Bremen Human Space Exploration Seminar
Guest: Prof. Dr. André Bächtiger
Professor for Political Theory, Department of Social Sciences, University of Stuttgart, Germany
The talk presents the DDME (Designing Democracy on Mars and Earth) project which sets up a bottom-up design to obtain a deeper understanding of citizens’ democratic preferences (principles and designs). DDME explores how citizens imagine “ideal” democracy (on “Mars”) and mend “real” democracy (i.e., how they would reform the political systems they live in (on “Earth”)) when they had the chance to reflect or deliberate on the pros and cons of the various conceptions and schemes of democracy. DDME is the first large-scale project to delegate democratic designing to citizens adopting a systematic and global approach where citizens together with democratic theorists reflect on advanced theoretical inputs (e.g. problem-based thinking on democracy) and think creatively about optimal democratic designs. The talk will present first results but also involve a creative part where the audience designs democracy on Mars.
André Bächtiger is a Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Stuttgart. His research focuses on the challenges of mapping and measuring deliberation and political communication as well as understanding the preconditions and outcomes of high-quality deliberation in the contexts of both representative institutions and mini-publics. His new research – sponsored by an ERC Advanced Grant “Designing Democracy on Mars and Earth” (DDME) – focuses on how to design future democracy, taking a problem-based and citizen perspective. His research has been published by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press as well has appeared in journals such as Science, American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research and the Journal of Political Philosophy.
Bremen Human Space Exploration Seminar
The seminar takes place every third Wednesday of the month at 13:30 CET/CEST online via zoom and consists of a 40-minute talk followed by a 40-minute discussion.
The zoom link for the meeting will be send via email to all registered members of the space-exploration mailing list. You can register here.
