In finding that extreme partisan gerrymandering is a non-justiciable political question in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court fixated upon the lack of judicially manageable standards to ...evaluate their constitutionality. The decision culminated in the Court's recent reinforcement ofthat manageability focus in partisan gerrymandering cases, with Chief Justice Roberts even calling efforts to numerically calculate the extremity of such gerrymandering "sociological gobbledygook." Such belabored fears about manageability misread the questions in the political question doctrine. The doctrine requires the Justices to initially ask, as a normative matter, whether the judiciary should resolve the controversy in our constitutional system, and only then to consider practical manageability concerns. The Court has taken the reverse approach, failing to acknowledge the damage extreme partisan gerrymandering does to our representative democracy of separated powers. The Court has also used an incoherent understanding of manageability that moves the goalposts for those that would measure and control partisan gerrymandering. In turn, the Court has first demanded more precise standards, then required more malleable ones. That impossibly exacting standard for standards is out of step with constitutional jurisprudence of similarly broad impact, such as Second and Fourth Amendment law, reapportionment cases, and racial gerrymandering. The Rucho Court should have tackled the normative question directly, finding that extreme partisan gerrymandering is an existential threat to our tripartite government. It exacerbates legislative gridlock, forcing an overburdened judiciary to act as the primary agent of legal change. The Court should then have relaxed its demands for manageable standards. Manageability is a sliding scale; where an issue is normatively vital to democracy 's future, the Justices should experiment with malleable standards. Adjudicating these cases with imperfect standards would have unleashed human capital to help repair the partisan rot in our democracy.
This article explores the complex relationship between democracy and longterm policy design for sustainability. At one extreme, democracy can be framed as problematic for policy planning because of ...the myopia fostered by some democratic institutions, such as regular elections. Alternatively, democracy can be seen as an ally of long-term policy design to the extent that it can generate public legitimacy and accountability, and potentially foster more equitable and just outcomes. Recent debates on how to 'manage' policy transitions to sustainability have been curiously silent on democratic matters, despite their potential implications for democracy. To explore what democracy might mean for transition management this article considers empirically how actors engaged in the Dutch Energy Transition Program make democratic sense of their activities. The analysis finds that in practice transition policies promote implicit narratives or democratic storylines on how reforms should be developed, who should participate in these, and how they should be legitimised and accountable to the public. The dominant narrative, which espouses elite theory and technocracy, privileges epistemic matters over democratic considerations. Other democratic storylines draw on representative democracy and interest group pluralism. The paper considers some possible ways to foster more productive interfaces between the governance structures of transition management, and the polycentric context of contemporary democratic systems.
The article intends to advance the study of e-participation in renewed directions by focusing on a category of actors that has long been overlooked: elected politicians. It zeroes in on legislators ...who while key actors of representative democracy chose to be involved in an e-participation initiative. This article generates theoretical propositions on how they make use of e-participation platforms in their work as parliamentarians. Based on a qualitative analysis of interviews about the main e-participation platform in France,
Parlement & Citoyens,
the article shows that parliamentarians’ usages of such participatory tools tend either toward a policy-oriented logic or a vote-seeking purpose. These usages can also be categorized as tending toward either a representative or a participatory democracy logic. The article concludes that if platforms are originally designed as online participatory alternatives to conventional legislative processes, they are chiefly used as adjuvants to traditional political representation practices.
This article examines the political thought of Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, a prominent democrat during the French Revolution. In pamphlets and newspaper articles between 1795 and 1799 he put forth an ...elaborate theory of 'representative democracy' which was a novel and radical vision of political reform and republican international order. His political and economic plan for a democratic future was focused on conceptualizing a realistic transition path to a genuinely republican society. In the wake of historians who pointed out the existence and importance of the idea of 'representative democracy' during the Directory, this article delves into the content of this idea by placing it in the context of Antonelle and his fellow travellers' political struggle to consolidate the Republic while avoiding both anarchy and aristocracy.
The so-called crisis of representation has formed the theoretical framework of many studies on media and democracy of the past thirty years. Many researches have highlighted the crisis of legitimacy ...and credibility of the ‘traditional’ parties (Katz & Mair, 2018) and communication was considered, at the same time, one of the causes of acceleration towards post-representative politics (Keane, 2013) but also an indispensable tool for re-connecting citizens to politics. Various phenomena have developed within this framework: a) the birth of political aggregations as a result of mobilization in the digital ecosystem; b) the development of digital platforms for democratic participation; c) the birth of parties defined as ‘digital’ or ‘platform’; and d) the growing centrality of digital political activism, both as a phenomenon within the digital communicative ecosystem (also in the context of social media) and as a result of the transformation of social movements. This article studies the role of platform parties as a space for the emergence of authoritarian tendencies (hyper-leadership) but also as an organizational opportunity for the development of new forms of digital activism. In particular, the article presents a research on the use of digital platforms (and their political and organizational consequences) by political parties in Italy, France, and Spain. The study shows the relationships between the evolution of digital ecosystems and the way in which political organization is organised, also highlighting how the new forms of mobilization and aggregation have opened up different yet interconnected public spaces.
Citizen initiatives and referendums play an important role in modern democracies, from treaty ratifications in the European Union to gay marriage in California, to the control of foreign workers in ...Switzerland. Departing from the classic opposition between direct and representative democracy, we study the equilibrium effects of direct democracy institutions on the incentives and selection of elected officials. We find that facilitating direct democracy induces a negative spiral on politicians’ role and contribution to society, which may dominate any direct benefit. The theory offers predictions on reelection probabilities and politicians’ performance consistent with recent evidence from the US states.
This article explores the idea that a citizen's relationship with their polity is contingent on and liable to change under certain conditions. The assessment of the prospects for political reform ...requires an understanding of the contingent nature of political engagement. Drawing from a survey of a representative sample of Australians three insights emerge. First, although many Australian citizens are not directly engaged in political actions beyond voting most do present a 'standby' role that suggests potential to engage. Second, willingness to shift patterns of engagement may depend on general orientations towards the polity and we find extensive evidence of negative understanding of the political system as well as more positive endorsement of representative political practices. Our third finding is that citizens might be prepared to change their relationship with the polity depending on the kind of politics that is offered; hence providing a creative space for political reform.
Defining what democracy means nowadays seems increasingly problematic as several alternative democratic visions are being developed and contrasted in normative theory and political practice. On the ...one hand, there are traditional accounts of democracy that are highly formal and minimalistic. Citizens are endowed with political rights, which they use to advance their interests, particularly through regular elections, which delegate power to governing representatives. Representative democracy has been long identified with this conception. On the other hand, alternative perspectives have emphasised the untapped potential of liberal societies. These more radical perspectives belong to two main democratic traditions: participatory democracy and deliberative democracy. On the basis of a common framework of participatory and deliberative norms, this paper envisages an alternative and more robust idea of democracy to offer normative guidance in democratising contemporary societies. We tie our discussion to an analysis of how Italian democracy could be improved.
This special issue focuses on the emergence of different forms of civic and political activism in Turkey. In doing so, we have taken into account different components of active citizenship and looked ...more specifically into the development of civic and political forms of activism that bridge that realms of conventional and non-conventional participation. As witnessed in many different contexts, conventional forms of political participation such as electoral politics are being replaced with non-conventional forms of participation that take place outside, and sometimes in opposition to, the more traditional channels of representation. The issue of active citizenship has become more and more salient in recent years, with a growing literature discussing the processes that bring about new modalities, which conceive the notion of citizenship as something detached from certain rights, obligations and entitlements embedded in the traditional definition of national citizenship. The active role citizens can play in political and civic life deserves particular attention with regard to the analysis of participatory behaviors that signify new modalities through which citizens relate to civic and political domains. We believe that the argument that more and more people are becoming disengaged from politics proves to be misleading. A key point that drives are argumentation is that instead the crisis of representative democracy has favored the emergence of alternative modalities to engage and participate in civic and political life. Civic and political participation take manifold dimensions, and can be expressed through the activation of participatory behaviors of various kinds, including volunteering, taking part in NGO activities, boycotts, and protests and demonstrations.
Este artículo pone de relieve que muchos de los problemas constitucionales del sistema italiano tienen raíces profundas en un multipartidismo que siempre se ha mostrado reacio a una simplificación, a ...pesar de las repetidas tentativas que han recurrido a mutaciones de las leyes electorales o (sin resultado) a una revisión de la parte organizativa de la Constitución. A estos viejos problemas recientemente se han unido otros nuevos, principalmente como consecuencia del nacimiento y consolidación de movimientos políticos que cuestionan los principios básicos del sistema representativo.
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