Global polycrisis can be tackled by institutional innovation towards democratic efficacy

How do we understand the multiplicity of crises the world is currently facing? This paper presents a new thesis: They are all interconnected and can be traced back to the single root cause of an outdated understanding of democracy. “Partitioning representation”, making one mark on a ballot every few years and having every world citizen represented just by their government in supranational affairs, is no longer effective. It was successful in Western societies and world society in the 1950s to 1980s because group identities enabled the generation of democratic self-efficacy among citizens. Individualism, mediatization and globalization have ended that. Instead, we need to give more responsibility to citizens and civil society in the political process, a model that is referred to as Civil Democracy. It provides the essential tools to shift from escalating problems to solving them.