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The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of two political phenomena: populism and technocracy. Often seen as opposites, the two factors are linked by some elements: both are described by their proponents as remedies to the legitimacy crisis that modern representative democracies are going through; both tend to define certain practices and principles of constitutional democracy that are insufficient to ensure effective governance of society; both see as their main remedy a restriction of the classical functions of representation and of the institutions of mediation (parties and parliament among all). Nevertheless, the two phenomena seem to follow the dynamics of opposite extremes: in the phases when the democratic order is increasingly identified with technocracy, the populist democratic eschatology gains confidence on the basis of the promise to return to citizens the power stolen from them by non-elective institutions. We will attempt to identify some key features that unite the two phenomena and we will highlight the differences in principle, the possible relationships as part of a more general democratic vulnus and the different types of impact they have on democracy and its principles.

What are the downstream political consequences of state activity explicitly targeting a minority group? This question is well studied in the comparative context, but less is known about the effects of explicitly racist state activity in liberal democracies such as the United States. We investigate this question by looking at an important event in American history—the mass internment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. We find that Japanese Americans who were interned or had family who were interned are significantly less politically engaged and that this demobilizing effect increases with internment length. We also find that camp experience matters: those who went to camps that witnessed violence or strikes experienced sharper declines. Taken together, our findings contribute to a growing literature documenting the demobilizing effects of ethnically targeted incarceration and expand our understanding of these forces within the U.S.

In recent times, the idea of popular sovereignty has figured prominently in the rhetoric of neo-populist thinkers and activists who argue that legal and political authority must be concentrated in one single body or individual elected by the people to act in its name. The thesis of this article is that, while the notion of popular sovereignty may seem to offer some support to the neo-populist image of democracy, it serves more persuasively to support the idea of a polycentric, constitutional democracy. The constitutional state can be polycentric and yet feature a sovereign. And if this constitutional state is democratic in the sense of distributing power relatively equally amongst individual citizens, thus empowering the people-several, then it will establish the people-corporate in the role of sovereign.

This study deepens our understanding of environmental knowledge production under varying political-economic regimes. While the extant scholarship on undone science, that is the systemic non-production of knowledge, is largely based in liberal democracies in the US and Europe, it elides important differences in the making and unmaking of science elsewhere. Using the case of Peru’s left-leaning military dictatorship (1968–1980), I show how undone science contributed to the 1973 collapse of the world’s largest fishery and one of the most studied fisheries on the planet: the anchoveta (Engraulis ringens). In an effort to reconstruct the fishery and resolve undone science, I also demonstrate how the state collapsed established boundaries by brokering research between previously antagonistic scientific fields and enabling South-South coalitions across Latin America. The evidence presented here illustrates how, during times of crisis, states can nationalize fisheries science, meaning they promote novel scholarship from domestic data sources, among local scientists, and between endemic research institutions. Thus, the main drivers of epistemic change, in this case, are state actors exercising “conventional” practices, undermining the assumption that only bottom-up and “contentious” pressure can do so. This research offers important lessons for future research on state-science relations in the Global South.

Objective/Context: People usually associate democracy with different sorts of values and desirable outcomes. An informed understanding of democracy, however, requires that the public be aware that democracy is a regime in which elections are free and fair, the government is bound by the rule of law, and citizens have equal political rights and civil freedoms. This article is a contribution to the scholarship on the public understanding of democracy as a liberal-electoral regime. The central claim is that an informed notion of democracy reinforces the relationship between perception of integrity in the electoral process and confidence in elections as a core institution in the political system. Methodology: Using survey data, the empirical analysis focuses on the case of Mexico, where several observers identify a crucial puzzle: voters systematically distrust elections that are widely regarded as free and fair. The analysis is replicated in other Latin American countries as well. Conclusions: As would be expected, voters are more likely to trust elections when they perceive that ballots are counted fairly, electoral officials are honest, media coverage is balanced, or women have equal opportunities to run for office. The results confirm, furthermore, that perception of electoral integrity is associated with a greater degree of trust in elections on the condition that voters understand democracy as a liberal regime. Originality: This research shows that an accurate understanding of democracy enhances citizens’ abilities to appreciate the link between electoral integrity and the trustworthiness of elections. Objetivo/contexto: es común que la ciudadanía asocie a la democracia con diferentes valores y resultados deseables. Una comprensión informada de la democracia requiere, sin embargo, que la gente la conciba como un régimen en el que las elecciones son libres y limpias, el Gobierno está limitado por la legalidad y la ciudadanía goza de iguales derechos y libertades. El argumento es que una comprensión informada de la democracia liberal-electoral refuerza la relación positiva entre la percepción de integridad electoral y la confianza en las elecciones. Metodología: con base en encuestas de opinión pública, el análisis empírico se centra en el caso de México, donde se observa una amplia desconfianza ciudadana en las elecciones a pesar de que los comicios suelen ser libres y limpios. El análisis se replica en otros países de América Latina. Conclusiones: el análisis revela que es más probable que los votantes confíen en las elecciones si perciben que los votos se cuentan limpiamente, los funcionarios electorales son imparciales, los medios ofrecen una cobertura equilibrada o las mujeres tienen iguales oportunidades de ser candidatas. Este estudio muestra, además, que los votantes que perciben integridad electoral y tienen una comprensión informada de la democracia expresarán más confianza en las elecciones que quienes no conciben la democracia de esa forma. Originalidad: los resultados confirman que una concepción informada de la democracia fortalece la confianza en las elecciones entre quienes perciben integridad en el proceso electoral. Objetivo/contexto: é comum que a cidadania associe a democracia a diferentes valores e resultados desejáveis. Uma compreensão informada da democracia requer, contudo, que as pessoas a concebam como um regime em que as eleições são livres e limpas, em que o governo está limitado pela legalidade e a cidadania se beneficie de direitos e liberdades iguais. Argumenta-se que uma compreensão informada da democracia liberal-eleitoral reforça a relação positiva entre a percepção da integridade eleitoral e a confiança nas eleições. Metodologia: com base em pesquisas de opinião pública, a análise empírica se centraliza no caso do México, no qual é observada uma ampla desconfiança cidadã nas eleições apesar de os comícios serem, geralmente, livres e limpos. A análise é reproduzida em outros países da América Latina. Conclusões: a análise revela que é mais provável que os eleitores confiem nas eleições se perceberem que os votos são contados de forma limpa, os cabos eleitorais forem imparciais, os meios oferecerem uma cobertura equilibrada ou as mulheres tiverem iguais oportunidades de candidatura. Este estudo mostra, além disso, que os eleitores que percebem integridade eleitoral e têm uma compreensão informada da democracia mostram mais confiança nas eleições do que aqueles que não concebem a democracia dessa forma. Originalidade: os resultados confirmam que uma concepção informada da democracia fortalece a confiança nas eleições entre quem percebe integridade no processo eleitoral.

This article addresses two great global challenges of the 2020s. On one hand, the accelerating climate crisis and, on the other, the deepening crisis of representation within liberal democracies. As temperatures and water levels rise, rates of popular confidence in existing democratic institutions decline. So, what is to be done? This article discusses whether sortition – the ancient Greek practice of selecting individuals for political office through lottery – could serve to mitigate both crises simultaneously. Since the 2000s, sortition has attracted growing interest among activists and academics. Recently it has been identified in countries like the UK and France as a mechanism for producing legitimate political answers to the climate challenge. However, few theoretical reflections on the potentials and perils of sortition-based climate governance have yet emerged. This article contributes to filling the gap. Based on a critique of the first successful case of sortition used to enhance national environmental policy – in Ireland in 2017–18 – we argue that sortition-based deliberation could indeed speed up meaningful climate action whilst improving the health of democratic systems. However, this positive outcome is not preordained. Success depends not only on green social movements getting behind climate sortition but also on developing flexible, context-specific designs that identify adequate solutions to a number of problems, including those of power (providing citizens’ assemblies with clear agenda-setting prerogatives beyond non-binding consultation); expertise (allowing assembly participants to influence which stakeholders and experts to solicit inputs from); and participation (engaging wider parts of the citizenry in the deliberative process).

Using composite indices that quantify the quality of institutions and democratic functioning, the paper argues that Turkey has always deviated in terms of liberal democracy and civil liberties from...

We are living in a world which is severely crisis-ridden and faces some major challenges. The fact that we are currently facing a genuine global pandemic (COVID-19) brings about even more uncertainty. The social and political institutions, which emerged and consolidated during the 20th century, and which created stability, have become fragile. The young generation born in the 1990s and onwards have experienced 9/11 and the ‘war against terrorism’, the financial crisis of 2008, changes to climate, environmental degradation, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. The generation born between 1960 and 1990 have had the same experiences along with severe economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s and the Cold War. Some of these challenges are in different ways intertwined with capitalism and its crises, while others are linked to the rapid development of new technologies, in particular innovations within communication and information technologies. This introduction lists the most important grand challenges facing the world as they have emerged more recently. The five articles following this introduction address some of these challenges, with particular attention to the problems of capitalism and democracy and the relation between these two areas. Most authors agree that climate change and the destruction of the environment are the biggest and most pertinent problems to address, but it is their stance that we can only meet these challenges if democracy is functioning well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Thesis Eleven is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The nature of state governance in consolidated liberal democracies has important implications for the ideal theory debate. The states of these societies are polycentric. Decision-making power withi...

This article examines how understandings of the rule of law are shaped in the Chechen diaspora in Norway. Taking as our point of departure studies of legal pluralism and the co-existence of traditional Adat, religious Sharia and Russian secular law in Chechnya, we examine the effect of living in a host country by asking: How do members of the Chechen diaspora, here defined as conflict-generated diaspora, view and internalize legal models in Norway? What type of state governance do they see as ideal for themselves and for Chechnya in the future? Further: what might the underlying explanation for their choices be? We assume that just as different waves of violence in Chechnya created different diaspora communities that today exhibit specific social, cultural and political traits, the latest wave of forced emigration to Europe after the post-Soviet Russo–Chechen wars may have made specific imprints on the legal preferences of this diaspora. The picture that emerges from our in-depth individual interviews and surveys is one of gradual adaptation and adjustment to Norwegian state governance and rule of law, demonstrating the complex and co-constitutive relationships between changing identities and legal preferences.

The four Visegrad countries (V4) are widely perceived to be undermining liberal democracy and the stability of the European Union they joined in 2004. The essays in this special issue approach this...

Postwar recovery efforts foreground gender equality as a key component of building more liberal democracies. This review explores the burgeoning scholarship on women's rights after war, first grappling with war as a period of possibility for building new gender-inclusive institutions. We review efforts in three arenas: increasing women's political representation in postwar democratic transitions; improving access to justice for women through the extension of property rights and bodily autonomy within systems of carceral justice; and integrating women into labor markets and security sectors through various components of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Yet these inclusionary efforts have too often sought to dismantle one form of oppression (gender inequality) without challenging others. We document how projects to center women in liberal democratic reforms following war inadvertently overlook other manifestations of violence at the core of these institutions.

Polarization in society may hold consequences beyond the undermining of social cohesion. Here we provide the first evidence highlighting the power of perceived moral polarization in society to drive support for strong leaders. Across two studies and four samples drawn from the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States (N = 1,664), we found evidence linking perceived moral polarization with perceived anomie in society (defined as the perceived breakdown of social fabric and leadership) and with the rise in support for leaders with both a conservative/authoritarian and progressive/democratic style. Specifically, via the perceived breakdown in social fabric, heightened moral polarization predicted increased support for conservative/authoritarian style strong leaders, and via the perceived breakdown of leadership, increased support for progressive/democratic style strong leaders. Experimentally, using a fictionalized society paradigm, we then established causal links between moral polarization and the desire to elect conservative/authoritarian and progressive/democratic strong leaders. The current research is the first to identify the potential political consequences of heightened perceived moral polarization in two-party liberal democracies and contributes to the growing body of research highlighting the role of societal factors in driving support for strong leaders.

The German federal election of 2021 reshuffled Germany's party‐political hierarchy, but left the six‐party system intact. For the first time since 2002, the SPD narrowly overtook the CDU/CSU to become the party with the largest vote share. The Greens and the FDP also gained votes while the CDU/CSU and the Left party suffered high losses and the AfD minor losses. Crucially, party system continuity coexists with severe challenges for German policy makers, namely regional and global insecurity, decline in the country's infrastructure and social coherence, as well as the highly divisive management of the Covid crisis. While the electorate still focusses mostly on social protection and economic security, it is unclear whether Germany's political class can deliver on such expectations in a multi‐crisis context. Crucially, technocratic updating at the expense of liberal democracy and constitutional order will worsen rather than improve the current situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Political Quarterly is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores how the concept of democracy is constructed, conveyed, and instrumentalised in the discourses of the populist radical right in the current EU context. The comparative analysis of the speeches of the leaders of two dissimilar PRR parties in government (Polish Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) and in opposition (French Rassemblement National) in the run-up to the 2019 European elections using tools of the discourse-historical and discourse-conceptual approaches to CDS highlights the common core of PRR interpretations of democracy, influenced by the shared axiological, institutional, and discursive framework of the EU. It shows that in the EU the PRR constructs the concept of democracy as an ideological complex, by diluting its essentially populist interpretation of democracy with liberal democratic elements. Only by advancing nativist and authoritarian interpretations of the people, does the PRR bring the concept of democracy in line with its ideological core of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism.

Parallels have been drawn between the 1930s and today, notably the existence of unstable economic conditions as well as deepening, antagonistic ideological divisions. In the 1940s, two books appeared that presented opposing diagnoses of, and remedies for, the problems that faced Western societies at that time. In Man and Society, Karl Mannheim argued that forms of political organization had not adapted to changing social, economic, and technological conditions, and that this explained the rise of communism and fascism. He insisted that, in order to avoid disorder and political extremism, liberal democracies needed to engage in greater planning of their economic and social affairs, with sociology providing the synthesis of scientific knowledge required for this. Just a few years later, Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, in which Mannheim's work was a central target. He insisted that only the preservation of liberal freedoms and competitive markets could prevent the spread of totalitarianism. This paper outlines the arguments of each of these authors and provides an account of some of the historical background against which their disagreement arose. It also explores the relevance of their very different positions today, at a time when the neoliberal ideology that Hayek championed continues to have great influence but is under increasing attack from across the political spectrum.

The narrowing eligibility and increasing conditionality of social security payments in Anglophone liberal democracies like Australia has been accompanied by growing attention to the ways benefit recipients navigate the personal and practical challenges of life amid welfare reforms. This article reorients the study of getting by on welfare benefits to focus on the material and affective investment in making life liveable. I argue that the generative dimension of getting by is suggested but submerged within the reactive orientation of much welfare scholarship on coping and resilience. This article takes up the challenge of telling sociological stories of hope in hardship without romanticising everyday struggle. It does so by focusing on the pleasures, pursuits and projects – however modest and muted – that sustain a liveable life in hardship but do not necessarily conform to normative ideas of ‘good resilience’.

The history of political philosophy serves as a valuable resource for the current research paradigms in political science. In comparative terms, the paradigm of Western research is essentially “change-oriented” and tends to shift constantly with its evolving thoughts. Due to the influence of bourgeois revolutions around the world, contemporary politics has transpired as the synopsis of governance of the established order. As the “governing strategies” of the established order encounter multiple social crises, the Marxist political science or Marxism has emerged as the naturally preferred alternative research paradigm. During the Cold War period, such governing strategies were adopted as universal values in Western political science, effectuating the prediction of “the end of the history.” After the launch of the reform and opening-up campaign, “change-oriented” liberal democracy became an instrumental paradigm for Chinese political science. However, as the contemporary world order disfavored this paradigm, Chinese scholars shifted their research focus to developing an independent discourse power in democracy and governance, as well as prioritizing state governance as their primary research paradigm and methodology. Thus, political science is expected to resume its common sense nearly after a century of political chaos.

Este artigo resgata alguns conceitos doutrinários sobre o tempo até sua compreensão como uma instituição social, com referencial teórico no filósofo belga François Ost. Com base nessa concepção, o trabalho identifica quatro momentos característicos no período transcorrido entre o golpe civil-militar e a democracia constitucional no Brasil. Conclui-se que o processo transicional brasileiro se revela como atrasado e inacabado, e que no momento em que a Constituição brasileira completa trinta anos é urgente retomar o processo constitucional de transição, sob pena de surgirem fissuras no Estado Democrático de Direito brasileiro. Enviado el (Submission Date): 18/10/2020 Aceptado el (Acceptance Date): 22/12/2020

The aim of this paper is to analyse political activity in the mass media discourses of states with more democratic and more authoritative regimes respectively, so as to show a clear difference in the context of a formal analysis of mass media content. The current study examines political news on qualitative online media portals in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Thirty years ago, these states began their independent transition from a closed system to openness/democracy. However, at today’s transition point, only Lithuania is considered a democratic country. In different periods Ukraine has been considered an example of competitive authoritarianism, while Belarus deviated towards complete authoritarianism and dictatorship. All political news items between 2005–2020 (for delfi.lt – since 2007) were collected with the help of the Python program. To measure the indicators, several Python programs were designed. The results of the research confirmed that the intensity of political activity differs in the mass media discourses of states with more democratic (Lithuania, Ukraine) and more authoritative (Belarus) regimes. Furthermore, a clear difference was shown in terms of five indicators, average indicators and the dynamics thereof.

Based on a nationwide survey dataset collected by Taiwan’s Executive Yuan (2017) (N = 2737) and adopting structural equation modelling with bootstrapped method, we confirm that citizens’ positive appraisal of liberal democracy can foster subjective wellbeing via political trust but find civic participation irrelevant in this model. The proposed model remains significant after age, education, residency and personal income are controlled. The only exceptions are the gender effects in the relationship between appraisal of liberal democracy and political trust and that between political trust and civic participation. The former is positively stronger for female, whereas the latter is negatively stronger for male. While civic participation has long been widely accepted as a foundational component of any consolidated democracy, empirical evidence of this study calls for reflection on the application of this notion in an East Asian setting.

At the beginning of the millennium, consumer culture researchers predicted that people would increasingly demand that marketplace actors subscribe to contemporary ethics of liberal democracy. Although their prediction indeed came true, they did not foresee that an algorithm-powered media ecosystem in combination with growing authoritarian movements would soon come to fuel an increasingly polarized political landscape and challenge the very fundament of liberal democracy per se. In this macroscopic, conceptual article, I discuss three assumption-challenging logics—counter-democratic consumer culture, de-dialectical algorithmic manipulation, and growing illiberal consumer resistance—according to which the market increasingly monetizes the conflicts accompanying this polarization and, thereby, reinforces it. I call this new logic a conflict market and illustrate it through three, historically situated and currently conflicting, consumer ideoscapes—the neoblue, the neogreen, and the neobrown—between which consumers engage in marketized conflicts, not in a de-politicizing way, but in an increasingly un-politicizing, de-dialectical, and polarizing way. At the technologically manipulated conflict market, the role of marketers is to monetize politically sensitive topics by creating conflict, knowingly renouncing large groups of consumers, and giving fodder to the political extremes.

Three decades since the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the ideal of liberal democracy is under considerable strain. Recent developments in the region show that democratic inst...

In recent years, several political theorists have restored and defended the central role played by political parties and partisanship in liberal democracies, highlighting the positive contribution ...

Constitutional review has become a hallmark of modern liberal democracy. The efficacy of this review, however, is far from guaranteed. In this article, I argue that courts enhance judicial authorit...

Strikes often lack a reasonable chance of success unless they violate some basic liberties (of contract, movement, etc.). This creates a dilemma for liberal democracies that recognize a right to strike: either the right is toothless, or the basic liberties do not have priority and so are not basic. Alex Gourevitch argues that grounding the radical right to strike in an interest in freedom resolves the dilemma. We point out an ambiguity in this solution: it either does not solve the dilemma, or it tacitly presupposes that there is no dilemma. However, we go on to show that a modified, dynamic conception of the radical right to strike can ground its priority, albeit at the expense of the basicness of certain static basic liberties. What is more, we argue that this generalizes to other forms of direct action, such as the recent Black Lives Matter blockades and those at Standing Rock.

The article studies the compliance of democracy of the Baltic States with the principle of tolerance. The study demonstrated specific social phobias (xenophobia, migrant phobia, homophobia, islamophobia, romaphobia, etc.), hate speech and other destructive trends in the Baltic countries that contradict values of liberal democracy. The authors argue that Baltic States face similar challenges of strengthening the principle of tolerance as well as how they differ in intolerance manifestations and mechanisms of their prevention and counteraction. In the Baltic States, issues related to promotion of tolerance are claimed to be common at two levels: at the institutional level (countries do not fulfil some of the EU guidelines aimed at enhancing the principle of tolerance); at the value level (population does not accept completely liberal-democratic values that the EU advocates).

In this article, I revisit the question of socio-economic transformation in South Africa to illustrate how it connects with human rights, essentially because, as I argue, transformation is unattainable without a comprehensive understanding of the central role of human rights in activating that process. I state the claim that the progressive human rights culture on the basis of which South Africa launched itself from the demise of apartheid into one of the most treasured constitutional democracies globally is noticeably disintegrating, displaying signs of post-independence failures that have bedevilled many other African countries. It leaves unanswered questions with regard to the transitional promise for a better life and equitable opportunities. Not only is the political intent to actualise the project for socio-economic transformation apparently lacking, prospects that the expectations of the impoverished segments of the population may never be fulfilled prompts the need for an in-depth diagnosis of the contrasts that dissociate the country from its constitutional commitment to remedy the injustices of the past, which remain visible in legislation, policies, institutional practices, governance mechanisms and social perceptions that seem to be hardwired to accommodate transformation. I aim to demonstrate that even though South Africa’s constitutional democracy is anchored on a radical undertaking to eradicate the injustices that unreasonably limit options for the larger part of the population, there is no genuine adherence to the constitutional standards for transformation under the present dispensation, which is shaped by misconceived and misdirected priorities at the expense of human rights that lie at the core of the project for socio-economic transformation. I articulate these viewpoints by bringing into sharper focus the connection between human rights and transformation so that perhaps, the arguments may provide conceptual direction in academic discourses and probably also shape policy direction in crafting transformative solutions to the socio-economic exigencies that South Africa is confronted with.

Participatory practices are prominent strategies for increasing the legitimacy and effectiveness of resource commons governance. Despite increases in participatory practices legitimacy of such governance is in decline. Remaining commons are sites of conflict echoing wider disillusionment in democratic governance across mature liberal democracies. Much participatory governance literature argues that more involvement of citizens in deliberation and decision-making is the solution, turning away from representative practices to strengthen direct participation in commons governance. In this paper we draw on seminal work in political representation theory to examine legitimacy and political agency in participatory governance practices. We develop a conceptual lens drawing on key elements of: Hannah Pitkin’s The Concept of Representation; Michael Saward’s Representative Claim; and, Vivan Schmidt’s throughput model of legitimacy. The lens comprises three ‘conditions’ for analyzing how political agency of participants is constituted through institutional processes: authorization, dissent and exit, and accountability. We argue that this conceptual lens can serve the participatory turn in commons governance by enabling explicit consideration of the links between political participation and representation as foundations of democratic legitimacy.

In this lecture, I lay out my approach to populism, which falls within the now dominant ‘ideational approach’ of populism, discuss the complex relationship between populism and politics, and identify some of the main causes of the ongoing ‘populist Zeitgeist’. My main arguments are: (1) while populism is related to (real and perceived) ‘crises’, these so-called ‘crises’ are often catalysts rather than prime causes of the rise of populism; (2) populism is essentially an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism; and (3) populism can only be overcome by more rather than less liberal democracy. I illustrate my arguments on the basis of the recent rise of populism in Europe, but believe they also largely hold true beyond that specific regional and temporal context.

This article addresses – from a theoretical and historical perspective – the discussion on republicanism and populism, in connection to different ways of conceiving political modernity. It places republicanism and populism within the framework of contemporary democracies in the Latin American context, looking at the reciprocal interaction between these political traditions, and their relevance for understanding the current challenges of the liberal model in the region.

In this paper we analyse Brexit in relation to changes in British national identity since World War II. We begin by analysing how the concept of “tradition” relates to “nation”, and then examine current discourses surrounding Brexit and national identity. We trace the ways in which British national identity has been renegotiated since World War II through contests over nationality, citizenship, cultural diversity, and Europe. Finally, we ask why British political actors have struggled to negotiate the dilemmas of post-Imperial British identity, and what lessons can be learned. We look at changing coalitions within British political parties, which we connect to philosophical tensions in their underlying intellectual traditions, and to changes brought about by globalisation. We conclude that Brexit and the broader crisis of liberal democracy of which it is a part have deep historical and philosophical roots, and that attempts to unite our policy through a single national identity will be unsuccessful.

This paper expands on the notion neo-illiberalism, signifying a symbiosis between neoliberal capitalism and variegated illiberal nationalisms, offering deeper reflections on its geopolitics, key drivers, and conceptual puzzles. It is argued that the West has entered an age of political illiberalization, replicating political operating logics of variegated illiberal(izing) regimes elsewhere, corroding domestic institutions and the western-dominated international liberal order, constituting an historic geopolitical shift. Although centrist parties have been variably attracted to the far right, particularly seeing center-right parties reinvent themselves as nationalist challengers to the ‘globalist’ status quo, in power they mostly radicalize the neoliberal encasement of capital, transforming a range of liberal-democratic institutions, procedures, and rights into illiberal political fortifications. Neoliberalism’s illiberal mutation is being realized amidst the intersections of rampant financial offshoring and digitization defining contemporary capitalism, allowing billionaire-class factions to ‘hack’ liberal-democratic governments and operating systems. With the rollout of data-driven technologies increasingly requiring the rollback of liberal protections by design, the fusion of digitizing capitalism and illiberal nationalisms is increasingly escaping accepted notions of liberalism.

Religious freedom (RF) is important because it is posited to be a central element of liberal democracy and as having multiple additional benefits including increased security and economic prosperity. Yet, it is also a disputed concept and many liberal democracies restrict the freedoms of religious minorities. This study uses the Religion and State (RAS) dataset to examine the extent of RF in 183 countries based on six definitions of RF. The author examines whether religious minorities are restricted in a manner that the majority is not, regulation of the majority religion, and imposition of precepts of the majority religion on a country’s population. He finds that very few countries, including liberal democracies, meet any standard for RF, even when one allows for ‘loose’ standards where some violations of RF are allowed.

As evidenced by the 2016 US presidential election, conspiracy theories such as birtherism, the belief that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen, have become more impactful on modern-day liberal democracies. This study investigates the consequences of the conspiratorial narratives espoused by populist candidates, arguing that the creation of a narrative involving a “conspiring” establishment figure can positively benefit populist candidates during elections by allowing them to position themselves as defenders of “the people”. Taking the case of Donald Trump and the birther conspiracy theory, empirical testing indicates that by helping to spread birtherism, Donald Trump was able to create for himself a core group of supporters who turned out to vote for him in both the Republican primaries and general election. Moreover, when tests are performed to investigate whether this was a consequence of rallying a right-wing base or mainstreaming the fringe conspiracy theory, significant positive relationships are demonstrated not with more conservative birthers, but instead with the more moderate ones, testifying to the strength of the mainstreaming effect.

Exclusionary nationalist movements’ rise in recent years challenges liberal democracy’s trust in political institutions’ ability to neutralize and incorporate extremism. The crisis of liberal democ...

Rejecting all knowledge claims concerning right and wrong in matters practical James Buchanan concurred with legal positivism that invalid law cannot be identified by its substantive content but only by an inherited defect in its factual creation. Beyond correct creation Buchanan proposed as a quasi-natural law constraint that unanimity in the shadow of individual veto power must at least be conceivable if a norm is to be law. The emerging hybrid conception of constitutional law is symptomatic for Buchanan’s never-ending but ultimately futile efforts to incorporate Kantian ideals of interpersonal respect into constitutional economics without imposing them as personal values.

In this century, representative liberal democracy is universally considered as the most perfect political regime. However, it is emphasized that the same political regime is exposed to a major crisis for the last 10-20 years as well as looking for ways out. Pursuant to many political scientists, the representative liberal democracy has the authoritarianism tendency that is defined as populism, and they relate it post-truth politics. It is also underlined that due to the politics with such negative elements, democracy contains paradox in terms of practice and discourse. Political regimes become functional within a certain social structure and it is obvious that democracy as a type of political system becomes functional within global world order, namely capitalism. In the research, political methodology, which studies the quantitative and qualitative methods, has been. This study aims to clarify how global capitalism throws representative liberal democracy into major functionality crisis, and the political and administrative rise of populist authoritarianism through post-trust. The sample of the study consists of academics working as lecturers in universities in Northern Cyprus. The results show that, there is a difference between demographic charecteristics of the participants responses to representative liberal democracy, know about populist authoritarianism and post truth politics. There is also a relationship between the political scientists’ authoritarianism tendency and authoritaritarianism defined as populism, as well as between liberal democracy role over the major crisis and role of global capitalism throws representative liberal democracy into major functionality crisis.

The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-21 has acted as an inflection point, exposing the fragility of liberal democracy in India, already beleaguered by the rise of majoritarian populism since 2014, buttres...

Urban land use planning is an indispensable, albeit mundane, tool of urban governance under liberal democracy in Canada and elsewhere. Such planning mediates between a multitude of competing public and private interests in relation to land, and has often been concerned with the optimization and ordering of privately propertied parcels toward their highest and best use for a so-called common good. The (often unequal and marginalizing) effects of such planning have garnered much scrutiny within urban geographical scholarship, even as the relationships and ideologies underpinning the origins of land use control in the early 20th century have attracted less attention. In this paper, I look to the roots of land use planning in Vancouver, Canada. I identify key actors and unpack the philosophies that influenced such planning at the national and local scales. In doing so, I show how three sets of discursive/moral relationships between property and planning, citizenship and propriety, and waste and improvement, emerged to define a liberal category of “land use.” Such relationships were entrenched in Vancouver’s planning system through legal means, as well as programs aimed at educating officials and citizens on the importance of land use control through zoning. I show how the land use planning process identified people and geographies of concern and placed them outside the normative urban vision of planners and civic officials, priming them for planning-led intervention and/or elimination. In doing so, I seek to expand geographical understandings of land use planning and suggest ways forward for those seeking to unearth and dismantle entrenched and privately propertied land use planning regimes under liberal democracy.

At the time of writing this article, one of the bastions of liberal democracy is in great turmoil. On 6 January 2021, protesters loyal to President Trump invaded the capitol to stop the certification of election results. It was a move characterised as domestic terrorism and condemned as anti-democratic by politicians from across the aisle. For many commentators, this was an inescapable result of Trumpism left unchecked, of the unfettered circulation of lies and the stoking of resentment against the democratic establishment. Articles question whether America can bridge the rift between democrat and republican forces or whether differences have become irreconcilable. But such polarisation is not the preserve of the US. It is also rampant in other liberal representative democracies, including the UK where Brexit has laid bare the split between remainers and leavers, liberals and conservatives.

Discriminatory attitudes towards Muslim refugees are common in liberal democracies, and Muslim citizens of these countries experience high rates of discrimination and social exclusion. Uniting thes...

In the European Union right-wing and left-wing populist parties are increasingly becoming stronger. Meanwhile in Central and Eastern Europe autocracies are emerging and becoming stabilized. Italy and Hungary are two notable examples of these processes. Italy is the only country in Western Europe where a coalition of purely populist parties won an election, while Hungary has the most mature autocracy in the European Union. By using survey methodology, we examined the preferences of Hungarian and Italian students regarding the values of liberal democracy. We seek answers to the questions whether there are any significant differences between the proportion of Hungarian students and Italian students who identify themselves with the values of liberal democracy and which of these values of liberal democracy they consider to be protected values. Based on our results, we claim that students from both countries are more likely to support liberal democratic values than to support either right-wing or left-wing populist values, even if the distributions of the two groups differ significantly. We found that Italian students adhere more strongly to liberal democratic values, while Hungarians are more open to left-wing and right-wing populism. Our results confirm that in Hungary, because of the values that many people hold, conditions are conducive for establishing a sustainable autocracy, while in Italy, the demand for such a system is much weaker.

Constitutional democracy is in decline and many would-be autocrats try to transgress constitutional constraints. Here, we introduce the concept of militant constitutionalism, which suggests a number of constitutional rules that could make constitutions more resilient to attempts to undermine them. A first empirical evaluation, however, can link only few constitutional paths to enhanced constitutional resilience.

A strong tradition in democratic theory claims that only constitutions made with direct popular involvement can establish or deepen democracy. Against this view, we argue that new constitutions are likely to enhance liberal democracy when they emerge through a plural agreement among political elites with distinct bases of social support. Power dispersion during constitution writing induces the adoption of institutions that protect opposition forces from the arbitrary use of executive power without unduly impairing majority rule. However, since incumbents may renege on the bargain, the democratizing effect of politically plural constitutional agreements is likely to be larger in the short term, when the identity of negotiating political forces and the balance of power between them tend to remain stable. We find support for these arguments using an original global dataset on the origins of constitutions between 1900 and 2015 and a difference-in-differences design.

The efforts of liberal thinkers to incorporate mutualistic social principles into Americans’ understanding of liberalism extended through the century, but the strongest and most holistic conceptions of the social sphere took hold during the New Deal era and World War II. Contrary to recent accounts that locate the weakening of that social liberal project in the 1970s and attribute it to underlying economic changes, this article builds on two generations of historiography to argue that the decline began during the long 1950s when totalitarianism changed the political context of social thought. The theory of mass society that developed to explain the rise of totalitarianism replaced the citizens of liberal democratic theory with the anxious, rootless masses of modern society and forecast the collapse of liberal democracy into totalitarianism. Americans cast totalitarianism as the antithesis of America, its Other in the narrative of American identity, a threat both without and within. In that context, mutualistic conceptions of the social sphere were put on the defensive and individual liberty was valorized. Liberal intellectuals, trusting in American capitalism and in the weak social state, focused on the threat of McCarthyite anti-intellectualism and mass irrationality. Their commitment to social democracy weakened and their chief concern shifted to the no-longer-autonomous individuals of modern society.

This article makes a simple argument: global immigration has provoked a crisis in some liberal democracies. The crisis is manifested along two dimensions. The first is the liberal dimension and the second the democratic component. The liberal dimension is conceptualized as a public good. Political parties, mostly but not exclusively on the right, have seized upon the immigration shock to undermine the public good principle—such as universal rights and equal treatment before the law—by shifting to the democratic people element of democracy. This shift redefines liberal democracy into a club good. This article shows how the League (formerly known as the Northern League) in Italy exploited the global immigration crisis to undermine liberal democracy by attacking the liberal democratic idea(l) of access to public goods offered by the welfare state to an exclusive club goods that should be only available to the “true” Italian citizen.