ARC Vortrag: Chris Brown, University of Southampton: Exploring Democratic Intelligence: From Epistemic Design in Schools to a System-Level Index

Across OECD countries, democratic systems are operating under increasing epistemic strain: misinformation, polarisation, algorithmic amplification, and declining institutional trust. Policy responses have rightly emphasised strengthening individual competencies such as critical thinking and media literacy. Yet these capacities alone are insufficient unless embedded within institutional conditions that allow high-quality reasoning to shape collective decisions and coordinated action.

This presentation introduces democratic intelligence (DI) as the collective capacity of institutions and societies to reason, learn, and act effectively under conditions of uncertainty and difference. DI emerges from the alignment of individual epistemic capacity (e.g., critical thinking, prospection, network diversity) with epistemic infrastructure: access to trustworthy knowledge, structured dialogue across difference, coordinated decision-making routines, and adaptive learning systems.

Schools offer a strategic entry point for strengthening democratic intelligence. They are institutional microcosms where young people and professionals learn not only disciplinary content, but how knowledge claims are examined, challenged, authorised, and translated into practice. Reframing school leadership as epistemic stewardship highlights the role of leaders in deliberately designing and sustaining these conditions.

Building on this framework, the presentation outlines the development of a proposed Democratic Intelligence Index (DII) - a system-level tool for assessing and strengthening institutional capacity across civic institutions, including education systems. By operationalising democratic intelligence into measurable dimensions, the DII seeks to support comparative insight, system learning, and long-term democratic resilience.

The central claim is straightforward: strengthening democracy requires not only better thinkers, but better-designed institutions - and these institutional capacities can be made visible, benchmarked, and improved. At a time when democratic resilience is increasingly understood as foundational to social cohesion, economic stability, and public trust, the capacity of education systems to cultivate and institutionalise democratic intelligence may become a defining policy priority.

https://arc.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/public-with-recording/

Meeting-ID: 680 4369 9643
Kenncode: 919358