The historically informed study of participatory mechanisms in the Indian capital, New Delhi, shows that democracy resides less in procedural engineering, whether participatory or electoral, than in the mobilizations that take advantage of it.
To increase citizen participation and political responsiveness, today new civic tech claims to be ‘hacking’ democracy. Going beyond their immediate appeal, can these technologies deeply transform politics? What project do they propose?
The president of the Brazilian Political Science Association, an expert of democratic innovations, discusses how Brazilian political scientists are taking stock of the Workers Party president’s curtailed electoral mandate in favor of Michel Temer and how it impacts their research orientation.
Can fresh air come from young democracies like Taiwan and civic-minded hacktivists like Audrey Tang? This interview shows that both help renew democratic practices in providing sophisticated collaborative, participatory and deliberative tools.
Democracy is not the government of the people, by the people. Rather, it is a permanent process of conquering new rights. This is the argument of Catherine Colliot-Thélène’s book, which examines the tension, found throughout democracy’s history, between individual emancipation and political affiliation.
The June protests which shook Brazil in 2013 stunned the world. This dossier, published by Books&Ideas, discusses the main issues at the core of these protests, analyzing them in the light of previous mobilizations and explaining why they are essential to the understanding of contemporary Brazil.
Europe is inventing a new form of citizenship founded not in government participation but in the achievement of specifically European rights and in a political debate increasingly geared to European issues, evidencing, Justine Lacroix asserts, if not the existence of a European people, at any rate that of a political Europe.
Hélène Landemore : Bernard Manin and Nadia Urbinati, you both have written books with apparently similar titles, respectively The principles of representative government (1997) and Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (2006). I would like to organize the discussion around the question of whether representative democracy is an contradiction in terms or the true essence of democracy. I will break down the theme into more manageable questions.
