibilism, to active learning through discovery and experience, and to the iterative growth of knowledge. It is not surprising then that recent work in the Pragmatist-inspired social sciences places this leitmotif at the center of their analysis. Under the banner of "democratic experimentalism," social scientists have identified and explored the possibilities of new forms of political practice. But as a richly evocative concept, "democratic experimentalism" also carries with it the intellectual baggage associated with the concept "experiment." In this paper, I will examine this intellectual baggage, taking the idea of "experiment" and "experimentalism" seriously. To do this requires that we examine a number of issues. First, in what sense is the language of experiment and experimentation, derived from the laboratory, useful and appropriate when applied to the social world? Second, what is the meaning of "experiment" when we apply the adjective "democratic" to it? How can a technique designed to isolate the effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable be said to be "democratic"? If we are to take the concept of democratic experimentalism seriously, I will argue, we must directly confront these issues.I think it is fair to say that the literature on democratic experimentalism has taken the idea of experimentalism more in its connotative than in its denotative sense. In the classic article on democratic experimentalism by Dorf and Sabel (1998), experimentalism has a general connotation implied by the key governance processes outlined in their paper - benchmarking, simultaneous engineering, and learning by monitoring. Although never explicitly defined, we can infer from these processes that experimentalism refers broadly to a process of learning from the experience of others. Similarly, in a more recent article applying the concept of democratic experimentalism to EU governance, Sabel and Zeitlin (2008) identify four key features of experimentalist governance: (1) framework goals and measures established through joint deliberation between member states and the EU; (2) lower-level units with the autonomy to address these framework goals and measures as they see fit; (3) regular reporting by lower-level units on their progress in meeting framework goals and measures; and (4) periodic revision of framework goals and measures. Again, the authors do not focus in a literal way on the meaning of experimentalism, but we can infer from their description that experimentation refers to the iterative efforts of lower-level units to devise strategies for meeting framework goals, followed by information pooling about the results of those efforts.It may be something akin to a category error to literally scrutinize a concept like "experimentation" if it is only being used in a connotative way. …