Hakeem Jefferson argues that the United States is experiencing a democratic backsliding. He calls for deep institutional reforms that aim at better reflecting the American public, such as expanding the number of judges in the Supreme Court or having a US Senate apportionment based on state population.
Upon the request of Corsican leaders, Rousseau undertook the writing of what would later be published as Projet de constitution pour la Corse. This new critical edition shows that this unfinished work requires a new title and a new understanding of Rousseau’s goals in undertaking it.
Is the Supreme Court democratic? No, replies Jeremy Waldron, who considers that the judicial branch should not substitute itself for citizens to determine their rights. But is his view of the separation of powers still valid today?
Seven years have passed since the start of the economic and political crisis in Iceland in 2008. Attempts at reforming the country’s constitution, the heterodox positions it has taken in matters of finance, and the political dynamism of its civil society have certainly aroused curiosity; however, these astonishing facts have yet to draw the interest of political science.
How can it be legitimate for a judge to overturn a law passed by the people’s representatives? Isn’t that judge interfering with majority rule? The French jurist Dominique Rousseau shows that a constitution is not a barrier to democratic expression, but an opportunity for that expression to become richer and deeper.
The Orban government has enacted sweeping changes that have raised the specter of autocracy in Hungary: is the European Union about to have a dictatorship among its member states? For Andrew Arato, even enemies of the new regime should recognize that it is still only a demokradura, a hard democracy: only then will they be able to go back on the current reforms.
A world-famous legal scholar, Bruce Ackerman wants to reinvigorate citizenship in today’s democracies. Here, he reexamines the intellectual foundations of his work, and some of the pragmatic applications he designed with others. His principle is to always consider how the state intervenes in the autobiography of every man.
In this article derived from a conference given at Princeton University in November 2008, Pierre-Etienne Will discards culturalist arguments justifying the absence of a democratic regime in China and searches for “sprouts of democracy” in Chinese history.
Constitutional courts are more and more important in our lives. But how can they be legitimate? Pasquale Pasquino shows that political theory cannot ignore the existence of these new bodies, any more than it can ignore the limitations of majority decisions.
