ABSTRACT
Conversations about democracy are everywhere in evaluation currently, prompted by a turbulent global political moment and a renewed reckoning with what evaluation owes to democratic life and vice versa. This closing article takes stock of the special issue’s contributions, tracing three ideas threaded across them: models of democracy and what they mean for evaluation, the long-running tension between incrementalism and ideology, and the implications of the current political environment for evaluation’s present and future. Reading the contributions alongside Chelimsky’s earlier astute observations, we identify what is confirmed, extended, complicated, and superseded in the long arc of evaluation and democracy scholarship. Building on this synthesis, and inspired by Stake’s question of how far an evaluator dare go, we propose that democratic health—the conditions and structures that sustain collective decision-making for the common good—ought to be adopted as a core evaluative criterion.