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This article proposes a reflection on the polarity, widely discussed by modern political and juridical thought, between direct democracy and representative democracy, presenting the latter as capable of structuring the politic relationships and of conveying the information necessary for the assumption of weighted relative deliberations to the management of public affairs., Magisterium, V. 1 (2022)

This essay deals with the long crisis of the Italian parliamentary system and posits that it may undermine representative democracy itself. The study presents an analysis of the events that marked the first two years of the XVIII Italian legislature in order to identify four ways in which parliament itself may be undermined. All of them took place during the last quarter of a century: the attack on the representativeness of the Chambers as well as parliamentarians; the debasement of confidence procedures and the lack of accountability of the Government towards Parliament; the reduction and marginalization of public debate within Parliament; the displacement of the legislative function of the Chambers in favor of the Government. These phenomena should not be considered as mere adaptations or minor changes in the political system. In fact, they question the fundamental principles of parliamentarism and the idea of representative democracy as laid down by the Constitution. This analysis is confirmed by the political events of the XVIII legislature, during which the leaders of the main political forces represented in Parliament predicted the overcoming of the representative principle as a possible outcome to the Italian political crisis. The many attempts to weaken the Parliament stem from the continued loss of value of the Constitutional rules related to the form of government and it also derives from the emerging idea of a democracy meant only to give its consent to rules that come from elsewhere instead of the parliament. This conception degrades representative democracy into a system that merely aims at the appointment of leaders needed to lead the executive branch —understood to be the center of the whole decision-making process— is radically foreign to the paradigm of parliamentarism and it is unable to express a coherent and efficient functioning model of parliamentary form of government. In this context, the strength of the Constitution and the role played by other constitutional bodies have proven to be crucial for the maintenance of parliamentary democracy and for the survival of a representative State as a whole. The Italian context shows how, nowadays, the fate of the representative State depends on the proper functioning of political links between representatives and constituents. It also depends on the possibility to extend the principles of representative democracy to the organization and the internal procedures of those political and institutional players that have proved to be extraneous to those principles, which instead today appear crucial for the life of the constitutional system.

In New Zealand, an AI called Sam is ���preparing��� ��� according to its creators ��� to run for a seat in the next general election. The idea of a total or partial replacement of the political decision-maker with an AI raises, of course, an innumerable series of questions. Firstly, the transparency of the decision-making process itself: who has designed the (algorithmic?) infrastructure, and who can influence it? With what data has it been fed? Does it use machine learning techniques? This idea lends itself easily to an anti-political and ��� in particular ��� anti-parliamentary use, both in the form of technocratic extremism and of an exquisitely ���populist��� message in terms of brutal simplification of a complex decision-making process. This kind of replacement is still a sort of Swiftian provocation: however, it already allows to question what is commonly perceived as lacking in the mechanisms of representative democracy., BioLaw Journal - Rivista di BioDiritto, N. 1 (2019)

The research analyses the efficiency of the representative democracy model in the land policies definition. The representative model is based on the assumption that people (public) are not able to manage their interests, but need the presence of representatives in order to assure the common interest. The paper focuses on the comparison between social preferences and institutional preferences. The hypothesis is that in the case there is a wide divergence of preferences between institutional and social preferences, it means that institutional actors have a different perception of priority in comparison to the society. To analyse the divergences concerning land policies authors have used a questionnaire designed in order to consider the main management strategies on rural development. The questionnaire - subdivided into thematic sections (forest functions, strategies of territorial development, renewable energies and forest fire control strategies) - has been submitted face-to-face to the representatives of local institutions and to the non-institutional actors. The results of the interviews have been compared statistically considering the two groups of actors, with the purpose of emphasizing the convergence and divergence on land policies. The study area is the forest district of Arci-Grighine in the Oristano department (Sardinia).

This article proposes an analysis of the relationships amongst the crisis of political parties, the insurgence of phenomena such as the cognitive mobilization and the role of participatory and deliberative democracy as frame for new forms of civic engagement. The authors also focus over the transformation of the public sphere and the need for scholars and politicians to go beyond a normative conception of the mediatised public space. The rising of new forms of political parties (cartel party, "presidentialized" party, franchise party) is strongly connected with the partisan dealignment, the crisis of the liberal representative democracy and the deep transformation of the public sphere; in the same time, new forms of active citizenship and civic engagement can replace and/or support the political parties. The participatory and deliberative democracy challenges the old politics and can represent both a tool and a frame for strengthening the new forms of political participation.

Deliberative democracy and the European Convention on Human Rights Theories of deliberative democracy have rapidly become very popular amongst political scientists. The central argument of these theories is that democratic legitimacy of lawmaking does not lie (or does not only lie) in the elected character of Parliaments but in public delib- eration processes. Decisions have to be justified by reasons and reasons have to be publicly debated. Legitimacy also depends on the opportunity for citizens to participate effectively in public debates. In this paper I argue that the European Court of Human Rights can be a key player in promoting a democracy based on public deliberation and that in the last decade the Court has been influenced by this conception of legitimate government. First, I suggest that the Court has promoted political debate by establishing the principle that freedom of expression deserves a higher degree of protection, if it claims to be in the public interest. Second, the Court has also been able to protect the outcome of a deliberative process. In deciding whether or not the State’s interference with an individual’s right is “necessary in a democ- ratic society”, the Court has recently given a certain importance to the deliberative character of a national measure. However this has happened in areas where the State’s margin of appreciation is wide. Furthermore, the analysis also considers how the Court has dealt with three critical questions in the theory of deliberative democracy, namely the ways in which deliberative democracy can be harmonized with representative democracy ; the place of human rights among the preconditions of deliberation; and the place that judicial review (of laws regulating human rights) can have in a deliberative democracy.