Die digitale Transformation schreitet unaufhaltsam voran. Im Spannungsverhältnis von kritischer Reflexion und technologischer Aktualität haben auch demokratietheoretische Debatten ihre ...deterministischen Tendenzen und technologischen Engführungen hinter sich gelassen. Während damit einerseits den Ambivalenzen und Affordanzen des Digitalen größere Beachtung geschenkt werden, drängen andererseits pragmatische Zugänge darauf, die Potentiale des Digitalen zur Lösung einer Krise der Demokratie in experimentellen Umgebungen zu erproben. Letztere betreiben die Transformation der Demokratie jedoch vorwiegend in reformatorischer Absicht und damit im Kielwasser machtvoller Erzählungen vor digitaler Demokratiemodelle. Sie orientieren sich weniger an der tatsächlichen Funktionalität des Digitalen als an eigenen Deutungen für die digitale Verwirklichung vordigitaler Versprechen. Gegenüber Vorstellungen einer digitalisierten Demokratie stellt der Beitrag daher die Bedeutung der Gemachtheit von digitaler Technik und Realität für eine realistische demokratische Theoriebildung ins Zentrum. Im Sinne eines normativen Maßstabes muss diese digital-demokratische Strukturen stärker dahingehend bewerten, ob sie tatsächlich zur Ermöglichung von Autonomie und Authentizität beitragen oder Teil einer Verschleierung von Macht und Deutung sind.
Las distinciones conceptuales propuestas por Thomas Hobbes reflejan el problema político de considerar lo múltiple en la unidad o la convergencia de innumerables cuerpos, deseos y pasiones en la ...consolidación de una voluntad soberana unitaria. Ejemplo de ello son las nociones de potentiae (potencias) y potestas (poder), junto a otras como multitud y pueblo o súbditos y soberano. Todas ellas reflejan el problema de la estabilidad del Estado y su legitimidad institucional: la necesidad de generar, de manera continua, un poder común. Con la intención de formular una lectura democrática, el propósito de este artículo es relacionar una lectura iconográfica del frontispicio del Leviatán con la presencia/ausencia de un cuerpo indómito. El trabajo concluye que un rasgo esencial de la teoría política hobbesiana es el sentido de lo democrático fundamentado en la presencia ineludible de cuerpos colectivos que deben ser representados.
"One of the most important books on political regimes written in a generation." —Steven Levitsky, New York Times –bestselling author of How Democracies Die A new understanding of how and why early ...democracy took hold, how modern democracy evolved, and what this history teaches us about the future Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer—democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa. Delving into the prevalence of early democracy throughout the world, David Stasavage makes the case that understanding how and where these democracies flourished—and when and why they declined—can provide crucial information not just about the history of governance, but also about the ways modern democracies work and where they could manifest in the future.Drawing from examples spanning several millennia, Stasavage first considers why states developed either democratic or autocratic styles of governance and argues that early democracy tended to develop in small places with a weak state and, counterintuitively, simple technologies. When central state institutions (such as a tax bureaucracy) were absent—as in medieval Europe—rulers needed consent from their populace to govern. When central institutions were strong—as in China or the Middle East—consent was less necessary and autocracy more likely. He then explores the transition from early to modern democracy, which first took shape in England and then the United States, illustrating that modern democracy arose as an effort to combine popular control with a strong state over a large territory. Democracy has been an experiment that has unfolded over time and across the world—and its transformation is ongoing.Amidst rising democratic anxieties, The Decline and Rise of Democracy widens the historical lens on the growth of political institutions and offers surprising lessons for all who care about governance.
The Indo Pacific concept (IPC) may be one of the hotspots in IR during the past decade. This ancient geographical concept was originally packaged by former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe into the ...so-called Free and Open Indo Pacific (FoIP). After being highly politicized, this concept has been officially adopted by Australia, the United States and India. After President Biden took office in 2020, the Indo Pacific strategy has undergone further diffusion around the world. Especially in Western democracies. By 2022, the Biden government has taken the promotion of FoIP into the primary strategic goal in the In-do-Pacific Strategy of the United States 11. At the same time, the report emphasized that protecting the democratic values of regional allies from interference is the direction of the US efforts. Leading by values has become an important accelerator for the United States to boost the diffusion of Indo-Pacific strategy. However, It is implausible for observers to explain the global diffusion of IPC after 2020. This article adheres to the viewpoint of constructivism and holds that the IPC, as an idea, has been recognized and accepted by states with common values. When the IPC was put forward and used by states platform as an initiative, it was constructed as a blueprint of “Democratic Alliance”. The Western-dominated international order based on the values of democracy and freedom is socially, politically, and historically ‘embedded’. This article argues that the diffusion of IPC could be understood as an political aspiration. Such aspiration contains the expectation of reuniting states sharing values of western democracy and freedom.
In this article, the author shows that in the '30s of the 20th century, the Romanian democratic institutions modelled after the liberal Constitution of 1923 entered a slow process of wear and tear, ...due, first of all, to the inability of the political parties to find solutions to serious economic, social and national problems faced by each party called to govern. The electoral system based on the electoral primacy was the main virus that generated the instability of liberal democracy in the interwar period. The degradation of the party life and the gradual loss of the electorate's trust in the democratic political formations revealed their inadaptability to the principles and the substance of Western constitutionalism. Against this background, the far-right political formations have gradually managed to capture enough electoral interest in order to offer an ideological and political alternative to the democratic parliamentary regime, a danger noticed in time by the liberal governments in power, which resorted to measures to counteract the extremist movements. The author notes, at the same time, that, at the level of the European continent, the parliamentary regime entered, after the First World War, into an acute identity crisis, in the conditions where in Europe only France, England and Switzerland had remained faithful to parliamentary democracy and, for a while, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The article shows that King Charles II, as a constitutional factor of balance between powers, failed in his attempt to depoliticize the parliamentary life and resorted to an authoritarian, active monarchy regime as a solution to preserve social peace and to regenerate the internal political life, threatened by the violence of the legionary movement and by the politics of the revisionist European states.
