PD Dr. Hanno Scholtz
Universität Zürich
Soziologisches Institut
Andreasstrasse 15
CH-8050 Zürich
http://www.suz.uzh.ch/scholtz
hanno.scholtz@uzh.ch
Curriculum Vitae (english) (PDF, 433 KB)
Publications
Publications on researchgate
Rethinking Democracy for Individualized Societies
My research focuses on institutional innovation for democratic renewal. I investigate how core institutions of industrial society—originally designed to group individuals into stable categories—are now misaligned with increasingly individualized and networked societies. This misalignment weakens democratic legitimacy and responsiveness, and contributes to polarization, social fragmentation, the ascent of populism, and the inability to tackle global challenges.
My central concept is Civil Democracy: a model of scalable participation that enables individuals to take part meaningfully in collective decisions, while drawing on trusted civil society actors for support and representation. This approach responds to the crisis of democratic efficacy—the sense that one’s voice does not count—and offers a digitally implementable institutional model for the 21st century.
Three recent publications explore this agenda:
- Polarization and Partitioning Representation: How an Overlooked Aspect of Contemporary Democracy Leads to Polarizing Societies(Sociology Compass, 2024)
- Global polycrisis can be tackled by institutional innovation towards democratic efficacy (Discover Global Society, 2024)
- Large-Scale Democratic Policy Design: Including Populations in Policy Design Processes (Policy Design and Practice, 2025)
All three are part of the foundation for my forthcoming book Rethinking Democracy (de Gruyter, expected late 2025), which offers a new theoretical and practical framework for democratic governance. A pre-publication summary and provisional outline of the book are available here.
My work on these questions started in Berlin and Mannheim in the 1980s and 1990s, and I had the luck to continue it at SUZ in the 2000s, in an environment that allows to combine analytical theory with quantitative empirical research, and I encourage my students to balance methodological discipline with imaginative exploration.
In parallel to academic work, I help build prototypes of Civil Democracy platforms and advise actors interested in institutional transformation in crisis regions such as the Middle East and Eastern Europe.