Democratic Theory

In "The Crisis of the European Union" Jürgen Habermas claims that the constituent power in the EU is shared between the community of EU citizens and the political communities of the member states. By his own account, Habermas arrives at this concept of a dual constituent subject through a rational reconstruction of the genesis of the European constitution. This explanation, however, is not particularly illuminating since it is controversial what the term ‘rational reconstruction’ stands for. This article critically discusses the current state of research on rational reconstruction, develops a new reading of Habermas’ method and invokes this account for an explanation and evaluation of the notion of a European pouvoir constituant mixte.

This paper aims at outlining a concept of deliberation compatible with the theory of recognition.Despite fostering different bodies of knowledge, these two theoretical perspectives emphasize theemancipatory potential of intersubjective communication. In order to suggest a joint approach, the articlechallenges four questions that seem to indicate incompatibilities between recognition and deliberation. Thepaper advocates a deliberative approach marked by: 1) a non-altruist conception of reciprocity; 2) a focuson meta-consensus; 3) a non-cognitive understanding of communicative forms; 4) a broad comprehension ofdeliberative processes; and 5) an understanding about the importance of civil society associations

India and Pakistan – two multi-religious and multi-lingual countries, sharing a geographical and historical space, with indistinguishable level of extreme poverty and extreme inequality at the hour of independence – have clearly contrasting political regime histories. Throughout the six decades of independence India has remained mainly a democracy, while in Pakistan democracy has been fleetingly instated only as a facade for military-bureaucratic dominance. Why India and Pakistan have grown different fruits (in terms of political systems) despite having common roots (in terms of history and colonial legacy)? In India, Pakistan, and Democracy: Solving the puzzle of divergent paths, Philip Oldenburg – as a quasi-citizen of both countries (p.13) – sets out to get to the bottom of this puzzle.

"This article seeks to discuss the conceptual contributions that emerge from the dialogue between the theory of recognition and the idea of democracy, in order to explore the problem of inequalities. The article starts with a presentation of Axel Honneth's theory of recognition. Next, it develops some of the core ideas of John Dewey, showing their implications on Honneth's theory. From this fruitful dialogue, a democratic approach to justice comes out, and the paper argues that it has five main strengths: it adopts a non-institutional concept of politics; (2) it starts with the observation of oppression; (3) it overcomes the duality between public and private; (4) it develops a non-homogenizing notion of equality; and (5) it breaks the crystallized dichotomy individual/community that pervades the often presumed opposition between liberalism and communitarism.
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"The idea of “promoting democracy” is one that goes in and out of favor. With the advent of the so-called “Arab Spring”, the idea of promoting democracy abroad has come up for discussion once again. Yet, an important recent line of thinking about human rights, starting with John Rawls’s book The Law of Peoples, has held that there is not human right to democracy, and that nondemocratic states that respect human rights should be “beyond reproach” in the realm of international relations. This is, for obvious reasons, a controversial view, especially given the powerful and important arguments purporting to show that democracies do significantly better than nondemocracies in promoting internal peace and equality, and in engaging in peaceful international cooperation. Both proponents and opponents of the Rawlsian view of human rights have argued that the view implies that democracies may not “promote democracy” in nondemocratic societies. But, given that all parties to this dispute agree that democracy is necessary for justice, and given the important instrumental goods provided by democracy, the Rawlsian view has seemed deeply implausible to many.

In this paper I blunt this challenge to the Rawlsian view by showing how, even if there is no human right to democracy, we may still rightfully promote democracy in a number of ways and cases. Showing this requires investigating what it might mean to “promote democracy”, and looking more carefully at when various methods of democracy promotion are appropriate than has been done by most political theorists working on human rights. When we look carefully, we can see that acceptable forms and instance of democracy promotion are compatible with the Rawlsian view of human rights, and that this view is therefore not vulnerable to the “instrumentalist” challenge. We also see how, if political philosophy is to be useful, it must be willing to be less abstract and to look closely at actual cases."

In this paper, we diagnose a conceptual deficit in established measurement tools for comparing and assessing democracies. Even though the dimension of inclusion has been central to traditional formulations in the conceptualization of democracy, many measurement instruments (continue to) disregard or underplay the importance of the political inclusion of immigrants – an empirically relevant group in established and stable democracies. With reference to both liberal and republican theories of democracy, we argue that in times of transnational migration such democracies should grant access to voting rights not only to citizens but to also to non-transient immigrants. We then identify and discuss the two different pathways that lead to their electoral inclusion: access to citizenship and alien enfranchisement. Based on a conceptual specification and an operationalization of these two pathways, we translate our normative arguments into a measurement tool – the Immigrant Inclusion Index (IMIX). With the help of the IMIX we can evaluate relevant laws and legal procedures and we can measure how far democracies actually provide immigrants with voting rights. Throughout the specification and operationalization of our index, we adhere strictly to what we characterize as a normative-functional logic of concept formation, and point to its distinctive qualities as opposed to the dominant causal logic. This does not mean that our concept cannot be used for causal analyses – but only in a disaggregated form. First empirical results of 24 European democracies reveal that all countries under scrutiny perform better with respect to granting voting rights via citizenship than via alien enfranchisement. Furthermore, the latter pathway is not used as a substitute for the former. Overall, we find evidence that points to a serious democratic deficit of many European countries with regard to immigrant inclusion. This democratic deficit of nation states is only getting apparent when we overcome the conceptual deficit of democracy measurement tools and adapt them to a world of migration.

"Recent years have seen near constant reports on the failures of governance and the crisis of democracy. The critical nexus between the ever-increasing array of crises that modern representative democracies face and the widening reliance on an array of undemocratic governance mechanisms and networks to meet and manage these crises needs urgent and in-depth scholarly attention. This book therefore seeks to investigate the ways in which representative democracy might better handle environmental, political, social and economic crises in the twenty-first century by making the mechanisms of governance more democratic. By examining cases such as the global financial crisis, the arab revolutions, Wikileaks and climate change, this volume highlights the tensions between governance and democracy during times of crisis and examines the prospects of democratising governance in the twenty-first century and beyond.
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""Pragmatism & Democracy, special issue of Etica & Politica, 1, 2010.
Guest editors: Roberto Frega, Fabrizio Trifirò

Table of contents

1. Robert Talisse, Saving Pragmatist Democratic Theory (from Itself)
2. Roberto Frega, What pragmatism means by Public Reason
3. Gideon Calder: Pragmatism, critical theory and democratic inclusion
4. Fabrizio Trifiro’: The importance of pragmatism for liberal democracy: an anti-foundationalist and deliberative approach to multiculturalism
5. Marque Porrovecchio, Cracks in the Pragmatic Façade: F. C. S. Schiller and the Nature of Counter-Democratic Tendencies
6. Joëlle Zask, Self-gouvernement et pragmatisme
7. Barbara Thayer-Bacon, Education’s Role in Democracy: The Power of Pluralism
8. Sandra Laugier, Emerson, l’éducation et la démocratie
9. Felipe Careira da Silva, School and Democracy. A reassessment of G. H. Mead’s educational ideas
10. Kenneth W. Stikkers, John Dewey on the Public Responsibility of Intellectuals
11. Brian Duff, The Pragmatic of Parenthood
12. Shane Ralston, Dewey and Goodin on the Value of Monological Deliberation
13. Brian Butler, Democracy and Law: Situating Law within John Dewey’s Democratic Vision
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