I have spent the past fifteen years believing in democracy. I researched its mechanisms, designed digital tools for public participation, built platforms meant to give citizens a voice in shaping their cities and their futures.
Today, I find myself in a position I never imagined: defending a prince's claim to governance in Iran over democratic movements. Championing individual vision over collective processes in urban planning. If you had told me in 2009 this is where I would end up, I would have been horrified.
This is not a conversion to authoritarianism. It's the opposite; a desperate attempt to save the outcomes I still care about. Because somewhere along the way, I realized that the words I'd organized my work around, democracy, participation, citizen-centered, had stopped meaning anything specific. They had become what Ernesto Laclau called 'empty signifiers': terms without fixed referents, vessels into which anyone can pour their preferred meaning. And in my experience, in contexts demanding strategic action, they function not as instruments of coalition-building but of paralysis.
The Trap of the Empty Signifier
An empty signifier derives its power from ambiguity. It brings together disparate groups by refusing to specify what it means. Democracy might be the most fiercely defended empty signifier. Democracy can mean a set of institutional mechanisms (elections, representation, rights). It can mean a moral value (equality, voice, dignity). It can mean a historical teleology, the inevitable endpoint of political development. Because it accommodates all these interpretations simultaneously, it creates the illusion of consensus and coherency where none exists.
The coalition it assembles contains people who understand the term in fundamentally different ways, some as practical mechanism, others as moral value, still others as ultimate goal. When one interpretation fails, adherents simply borrow from another. The practical mechanisms don't work? No problem, shift to defending democracy as a value worth preserving, then use that value to justify why we must continue practicing the failed mechanisms. The value itself is questioned? Elevate it to sacred principle, beyond critique. Along the way, they forge unjustified connections between groups that make these shifts seem natural rather than evasive. Each time it retreats, it becomes harder to challenge but easier to excuse.
Consider the formula: "A democratic society is only achievable through democratic means." This is presented as self-evident moral logic. But it is actually a category error. It conflates an end-state (a society with certain characteristics) with a method (a process for making decisions). More dangerously, it prevents us from asking whether the approach achieves the goal, let alone whether other approaches might work better. The cost of this foreclosure is not merely rhetorical.
“Democracy is a least bad form of government!” The Costliest Slogan For Iranians
In Iran, it has cost tens of thousands of lives. After the 1979 revolution established the Islamic Republic, those who opposed the regime united under the banner of democracy.
By the late 1990s, reformists were elected with a promise of removing dictatorship through constitutional revision and institutional change. For eight years, President Khatami, an admirer of Jürgen Habermas, cultivated civil society, encouraged public debate, and promoted non-violent resistance. He even invited Habermas himself to Tehran in 2005.
The regime responded with violence, repression, and the systematic destruction of the very civic institutions the reformists tried to nurture. The escalation was methodical: first, targeted oppression of activists; then, shooting peaceful demonstrators; now, mass killings with no pretense of restraint. By any strategic reckoning, the goal, removing a dictatorial theocracy, had proven incompatible with the method. A rational reassessment would have asked: what other mechanisms might work?
But the crowd that had gathered under the banner of democracy could not let go of the banner. The signifier had accumulated too much moral weight. So it shifted: democracy ceased to be a means to an end and became an end in itself. Intellectuals argued that practicing democracy, even when futile, even when counterproductive, was necessary to preserve democracy as a value.
The consequences were devastating. First, the regime itself was drawn under the umbrella of legitimacy. After all, it held elections. It provided voting. If democracy is measured by the mechanics rather than the result, then a dictator who permits voting can claim democratic credentials. This is the same logic that allows the world's worst polluters to brand themselves as champions of sustainability.
Second, the concept of democracy contracted to its most minimal procedural form: casting a ballot. For a population seeking democracy in face of theocratic rule, it became acceptable to vote for candidates pre-approved by the very regime they sought to dismantle. Why? Because for them at that point, democracy as a value needed to be preserved. They label it a ‘practice of democracy’.
Third, and most insidiously, it made the method untouchable and branded all alternatives as wrong. Any strategy outside the approved framework of peaceful, participatory, deliberative action became morally illegitimate. The goal shifted from removing dictatorship to building civil capacity, a noble aim in abstract, but a catastrophic one when there is no strategy in place to oppose an opponent who is eliminating the civil society you're trying to build.
Fifteen years later, the toll is undeniable. Thousands dead. Civil institutions obliterated. And now, finally, many Iranians are rejecting the tyranny of the signifier. They are willing to consider mechanisms once deemed immoral, because they have learned that words, however beautiful, cannot substitute for effective strategies that can actually deliver a fairer, more inclusive, and tolerant society.
From Countries to Cities
The same paralysis can be spotted in urban planning. After nearly a decade of debate in planning theory, the 1990s produced a general consensus around the term "collaborative planning", a catchall for ideas concerned with democratic management and control of the city. Even by the early 2000s, critics worried about the term's vagueness, arguing that its ill-defined usage distorted understanding of its original aims.
Digital tools gave visibility and credibility to those who conceived of democracy in planning as a mechanism, as platforms, processes, and participatory tools. By 2010, when I began working on the topic, books were already documenting a troubling pattern: these efforts had produced interesting multimedia experiments, but it remained unclear how they influenced actual outcomes or the underlying logic of decision-making. Most initiatives, digital or otherwise, had devolved into data collection exercises.
These criticisms did not trigger a return to procedural planning theories or a rethinking of planning through the lens of decision science. Instead, two strategies emerged to keep democracy alive as a signifier in planning. First, the field popularized planning as small-scale, short-term interventions while abandoning the idea of planning as a strategic, long-term thinking. This shift was justified as more attuned to democratic values. Second, it pivoted from contributing to outcomes to building capacity. Just as voting in a dictatorship becomes a practice of democracy divorced from results, participation (in strategic decision making) became justified, at best as capacity building, at worst as a moral necessity.
Here again, the signifier shifts registers to avoid accountability. When challenged on results, advocates retreat to process: "We empowered voices." When challenged on process, when participation is revealed as performative or tokenizing, they retreat to values: "Inclusion is a moral imperative." The result is a crossroad that rejects legitimate insights from individual expertise while failing to establish any genuine mechanism for meaningful public participation.
What Remains
We must let empty signifiers die. Not the concepts they gesture toward, fairness, inclusion, collective self-determination, but the words that have ceased to mean anything because they have been made to mean everything. When a word becomes a "least bad" slogan, it stops being a tool for progress and starts being a cage.
This is especially critical in fields and contexts that deal with strategic decision-making, where the choices we make, or fail to make, directly shape lives, determine who thrives and who suffers, who lives and who dies. In these domains, paralysis is not a philosophical problem. It is a material one, measured in bodies, in wasted resources, in futures foreclosed. We cannot afford to let words substitute for effective action when the stakes are this high.
