How can the ideal of deliberative democracy be put into practice? A collective work analyses the “deliberative turn” in theories of democracy and outlines pathways for how deliberation could be implemented in mass democracies where public opinion continues to be shaped by the media and political parties.
The 2017 legislative election, which resulted in a landslide victory for La République en Marche, brought up the question of change in the political profession. Étienne Ollion shows that the National Assembly under Macron has done little to renew political practices, often sidelining newly elected members.
With taxpayer suffrage abolished and universal suffrage achieved, political participation in our democratic societies should no longer be conditioned on property ownership. However, as Timothy Kuhner shows, politics remain subservient to capital.
Nowadays, criticism of Europe has become the outlet for democratic disarray. While disintegration threatens the European Union, what are the forces opposing it, and what are they going after exactly?
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?
The history of the vote reveals that election was not born with modern representative government, but that elections were held in the Middle Ages. It also reveals that designation by election is not the end of history in our democracies but that other methods may be considered.
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.
Although a useful instrument of representative government, a referendum is not the embodiment of direct democracy that many like to believe. It is an act of acclamation rather than real participation in state affairs, and should be restricted by legal provisions that limit its scope.
To understand the concept of political representation, Roger Chartier, the historian of the book, proposes to relate it to the different meanings encompassed by the French term “représentation,” from its broadest sense—to show an absent object—to its legal and political sense—to hold someone’s place.
The current strikes and mass protests in Brazil are part of a global wave of struggles against traditional political institutions and the notion of leadership. This essay highlights the absence of any clear political project answering the demands coming from the streets.
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.
In June 2013, Brazil faced an unprecedented wave of protests. First denouncing the rising fare of public transportation, the June protests gained momentum, showing that Brazilians craved for no less than a complete political reform. Assessing the legacy of this social movement, this essay points to the limits of citizen participation as it was implemented in Brazil in the preceding decades.
In order to better grasp protests and social movements in China, whose number has impressively swollen in recent years, Books&Ideas presents a dossier on the evolution of social mobilization and on the representation of social instability in this country.
The recent biography of Malcolm X provides us with a compelling intellectual history of the charismatic leader. Marable’s critical reevalution of Malcolm’s biography traces his ideas back to a long history of social and religious movements within African American society.
How do you renounce unanimity to embrace the majority principle? How do you ward off the dissastisfaction of a minority defeated by vote? Those problems haunted the Middle Ages, the system of orders and ranks of which made room for the majority principle in many of its central institutions. For historian Olivier Christin, we need to reassess this era’s contribution to the origins of the kind of political decision-making that is associated with the democratic revolution.
In States of Credit, David Stasavage explains why city-states were able to create long-term debt as early as the 13th century, whereas territorial states began to do so only in the 16th century. This research has major implications for our understanding of state formation and economic growth.
The indignados movement signals people’s current dissatisfaction as regards political representation. Though pessimistic as to the political outlets of that mobilization, French political scientist Loïc Blondiaux calls for a democratization of democracy and offers to combine experimental democratic forms to complement elections.
The current world-wide demand for “real” democracy as embodied in the Indignados (15-M) movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement reiterates long-lasting frustrations as regards representative government and the incompleteness of democratic experiences throughout the world. This dossier gathers interviews and essays by renowned scholars on the conception of democracy as an on-going experience and not as a finished model.
As a counterbalance to the simplistic temptations of the populism that is currently spreading within European democracies, Pierre Rosanvallon invites us to complicate our notion of democracy and make it polyphonic, because the people do not all speak with one voice.
The scandal over expenses and the recent revelations about the corruption of former Labour MPs have seriously weakened the legitimacy of British political leadership. Florence Faucher-King retraces the main episodes and factors that have led to an unprecedented crisis of representation in the country of parliamentary government.
Our consumption never stops increasing and the planet is bled dry. Relying on technological progress for our salvation is an illusion. For the solution is political: We must seek to refound our representative democracy.
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.
