Fabio Wolkenstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 367157 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fabio Wolkenstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fabio |
| FAMILY NAME | Wolkenstein |
| SIGNATURE | WOLKENSTEIN F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5030-7068 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 436 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Hans Kelsen on Constitutional Democracy: Genesis, Theory, Legacies
This volume challenges conventional interpretations by demonstrating that Hans Kelsen was far from being a purely formalist thinker. Instead, it highlights his profound and enduring engagement with the threats facing constitutional democracies. The political and institutional upheavals of interwar Europe significantly influenced Kelsen's evolving vision of democracy, as this volume shows. His contributions to twentieth-century democratic theory i…
‘Professor Hayek Is Not a Member of the ÖVP!’ The Conflictual Beginnings of the West German and Austrian Christian Democrats’ Neoliberalisation
While the neoliberalisation of social democracy has been extensively studied, the embrace of neoliberal ideas and policies by Christian Democratic parties has received far less attention. This article examines the contested early stages of neoliberalisation among West German and Austrian Christian Democrats during the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on two prominent advocates of neoliberalism within these parties – Franz Josef Strauß and Wolfgang Schüs…
The Dialectic of Backsliding: Thinking with Habermas About Democratic Progress and Regression
There is widespread agreement that we are living in an age of “democratic backsliding,” in which a growing number of formally democratic countries are falling behind previously achieved levels of democratization. But on what grounds can we claim that one level of democratic development is “higher” or “lower” than another? This question has rarely been systematically addressed in recent scholarship, despite the popularity of the language of “backs…
Was ist konservativ an der Christdemokratie
Christdemokratische Parteien gelten gemeinhin als konservativ. Dieser Beitrag zeigt jedoch, dass die Christdemokratie in ihrer Geschichte sehr unterschiedliche Formen des Konservatismus vereinte. Einerseits prägten konservative katholische Traditionen, die sich einem traditionellen Familienbild und einem latent autoritären, obrigkeitsstaatlichen Denken verschrieben, das Selbstverständnis der Bewegung. Andererseits absorbierten christdemokratische…
Citizens’ Preferences for Multidimensional Representation
How do citizens want to be represented in politics? We investigate citizens’ multidimensional preferences regarding six conceptions of representation that are derived from political theory. Using original item batteries and a conjoint experiment, we elicit the relative importance of the dimensions and the types of representation people prefer on each dimension. Our results from surveys fielded in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany…
Revisiting the constructivist turn in political representation
In recent times, representation theory has become one of the most productive and interesting sub-fields in democratic theory. Arguably, the most important theoretical innovation are the so-called ‘constructivist’ approaches to political representation. These approaches play a central role in Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation and The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation, two impressive volumes th…
Hans Kelsen on political Catholicism and Christian Democracy
Hans Kelsen was one of the most important legal thinkers of the 20th century, and he is known for mounting an elaborate defense of liberal party democracy at a time when the latter was hardly the most popular form of regime. This article examines how Kelsen responded to two major political movements he experienced in his intellectual prime: political Catholicism, which he was confronted with in interwar Austria, and Christian Democracy, which bec…
Should Traditional Representative Institutions be Abolished? A Critical Comment on Hélène Landemore’s Open Democracy
This short piece discusses Hélène Landemore’s proposal of an ‘open democracy’, as outlined in her recent book Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century . Acknowledging the value of Landemore’s radical and ambitious proposals, I draw attention to a number of shortcomings and blind spots that have to do with how the case for an ‘open democracy’ is made: through an unduly brief and dismissive treatment of political partie…
Ethics and Affect in Resistance to Democratic Regressions
In recent times, it has become increasingly common that elected parties and leaders systematically undermine democracy and the rule of law. This phenomenon is often framed with the term democratic backsliding or democratic regression. This article deals with the relatively little-studied topic of resistance to democratic regressions. Chief amongst the things it discusses is the rather central ethical issue of whether resisters may themselves, in …
Christian Europe Redux
The notion of ‘Christian Europe’ has returned with a vengeance in recent times. It figures prominently in the political rhetoric of conservative nationalists, who link appeals to Europe's Christian heritage and identity to avowedly illiberal political projects. This article examines this revived idea of Christian Europe by contrasting it with the meanings that prominent Christian Democratic leaders ascribed to the term in the post‐war era. This c…
Die dunkle Seite der Christdemokratie: Geschichte einer autoritären Versuchung
In Ungarn wickelt Viktor Orbáns Fidesz-Partei gerade die Demokratie ab und beruft sich dabei besonders emphatisch auf die christdemokratische Tradition. Ein ungehöriger Affront, könnte man meinen. Aber wie ernst war es christdemokratischen Parteien in der Vergangenheit eigentlich mit der liberalen Demokratie?
What is democratic backsliding
Much recent political commentary suggests that a "backlash," "revolt," or "counter-revolution" is unfolding against liberal constitutional democracy (e.g., Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018; Galston, 2020; Mounk, 2018; Norris & Inglehart, 2019; Zielonka, 2018). As a generalizable observation about contemporary politics, this diagnosis is perhaps unduly alarmist (e.g., Przeworski, 2019). In some countries, however, sustained attacks on democratic institutio…
When do social democratic parties unite over tough immigration policy
Attempting to reconcile the diverse immigration policy demands of the ‘old’ working class and the ‘new’ middle class, social democratic parties struggle to take a clear position on immigration policy. Adopting more restrictive policies is a possible way forward, but this is likely to lead to electorally costly intra-party conflict. This article illuminates the conditions under which social democratic parties can unite behind more restrictive immi…
European political parties’ complicity in democratic backsliding
This article discusses the contribution of European political parties to democratic backsliding. It focuses on the European People’s Party’s efforts to protect the Hungarian government, and the European Conservatives and Reformists party’s permissive acceptance of the Polish government’s attacks on democracy and the rule of law, analysing these patterns of behaviour as a form of complicity in democratic backsliding. In a second step, the article …
Where Does Europe End? Christian Democracy and the Expansion of Europe
In this article, we argue that an analysis of the conflict around the nature and limits of European integration that arose between Catholic and Protestant Christian Democrats in the post‐war era can shed new light on the expansionary dynamics that gradually came to characterize the project of European integration. Catholic Christian Democrats framed the unification of Europe as a relatively exclusionary cultural‐civilizational endeavour, while Pr…
Party Reforms and Electoral Systems: Proportional Representation is More Hospitable to Internal Democratisation
This article lays out the case for undertaking democratic reforms that reconnect parties with society, and addresses the well-known objection that democratising parties holds the risk of making them less electable, since it means empowering people who care more about their ideology than what the wider public wants. The article then argues that proportional representation systems reduces the risks associated with this potentiality, thus being more…
Freedom of speech within political parties
The expulsion of party members for the expression of dissent is a common practice in democratic states around the world, which can have momentous consequences for individual parties and the political system at large. In this article, we address the question of whether limitations on party members’ free speech can be defended on normative grounds. Drawing on a conception of parties that sees them as broader membership organisations that allow citi…
Multidimensional Representation
The study of representation is a major research field in quantitative political science. Since the early 2000s, it has been accompanied by a range of important conceptual innovations by political theorists working on the topic. Yet, although many quantitative scholars are familiar with the conceptual literature, even the most complex quantitative studies eschew engaging with the “new wave” of more sophisticated concepts of representation that the…
Epistemic Barriers to Rational Voting: The Case of European Parliament Elections
Voting is often said to be irrational because of the incredibly small likelihood that an individual voter’s ballot will be pivotal in favour of her preferred candidate or party. A persuasive response to this is to think of voting in terms of a ‘contributory causation’: a single voter can accordingly cause an outcome by being part of the set of votes that is decisive in bringing that outcome about. This article applies this theory of voting to Eur…
Response to Cristina Lafont’s Review of Rethinking Party Reform
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Revival of Democratic Intergovernmentalism, First Principles and the Case for a Contest-Based Account of Democracy in the European Union
Post-Eurocrisis, normative debates on democracy in the European Union have seen a revival of democratic intergovernmentalism. This article questions not the substantive proposals put forward under the heading of democratic intergovernmentalism, but the theory-building strategy typically used to justify these proposals. It argues that democratic intergovernmentalism theories fail to sufficiently theorise the connection between normative principles…
The social democratic case against the EU
Until the 1980s, many European social democratic parties had reservations about the project of European integration. But what exactly is the status of Euroscepticism within the broader ideology of social democracy? Does honouring social democratic commitments demand rejecting European integration and membership of the EU? This article investigates this question, using debates around Europe in the social democratic parties of Great Britain, Sweden…
Transnational partisan networks and constituent power in the EU
The constitutional politics of the EU have been intensely debated in recent times. One widespread perception animating the debate is that the constitutionalization of the EU polity has taken place in a largely apolitical fashion, in a process driven by decisions of courts, notably the Court of Justice of the EU, which are made in isolation from political contestation and popular participation (e.g. Glencross, 2014; Grimm, 2015; Scharpf, 2017). Th…
Rethinking Party Reform
Agents of Popular Sovereignty
Popular sovereignty requires that citizens perceive themselves as being able to act and implement decisions, and that they are de facto causally connected to mechanisms of decision making. I argue that the two most common understandings of the exercise of popular sovereignty—which center on direct decision making by the people as a whole and the indirect exercise of democratic agency by elected representatives, respectively—are inadequate in this…
The Crisis of Party Democracy, Cognitive Mobilization, and the Case for Making Parties More Deliberative
The much-discussed crisis of political parties poses a challenge to democratic theorists as institutional designers: how can the capacity of parties to mediate between society and state be resuscitated? In this article, we suggest that parties need to become more internally deliberative, allowing partisans to debate policy and more general visions for the polity. We outline a prescriptive model of deliberative intraparty democracy, drawing on the…
A Deliberative Model of Intra‐Party Democracy
Political parties serve a number of important functions in representative democracies.Connecting citizens to government is perhaps the most important one.This is how parties were traditionally conceived, and it continues to be the main standard according to which their legitimacy as representative institutions is evaluated. 1Intra-party democracy is instrumental in establishing and sustaining this connection between society and government.Interna…
Multidimensional Representation
The study of representation is a major research field in quantitative political science. Since the early 2000s, it has been accompanied by a range of important conceptual innovations by political theorists working on the topic. Yet, although many quantitative scholars are familiar with the conceptual literature, even the most complex quantitative studies eschew engaging with the “new wave” of more sophisticated concepts of representation that the…
Gentrification and occupancy rights
What, if anything, is problematic about gentrification? This article addresses this question from the perspective of normative political theory. We argue that gentrification is problematic insofar as it involves a violation of city-dwellers’ occupancy rights. We distinguish these rights from other forms of territorial rights and discuss the different implications of the argument for urban governance. If we agree on the ultimate importance of bein…
Intra-party democracy beyond aggregation
Contemporary scholarship on intra-party democracy pays a great deal of attention to aggregative procedures like primaries or membership ballots but widely ignores deliberative procedures within parties. This article begins by highlighting why scholars should care about deliberation within parties, discussing several functions intra-party deliberation is said to serve in the democratic theory literature. It then goes on to explore the deliberative…
Complementing and correcting representative institutions: When and how to use mini‐publics
In democratic theory and practice, it has become a popular view that designed deliberative mini‐publics can effectively counteract failures of representative democratic institutions. But when should mini‐publics be deployed, and how should they be designed? This article develops a framework for thinking about these questions. It argues that when representative democratic institutions ensure the empowerment of inclusions, enable the formation of c…
Populism, liberal democracy and the ethics of peoplehood
Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop normative standards that allow us to distinguish between more and less legitimate forms of populism. The point of this exercise is not to dismiss populism in toto; the article strives for a more subtle result, namely, to show that liberal democracy can …
Demoicracy, Transnational Partisanship and the EU
Advocates of demoicracy dismiss the proposal to transform the EU into a supranational democracy on the grounds that there is no pan‐European demos. This article examines several arguments that have been advanced to that effect and, noting some problems left outstanding, goes on to suggest that demoicrats who endorse the no‐demos thesis fail to consider the possibility that citizens themselves may seek to europeanize the identities of Europeans. I…
What is democratic backsliding
Much recent political commentary suggests that a "backlash," "revolt," or "counter-revolution" is unfolding against liberal constitutional democracy (e.g., Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018; Galston, 2020; Mounk, 2018; Norris & Inglehart, 2019; Zielonka, 2018). As a generalizable observation about contemporary politics, this diagnosis is perhaps unduly alarmist (e.g., Przeworski, 2019). In some countries, however, sustained attacks on democratic institutio…
Agents of Popular Sovereignty
Popular sovereignty requires that citizens perceive themselves as being able to act and implement decisions, and that they are de facto causally connected to mechanisms of decision making. I argue that the two most common understandings of the exercise of popular sovereignty—which center on direct decision making by the people as a whole and the indirect exercise of democratic agency by elected representatives, respectively—are inadequate in this…
Exercising Deliberative Agency in Deliberative Systems
At the heart of the ideal of deliberative democracy lies an emphasis on the political autonomy of citizens participating in procedures of public justification aimed at the promotion of the common good. The recent systemic turn in deliberative democracy has moved so far away from this ideal that it relegates the deliberations of citizens to a secondary matter, legitimising forms of rule that may even undermine the normative impulses central to the…
Revisiting the constructivist turn in political representation
In recent times, representation theory has become one of the most productive and interesting sub-fields in democratic theory. Arguably, the most important theoretical innovation are the so-called ‘constructivist’ approaches to political representation. These approaches play a central role in Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation and The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation, two impressive volumes th…
The grounds of solidarity: From liberty to loyalty
Solidarity can be conceived in multiple ways. This article probes possible underlying ontological and normative assumptions of solidarity. In order to conceptually clarify the notion of solidarity, we distinguish between five types of solidarity. We suggest that solidarity is either grounded in the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, or a category of loyalty and allegiance. If the former is the case, solidarity can be justified on rational grounds. I…
What can we hold against populism
Populist movements have become key players in European politics. These movements are readily criticized by journalists or political rivals, yet none of the common objections to populism seems to arrest their success. This article turns to normative political theory to cultivate sensitivity to problems arising from some existing arguments against populism, and to explore possible alternatives. It offers a critical reading of prototypical liberal a…
When do social democratic parties unite over tough immigration policy
Attempting to reconcile the diverse immigration policy demands of the ‘old’ working class and the ‘new’ middle class, social democratic parties struggle to take a clear position on immigration policy. Adopting more restrictive policies is a possible way forward, but this is likely to lead to electorally costly intra-party conflict. This article illuminates the conditions under which social democratic parties can unite behind more restrictive immi…
Transnational partisan networks and constituent power in the EU
The constitutional politics of the EU have been intensely debated in recent times. One widespread perception animating the debate is that the constitutionalization of the EU polity has taken place in a largely apolitical fashion, in a process driven by decisions of courts, notably the Court of Justice of the EU, which are made in isolation from political contestation and popular participation (e.g. Glencross, 2014; Grimm, 2015; Scharpf, 2017). Th…
Christian Europe Redux
The notion of ‘Christian Europe’ has returned with a vengeance in recent times. It figures prominently in the political rhetoric of conservative nationalists, who link appeals to Europe's Christian heritage and identity to avowedly illiberal political projects. This article examines this revived idea of Christian Europe by contrasting it with the meanings that prominent Christian Democratic leaders ascribed to the term in the post‐war era. This c…
Citizens’ Preferences for Multidimensional Representation
How do citizens want to be represented in politics? We investigate citizens’ multidimensional preferences regarding six conceptions of representation that are derived from political theory. Using original item batteries and a conjoint experiment, we elicit the relative importance of the dimensions and the types of representation people prefer on each dimension. Our results from surveys fielded in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany…
Where Does Europe End? Christian Democracy and the Expansion of Europe
In this article, we argue that an analysis of the conflict around the nature and limits of European integration that arose between Catholic and Protestant Christian Democrats in the post‐war era can shed new light on the expansionary dynamics that gradually came to characterize the project of European integration. Catholic Christian Democrats framed the unification of Europe as a relatively exclusionary cultural‐civilizational endeavour, while Pr…
European political parties’ complicity in democratic backsliding
This article discusses the contribution of European political parties to democratic backsliding. It focuses on the European People’s Party’s efforts to protect the Hungarian government, and the European Conservatives and Reformists party’s permissive acceptance of the Polish government’s attacks on democracy and the rule of law, analysing these patterns of behaviour as a form of complicity in democratic backsliding. In a second step, the article …
Party Reforms and Electoral Systems: Proportional Representation is More Hospitable to Internal Democratisation
This article lays out the case for undertaking democratic reforms that reconnect parties with society, and addresses the well-known objection that democratising parties holds the risk of making them less electable, since it means empowering people who care more about their ideology than what the wider public wants. The article then argues that proportional representation systems reduces the risks associated with this potentiality, thus being more…
The social democratic case against the EU
Until the 1980s, many European social democratic parties had reservations about the project of European integration. But what exactly is the status of Euroscepticism within the broader ideology of social democracy? Does honouring social democratic commitments demand rejecting European integration and membership of the EU? This article investigates this question, using debates around Europe in the social democratic parties of Great Britain, Sweden…
Membership ballots and the value of intra-party democracy
On the face of it, membership ballots present a clear case in which intra-party democracy comes into collision with core principles of representative democracy: they weaken the autonomy of representatives, and undermine the authority of the voters. In this article, I investigate whether this is correct, and whether membership ballots are, therefore, democratically illegitimate, using the controversial 2013 Mitgliederentscheid in the German Social…
Ethics and Affect in Resistance to Democratic Regressions
In recent times, it has become increasingly common that elected parties and leaders systematically undermine democracy and the rule of law. This phenomenon is often framed with the term democratic backsliding or democratic regression. This article deals with the relatively little-studied topic of resistance to democratic regressions. Chief amongst the things it discusses is the rather central ethical issue of whether resisters may themselves, in …
The Revival of Democratic Intergovernmentalism, First Principles and the Case for a Contest-Based Account of Democracy in the European Union
Post-Eurocrisis, normative debates on democracy in the European Union have seen a revival of democratic intergovernmentalism. This article questions not the substantive proposals put forward under the heading of democratic intergovernmentalism, but the theory-building strategy typically used to justify these proposals. It argues that democratic intergovernmentalism theories fail to sufficiently theorise the connection between normative principles…
The grounds of solidarity: From liberty to loyalty
Solidarity can be conceived in multiple ways. This article probes possible underlying ontological and normative assumptions of solidarity. In order to conceptually clarify the notion of solidarity, we distinguish between five types of solidarity. We suggest that solidarity is either grounded in the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, or a category of loyalty and allegiance. If the former is the case, solidarity can be justified on rational grounds. I…
A Deliberative Model of Intra‐Party Democracy
Political parties serve a number of important functions in representative democracies.Connecting citizens to government is perhaps the most important one.This is how parties were traditionally conceived, and it continues to be the main standard according to which their legitimacy as representative institutions is evaluated. 1Intra-party democracy is instrumental in establishing and sustaining this connection between society and government.Interna…
What can we hold against populism
Populist movements have become key players in European politics. These movements are readily criticized by journalists or political rivals, yet none of the common objections to populism seems to arrest their success. This article turns to normative political theory to cultivate sensitivity to problems arising from some existing arguments against populism, and to explore possible alternatives. It offers a critical reading of prototypical liberal a…
Changing Societies, Changing Party Systems
Changing Societies, Changing Party Systems by Heather Stoll aims to help us better understand how social diversity shapes democratic party systems. It focuses on the relationship between increasing
Membership ballots and the value of intra-party democracy
On the face of it, membership ballots present a clear case in which intra-party democracy comes into collision with core principles of representative democracy: they weaken the autonomy of representatives, and undermine the authority of the voters. In this article, I investigate whether this is correct, and whether membership ballots are, therefore, democratically illegitimate, using the controversial 2013 Mitgliederentscheid in the German Social…
The Crisis of Party Democracy, Cognitive Mobilization, and the Case for Making Parties More Deliberative
The much-discussed crisis of political parties poses a challenge to democratic theorists as institutional designers: how can the capacity of parties to mediate between society and state be resuscitated? In this article, we suggest that parties need to become more internally deliberative, allowing partisans to debate policy and more general visions for the polity. We outline a prescriptive model of deliberative intraparty democracy, drawing on the…
Gentrification and occupancy rights
What, if anything, is problematic about gentrification? This article addresses this question from the perspective of normative political theory. We argue that gentrification is problematic insofar as it involves a violation of city-dwellers’ occupancy rights. We distinguish these rights from other forms of territorial rights and discuss the different implications of the argument for urban governance. If we agree on the ultimate importance of bein…
Exercising Deliberative Agency in Deliberative Systems
At the heart of the ideal of deliberative democracy lies an emphasis on the political autonomy of citizens participating in procedures of public justification aimed at the promotion of the common good. The recent systemic turn in deliberative democracy has moved so far away from this ideal that it relegates the deliberations of citizens to a secondary matter, legitimising forms of rule that may even undermine the normative impulses central to the…
Intra-party democracy beyond aggregation
Contemporary scholarship on intra-party democracy pays a great deal of attention to aggregative procedures like primaries or membership ballots but widely ignores deliberative procedures within parties. This article begins by highlighting why scholars should care about deliberation within parties, discussing several functions intra-party deliberation is said to serve in the democratic theory literature. It then goes on to explore the deliberative…
Demoicracy, Transnational Partisanship and the EU
Advocates of demoicracy dismiss the proposal to transform the EU into a supranational democracy on the grounds that there is no pan‐European demos. This article examines several arguments that have been advanced to that effect and, noting some problems left outstanding, goes on to suggest that demoicrats who endorse the no‐demos thesis fail to consider the possibility that citizens themselves may seek to europeanize the identities of Europeans. I…
Transnational partisan networks and constituent power in the EU
The constitutional politics of the EU have been intensely debated in recent times. One widespread perception animating the debate is that the constitutionalization of the EU polity has taken place in a largely apolitical fashion, in a process driven by decisions of courts, notably the Court of Justice of the EU, which are made in isolation from political contestation and popular participation (e.g. Glencross, 2014; Grimm, 2015; Scharpf, 2017). Th…
Rethinking Party Reform
Agents of Popular Sovereignty
Popular sovereignty requires that citizens perceive themselves as being able to act and implement decisions, and that they are de facto causally connected to mechanisms of decision making. I argue that the two most common understandings of the exercise of popular sovereignty—which center on direct decision making by the people as a whole and the indirect exercise of democratic agency by elected representatives, respectively—are inadequate in this…
Populism, liberal democracy and the ethics of peoplehood
Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop normative standards that allow us to distinguish between more and less legitimate forms of populism. The point of this exercise is not to dismiss populism in toto; the article strives for a more subtle result, namely, to show that liberal democracy can …
Complementing and correcting representative institutions: When and how to use mini‐publics
In democratic theory and practice, it has become a popular view that designed deliberative mini‐publics can effectively counteract failures of representative democratic institutions. But when should mini‐publics be deployed, and how should they be designed? This article develops a framework for thinking about these questions. It argues that when representative democratic institutions ensure the empowerment of inclusions, enable the formation of c…
Epistemic Barriers to Rational Voting: The Case of European Parliament Elections
Voting is often said to be irrational because of the incredibly small likelihood that an individual voter’s ballot will be pivotal in favour of her preferred candidate or party. A persuasive response to this is to think of voting in terms of a ‘contributory causation’: a single voter can accordingly cause an outcome by being part of the set of votes that is decisive in bringing that outcome about. This article applies this theory of voting to Eur…
Response to Cristina Lafont’s Review of Rethinking Party Reform
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Revival of Democratic Intergovernmentalism, First Principles and the Case for a Contest-Based Account of Democracy in the European Union
Post-Eurocrisis, normative debates on democracy in the European Union have seen a revival of democratic intergovernmentalism. This article questions not the substantive proposals put forward under the heading of democratic intergovernmentalism, but the theory-building strategy typically used to justify these proposals. It argues that democratic intergovernmentalism theories fail to sufficiently theorise the connection between normative principles…
The social democratic case against the EU
Until the 1980s, many European social democratic parties had reservations about the project of European integration. But what exactly is the status of Euroscepticism within the broader ideology of social democracy? Does honouring social democratic commitments demand rejecting European integration and membership of the EU? This article investigates this question, using debates around Europe in the social democratic parties of Great Britain, Sweden…
European political parties’ complicity in democratic backsliding
This article discusses the contribution of European political parties to democratic backsliding. It focuses on the European People’s Party’s efforts to protect the Hungarian government, and the European Conservatives and Reformists party’s permissive acceptance of the Polish government’s attacks on democracy and the rule of law, analysing these patterns of behaviour as a form of complicity in democratic backsliding. In a second step, the article …
Where Does Europe End? Christian Democracy and the Expansion of Europe
In this article, we argue that an analysis of the conflict around the nature and limits of European integration that arose between Catholic and Protestant Christian Democrats in the post‐war era can shed new light on the expansionary dynamics that gradually came to characterize the project of European integration. Catholic Christian Democrats framed the unification of Europe as a relatively exclusionary cultural‐civilizational endeavour, while Pr…
Party Reforms and Electoral Systems: Proportional Representation is More Hospitable to Internal Democratisation
This article lays out the case for undertaking democratic reforms that reconnect parties with society, and addresses the well-known objection that democratising parties holds the risk of making them less electable, since it means empowering people who care more about their ideology than what the wider public wants. The article then argues that proportional representation systems reduces the risks associated with this potentiality, thus being more…
Freedom of speech within political parties
The expulsion of party members for the expression of dissent is a common practice in democratic states around the world, which can have momentous consequences for individual parties and the political system at large. In this article, we address the question of whether limitations on party members’ free speech can be defended on normative grounds. Drawing on a conception of parties that sees them as broader membership organisations that allow citi…
Multidimensional Representation
The study of representation is a major research field in quantitative political science. Since the early 2000s, it has been accompanied by a range of important conceptual innovations by political theorists working on the topic. Yet, although many quantitative scholars are familiar with the conceptual literature, even the most complex quantitative studies eschew engaging with the “new wave” of more sophisticated concepts of representation that the…
Die dunkle Seite der Christdemokratie: Geschichte einer autoritären Versuchung
In Ungarn wickelt Viktor Orbáns Fidesz-Partei gerade die Demokratie ab und beruft sich dabei besonders emphatisch auf die christdemokratische Tradition. Ein ungehöriger Affront, könnte man meinen. Aber wie ernst war es christdemokratischen Parteien in der Vergangenheit eigentlich mit der liberalen Demokratie?
Political science (33 works) · Law (29 works) · Politics (29 works) · Law (27 works) · Democracy (26 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Political economy (18 works) · Law and economics (14 works) · Populism, Right-Wing Movements (14 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works)