On the Demos and its Kin: Nationalism, Democratic Legitimacy, and Boundaries

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arash Abizadeh
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Legitimacy

From meditation to action – a research agenda for studying informal global rule-making: remarks on ‘Cosmopolitanism, publicity, and the emergence of a “global administrative law”’

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Oliver Westerwinter
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Institutional Architecture ◽  
Global Law ◽  
Rule Making ◽  
Law Making

Abstract Friedrich Kratochwil engages critically with the emergence of a global administrative law and its consequences for the democratic legitimacy of global governance. While he makes important contributions to our understanding of global governance, he does not sufficiently discuss the differences in the institutional design of new forms of global law-making and their consequences for the effectiveness and legitimacy of global governance. I elaborate on these limitations and outline a comparative research agenda on the emergence, design, and effectiveness of the diverse arrangements that constitute the complex institutional architecture of contemporary global governance.

Democratic Legitimacy

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Rosanvallon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Constitutional Courts ◽  
International Debate ◽  
The Past ◽  
Democratic Authority ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Western Democracies

It's a commonplace occurrence that citizens in Western democracies are disaffected with their political leaders and traditional democratic institutions. But this book argues that this crisis of confidence is partly a crisis of understanding. The book makes the case that the sources of democratic legitimacy have shifted and multiplied over the past thirty years and that we need to comprehend and make better use of these new sources of legitimacy in order to strengthen our political self-belief and commitment to democracy. Drawing on examples from France and the United States, the book notes that there has been a major expansion of independent commissions, NGOs, regulatory authorities, and watchdogs in recent decades. At the same time, constitutional courts have become more willing and able to challenge legislatures. These institutional developments, which serve the democratic values of impartiality and reflexivity, have been accompanied by a new attentiveness to what the book calls the value of proximity, as governing structures have sought to find new spaces for minorities, the particular, and the local. To improve our democracies, we need to use these new sources of legitimacy more effectively and we need to incorporate them into our accounts of democratic government. This book is an original contribution to the vigorous international debate about democratic authority and legitimacy.

Overdoing Democracy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Talisse
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Good Thing ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Crowding Out ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Democratic Ideal ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Social Goods

Democracy is an extremely important social political good. Nonetheless, there is such a thing as having too much of a good thing. When we overdo democracy, we allow the categories, allegiances, and struggles of politics to overwhelm our social lives. This has the effect of undermining and crowding out many of the most important correlated social goods that democracy is meant to deliver. What’s more, in overdoing democracy, we spoil certain social goods that democracy needs in order to flourish. Thus overdoing democracy is democracy’s undoing. A thriving democracy needs citizens to reserve space in their shared social lives for collective activities and cooperative projects that are not structured by political allegiances; they must work together in social contexts where political affiliations and party loyalties are not merely suppressed, but utterly beside the point. Combining conceptual analyses of democratic legitimacy and responsible citizenship with empirical results regarding the political infiltration of social spaces and citizens’ vulnerabilities to polarization, this book provides a diagnosis of current democratic ills and a novel prescription for addressing them. Arguing that overdoing democracy is the result of certain tendencies internal to the democratic ideal itself, the book demonstrates that even in a democracy, politics must be put in its place.

Normative dimensions of central banking: How the guardians of financial markets affect justice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Dietsch
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
Central Banking ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Policy Agenda ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Introductory Section ◽  
The Impact

Monetary policy, and the response it elicits from financial markets, raises normative questions. This chapter, building on an introductory section on the objectives and instruments of monetary policy, analyzes two such questions. First, it assesses the impact of monetary policy on inequality and argues that the unconventional policies adopted in the wake of the financial crisis exacerbate inequalities in income and wealth. Depending on the theory of justice one holds, this impact is problematic. Should monetary policy be sensitive to inequalities and, if so, how? Second, the chapter argues that the leverage that financial markets have today over the monetary policy agenda undermines democratic legitimacy.

The Role of National Constitutional Courts in European Democracy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dieter Grimm
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Economic Liberalization ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
European Law ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Constitutional Courts ◽  
European Court ◽  
European Democracy ◽  
And Function

This chapter examines the role of national constitutional courts in European democracy. It first provides an overview of national constitutional courts in Europe, focusing on the requirements that they impose on national institutions and the consequences of those requirements at the treaty level—i.e., transferring national powers to the European Union and regulating how these powers are exercised; at the level of the EU’s exercise of these powers; and at the level of implementing European law within national legal systems. The chapter also discusses how the European Court of Justice’s jurisprudence enabled the European treaties to function as a constitution; the non-political mechanism of EU decisions and how it promotes economic liberalization; and how the design and function of European primary law undermine democracy. The chapter suggests that the democratic legitimacy imparted to the EU’s decisions by its citizens can only develop within the framework of the European Parliament’s powers.

scholarly journals The European Economic Constitution after the PSPP Judgment: Towards Integrative Liberalism?

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1058-1077
Author(s):  
Matthias Goldmann
Keyword(s):  
State Intervention ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Profound Change ◽  
European Economic ◽  
Economic Constitution ◽  
Post War ◽  
Reactive Mode ◽  
Proportionality Principle ◽  
Market Liberalism

AbstractThis article argues that the PSPP judgment effectively buries the era of financial liberalism, which has dominated the European economic constitution for decades. It raises the curtain on a new political paradigm, which I call “integrative liberalism”. Whereas the financial crisis put financial liberalism under strain, the development since then has been contradictory, torn between state intervention and market liberalism, focused above all on buying time rather than finding a new constitutional equilibrium. Now, together with the measures adopted in response to COVID-19, the PSPP judgment paves the way for profound change. Integrative liberalism is characterized by an overall shift from the market to the state, mitigating the post-crisis insistence on austerity and conditionality. Contrary to the embedded liberalism of the post-war era, integrative liberalism operates in a corrective and reactive mode with a focus on goals and principles, lacking the emphasis on long-term planning. Like every political paradigm, integrative liberalism ushers in a new understanding of the law. It puts the emphasis on context instead of discipline, and it elevates the proportionality principle. If integrative liberalism is to succeed, however, the democratic legitimacy of the Eurosystem and its independence require serious reconsideration.

‘Party in the street’: The partisan politics of space

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
State Power ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.

scholarly journals Privacy in Public: A Democratic Defense

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96
Author(s):  
Titus Stahl
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Privacy Protection ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Political Speech ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

AbstractTraditional arguments for privacy in public suggest that intentionally public activities, such as political speech, do not deserve privacy protection. In this article, I develop a new argument for the view that surveillance of intentionally public activities should be limited to protect the specific good that this context provides, namely democratic legitimacy. Combining insights from Helen Nissenbaum’s contextualism and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, I argue that strategic surveillance of the public sphere can undermine the capacity of citizens to freely deliberate in public and therefore conflicts with democratic self-determination.

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