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, the paper critically examines whether randomized controlled experiments should be the gold standard for democratic experimentalism. This tradition of experimentalism, it is argued, values the verification of knowledge above other experimental values. In this sense, it differs quite dramatically with the tradition of democratic experimentalism, which has little to say about verification. The paper then suggests that a more compatible conception of experimentalism might be found in recent work on design experiments. Design experiments lack the ambition of the verificationist paradigm to fully control variables, substituting instead a desire to iteratively improve design through real world application. The paper then goes on to examine the meaning of experimentation in the Pragmatist tradition. While some elements of the verificationist paradigm can be found in the writing of Charles Peirce, Dewey’s treatment of experimentalism as a basis for modern democratic authority adopts a more general interpretation of experimentation as a form of cooperative inquiry. The final section of the paper examines the meaning and application of experimentalism in the area of adaptive management, a popular and well-studied approach to natural resource management. This analysis finds many of the same tensions in practice as described in 1 The reflections in this essay were prompted by conversations with Gerry Berk, though he cannot be held responsible for the positions that I ultimately take. theory, particularly between “experimental” and “collaborative” forms of adaptive management. These tensions point to the challenges of making experiments democratic.