Jack Birner, professor emeritus at University of Trento, Department of Sociology and Social Research, gave a talk for the Workshop “Democracy in the real world, Epistemic challenges and behavioural insights, Pisa, 20 November 2025. The discussion of Popper’s four paradoxes related to democracy leads to a distinction between two models or types of democracy, i.e. Deliberative Democracy and Critical Democracy. These correspond more or less with what we call Representative or Conflict Democracy and Consensus Democracy.
Hereby a list of the paradoxes:
P1: The paradox of democracy (this is the risk of the dictatorship of the majority discussed in WP1).
P2: The paradox of freedom
P3: The paradox of sovereignty
P4: The paradox of tolerance
P5: The paradox of representation
P6: The paradox of the popularity of DD (Deliberative Democracy, aka participatory democracy)
P7: The paradox of information
P8: The paradox of truthfulness
P9: The paradox of time, or of the time horizon
P10: The paradox of the success of democracy
P11: The paradox of the attractiveness of democracy
P12: The paradox of populism.
In his talk he starts from Plato, Popper and Hayek. A few extracts to think about
“Popper proposes to replace Plato’s question of who should rule by the question: “How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?”
“Prepare for the worst, aim for the best. We may call this Popper’s maximin rule. And in fact, a guiding principle of his social and political philosophy is the idea that instead of the state having the task of maximizing the happiness of its citizens, it should limit itself to reducing their suffering. John Watkins has coined the label of negative utilitarianism for this.”
It seems to us that the Swiss democratic system has foud a way to implement this in reality by having a system that must provide for all citizens and obtain their approval. This avoid the conflicts whereby the winner takes all and mainly looks for the special interest of who has elected them.
Source: https://www.academia.edu/145145144/Some_paradoxes_of_democracy
Also have a look at the other work of Jack Birner.