How to Make Democracy More Sustainable

The next session at ECREA 2022 starts with a paper by Gitte Stald, who begins by introducing the notion of sustainable democracy; this concept had ecological overtones before, but more lately we’ve also begun to speak more generally about how to sustain democracy itself – and that may also need innovation to democracy itself. This question is often addressed from a systemic and government perspective, but it is critical to also take into account the citizen perspective, of course.

This research then sits at the nexus between informed citizenship, participation, democratic self-confidence, and trust in information as well as the system itself, all four of which are the conditions for sustainable democracy. And at the centre of these four elements, Gitte suggests, is democratic literacy – especially also for younger citizens, since they are the ones who will make (or keep) democracy sustainable.

But young people are often stereotyped as democratically lazy, unengaged, and uninformed, and their democratic practices may not follow older democratic norms – not least because they are making greater use of digital technologies. This means we need new thinking and democratic innovation.

Gitte’s work pursued this through in-depth interviews with 16 young Danes who were strategically chosen to represent ordinary young people in Denmark. Overall, it found that context matters: personal background was more important than age and gender. With respect to informed citizenship, social media emerged as critically important, but legacy media still remain important, and legacy media sources remained the most trusted. And they felt that it was important for them to be engaged and informed citizens – this is still dutiful citizenship rather than John Hartley’s ‘silly citizenship’.

Democratic participation was also important for them; even if they were still too young to be able to vote, they felt that it was important to actively participate in political discussions at the dinner table or at parties when relevant topics emerged. But uncertainty about the possible reception of such views might prevent them from doing so in social media spaces – this may also reveal poor levels of democratic self-confidence in public participation. Democratic innovation may need to find new means for fostering such self-confidence in young citizens.