Democratic Argument Research Articles

Foreign Law, Democracy, and Constitutional Interpretation: A German-American Comparison

AbstractDemocracy is usually relied upon as an important argument against the excessive influence of international and foreign law on the domestic legal order, and especially on domestic constitutional law. Both in Germany and the United States, skeptics and opponents of the Europeanization or internationalization of domestic constitutional law repeatedly raise democratic concerns. From a comparative perspective, this Article examines the German and American democratic arguments against an overreliance on international and foreign law in constitutional interpretations. In exploring the democratic concerns expressed in German and American discussions, this Article focuses especially on the contrast between German dualism on the one hand and American exceptionalism on the other hand. This Article shows that, while the German dualists and the American exceptionalists base their arguments on different understandings of democracy, they share the viewpoint that democracy can only be realized on the national level, whereas international law aims at uniformity und thus inevitably runs counter to democratic self-governance and self-determination of the states. Precisely in this sense, it can be said that there is no qualitative, but rather only a quantitative distinction between German and American democratic arguments. Thus conceived, the alleged contrast between the principle of open statehood emphasized by German constitutional law scholars and the Constitutional Court and the idea of American exceptionalism embraced by a number of critics of the use of foreign law lies only in the extent to which the reference to international or foreign law in interpreting the domestic Constitution is deemed legitimate and justifiable.

Public participation in health data governance: a scoping review

Abstract Background The sheer growth of the health data shared and traded globally holds great promise and menace to public health. Big health data can foster scientific advancements with potential to heal millions across the globe. However, inerasable digital footprints left by the use of apps and digital services challenge people’s privacy and autonomy in (un)foreseeable ways that may cause them to stop sharing data. While many argue that public participation in data governance is a right, others view it as a means to increase data subjects’ recruitment and amass large quantities of data. Little systematic knowledge exists, however, about the arguments for and impact of public participation on health data policy and management. Methods A descriptive systematic scoping review was performed. Studies indexed in PubMed, WoS and PsycINFO published until March 2019 were searched. Only empirical, original, peer-reviewed studies reporting on public participation on health data governance were included. Eligibility and data extraction were performed by 3 researchers. Results The 21 studies analyzed point to public participation in several governance dimensions including data access, linkage, dissemination and policy. Involvement of (potential) data subjects in health data governance was substantiated by democratic arguments of legitimacy, transparency and accountability. However, the need to earn public support for data generation and use can override these arguments and foster utilitarian approaches that may transform participatory exercises into a technology of legitimation for a priori made decisions. Furthermore, although public participation in data governance can deliver instrumental benefits (e.g. participant-centred data policy), systematic assessment of participatory exercises’ impact is lacking. Conclusions Public participation in health data governance can promote public trust in and thrust for science. Further research is needed to fully assess its impact. Key messages Democratic-led participatory exercises in health data governance can foster public trust in science. Further research is needed to fully assess the impact of public participation in data governance.

De Grouchy, Wollstonecraft, and Smith on Sympathy, Inequality, and Rights

ABSTRACT This article offers an analysis of Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy [1798]. The focus is on the republican implications of her views on sympathy, with comparisons to Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft. Critical attention is paid to claims made on de Grouchy’s behalf that her philosophy is republican and that she offers republican arguments for gender and class equality. These claims are made by Sandrine Bergès [2021] in ‘Revolution and Republicanism: Women Political Philosophers of Late Eighteenth-Century France and Why They Matter’ to which this paper is an invited commentary. This paper does not dispute that de Grouchy’s thought is republican but concludes (1) that her Letters are conspicuously silent on women’s citizenship rights and that the gendered conceptual world of republican thought can account for that, and (2) that any commitment to equality of wealth is negated by her definition of property rights. Since gender and class equality would have been a subversion rather than an application of late eighteenth-century republican thought, this makes de Grouchy a more recognisable republican than Wollstonecraft, whose philosophy explicitly included a commitment to equality of wealth and equal citizenship rights for women.

Liberdade de imprensa na obra de Benjamin Constant: direito individual liberal ou garantia política republicana?

O artigo indaga o estatuto teórico da liberdade de imprensa na obra de Benjamin Constant, tendo como referência sua distinção entre princípios de liberdade e garantias. A hipótese é que a liberdade de imprensa é um componente da liberdade dos modernos no qual ocorre a articulação entre a esfera dos princípios de liberdade e a das garantias. Essa articulação é remetida ao esforço do autor para integrar duas linguagens políticas fundamentais para a elaboração de sua teoria política: a republicana e a liberal. O artigo reconstrói uma teoria da liberdade de imprensa desenvolvida pelo autor em linguagem liberal, a qual delimita o campo do pensamento e de sua expressão como pertencendo de direito ao domínio individual e define essa liberdade pela fórmula da não intervenção. Em seguida, sustenta que argumentos oriundos de uma linguagem republicana são construídos paralelamente à justificativa puramente liberal. Esses argumentos republicanos compreendem a liberdade de imprensa como um traço fundamental de uma constituição livre, na qual o arcabouço institucional e o espírito público se opõem à emergência de um poder arbitrário. Esse aspecto da obra de Constant é mobilizado para reavaliar os fundamentos normativos da liberdade de imprensa e seus desafios na sociedade moderna.

Dictatorship, Democracy, and Exit

The argument for democracy over dictatorship is often made on second-best grounds. Given the possibility of self-interested leaders, opportunities for predation are decreased by distributing political authority among a number of individuals. This second-best argument loses cogency under conditions of strong interjurisdictional competition for mobile residents, however, since benevolence effectively becomes endogenous to the competitive environment. I here present a simple formal model which considers the degree of predation under dictatorship and democracy given varying exit costs. A self-interested dictator will maximize profit, but in increasing the tax rate also needs to consider the effect of taxation on productivity. As citizen exit becomes less costly, the marginal effect of tax rates on tax revenues increases and the dictator is forced to reduce extraction. Democratic institutions make extraction more costly, but also spread extractive power more widely and weaken then incentive to reduce extraction in response to competitive pressure. With sufficient competition, an endogenously benevolent dictator will extract less than the aggregate of democratic factions. This analysis sheds light on the economic success of authoritarian countries such as Singapore and has important implication for emerging models of subnational governance such as charter cities and special economic zones.

Democracy and Compulsory Voting

In this article I aim to show that compulsory voting cannot be defended on democratic grounds. In pursuing this task, I first offer a generic account of the democratic argument in favor of compulsory voting, drawing on some of the most salient recent defenses of a moral duty to vote. I then offer an overarching objection that defeats both the generic form of the democratic argument for compulsory voting and its various operationalizations. The crux of the objection is that the democratic justification of a moral duty to vote is parasitical upon the existence of a moral duty to vote well. This decisively undermines the democratic argument for compulsory voting, since the latter can only be deployed as an enforcement mechanism for a duty to vote, regardless of the substantive content of that vote.

Border Coercion and ‘Democratic Legitimacy’: On Abizadeh’s Argument Against Current Regimes of Border Control

Arash Abizadeh claims that ‘[a]nyone accepting the democratic theory of political legitimation domestically is thereby committed to rejecting the unilateral domestic right to control state boundaries’. He bases this conclusion on the premise that ‘to be democratically legitimate, a state’s regime of border control must result from political processes in which those subject to it—including foreigners—have a right of democratic participation’. I shall argue that this premise, even if it were correct, does not support the conclusion since ‘democratic legitimacy’ (in Abizadeh’s sense) is morally irrelevant: that something is ‘democratically illegitimate’ in no way suggests, let alone implies, that it is also morally impermissible or contravenes a moral right. I shall consider counter-arguments advanced against this objection by Maxime Lepoutre and Abizadeh himself and argue that they fail. Thus there is no valid democratic argument against border coercion.

Empathy, Not Truth: Can a Dialectical and Skeptical Argumentation Enhance Both Democracy and Human Rights Courts?

Who is the best moral reasoner, the judge or the legislator? The aim of this paper is to refine this question, by distinguishing between different metaethical assumptions. If the meta-ethical assumptions of arguers are incompatible or if their institutional goal is to establish some truth, there is no way of entering into a constructive argumentative activity. My claim is that only when arguers renounce any epistemic temptation and feel empathy with respect to others’ arguments, caninstitutions improve the quality of their judicial and democratic arguments, and therefore gain authority.

Empathy, Not Truth: Can a Dialectical and Skeptical Argumentation Enhance Both Democracy and Human Rights Courts?

Who is the best moral reasoner, the judge or the legislator? The aim of this paper is to refine this question, by distinguishing between different metaethical assumptions. If the meta-ethical assumptions of arguers are incompatible or if their institutional goal is to establish some truth, there is no way of entering into a constructive argumentative activity. My claim is that only when arguers renounce any epistemic temptation and feel empathy with respect to others’ arguments, caninstitutions improve the quality of their judicial and democratic arguments, and therefore gain authority.

Defending the Democratic Argument for Limitarianism: A Reply to Volacu and Dumitru

In this paper, I argue that limitarian policies are a good means to further political equality. Limitarianism, which is a view coined and defended by Robeyns (2017), is a partial view in distributive justice which claims that under non-ideal circumstances it is morally impermissible to be rich. In a recent paper, Volacu and Dumitru (2018) level two arguments against Robeyns’ Democratic Argument for limitarianism. The Democratic Argument states that limitarianism is called for given the undermining influence current inequalities in income and wealth have for the value of democracy and political equality. Volacu and Dumitru’s Incentive Objection holds that limitarianism places an excessive and inefficient burden on the rich in ensuring political equality. The Efficacy Objection holds that even if limitarianism limits excessive wealth it still fails to ensure the preservation of political equality. In this paper, I will argue that both of these objections fail, but on separate grounds. I argue that the Incentive objection fails because one could appeal to limitarian policies that are different from the ones discussed by Volacu and Dumitru and which escape the problem of reduced productivity. I argue against the Efficacy Objection that limitarian policies are a partial but highly valuable step towards establishing political equality, and that they can and should complement or be complemented by other strategies.

Five theses on technoliberalism and the networked public sphere

How have digital technologies affected the market logics and economization that constitute the underlying governing rationality of neoliberalism? This essay unfurls five theses that further develop the concept of technoliberalism, the intensification of neoliberalism through computational technology, in the context of the networked public sphere: (1) technoliberalism names the dominant governing rationality in cultures where digital computation technology suffuses everyday life; (2) technoliberalism replaces public, democratically accountable power with the private, technical expertise of digital technology firms; (3) technoliberalism focuses on contriving technical systems to change culture at the expense of democratic argument and deliberation; (4) technoliberalism intensifies the commodification of attention, resulting in undemocratic forms of “noopower”; and (5) technoliberalism standardizes subjectivities through grammatization. Each thesis complicates the prospects of democratic deliberation in the networked public sphere and articulates lines of communication research necessary for keeping democratic practices vibrant.

The Right to Strike: A Radical View

Workers face a common dilemma when exercising their right to strike. For the worst-off workers to go on strike with some reasonable chance of success, they must use coercive strike tactics like mass pickets and sit-downs. These tactics violate some basic liberties, such as contract, association, and private property, and the laws that protect those liberties. Which has priority, the right to strike or the basic liberties strikers might violate? The answer depends on why the right to strike is justified. In contrast to liberal and social democratic arguments, on the radical view defended here, the right to strike is a right to resist oppression. This oppression is partly a product of the legal protection of basic economic liberties, which explains why the right to strike has priority over these liberties. The radical view thus best explains why workers may use some coercive, even lawbreaking, strike tactics.

CIÊNCIA, POLÍTICA E MÍDIA NA PERSPECTIVA CENTRADA NO ESCLARECIMENTO: A SOCIOLOGIA DE ALAN IRWIN EM DIÁLOGO COM A EDUCAÇÃO EM CIÊNCIAS

Este trabalho pretende discutir a abordagem de controvérsias sociocientíficas em sala de aula a partir da perspectiva centrada no esclarecimento. Para tal, a sociologia de Alan Irwin foi apresentada, e utilizando princípios da filosofia de Bakhtin, procurou-se elucidar os sentidos conferidos por professora e estudantes a controvérsias circulantes sobre o aquecimento global em sequência de dez encontros, especialmente no que diz respeito à relação entre ciência, política e mídia. Constatou-se perplexidade e desconforto com os fatores não-epistêmicos das controvérsias, a ciência sendo tratada como sinônimo de conhecimento verdadeiro, unívoco e objetivo, frequentemente em oposição à política e à mídia, tratadas como artifícios de mascaramento da realidade ou busca pelo poder. Houve um espectro de reações e níveis de consciência distintos por parte dos estudantes, seja sobre a complexidade das controvérsias sociocientíficas, seja sobre a percepção de si mesmos ou sobre o alcance epistêmico dos julgamentos da realidade. Avalia-se a coexistência do argumento democrático para o ensino de ciências para todos com tal perspectiva criticada por Irwin, bem como recomenda-se maiores esforços para o ensino-aprendizagem da natureza da ciência, das relações ciência-politica-mídia e do ceticismo como possível competência a ser educada.

Assessing Non-intrinsic Limitarianism

In this paper we aim to examine a novel view on distributive justice, i.e. limitarianism, which claims that it is morally impermissible to be rich. Our main goal is to assess the two arguments provided by Ingrid Robeyns in favour of limitarianism, namely the democratic argument and the argument from unmet urgent needs and the two distinct limitarian views which these arguments give rise to. We claim that strong limitarianism, which is supported by the democratic argument, should be rejected as it fails to fully instantiate the value of political equality, while having some other unattractive implications as well. By contrast, we argue that weak limitarianism, which is supported by the argument from unmet urgent needs, should be endorsed, albeit in a qualified version which also takes responsibility constraints into consideration.

Between 'Member-Driven' WTO Governance and 'Constitutional Justice': Judicial Dilemmas in GATT/WTO Dispute Settlement

Globalization and the recognition of human rights and constitutionalism by all UN member states entail that also international courts increasingly interpret their judicial mandates and multilateral treaties in conformity with 'constitutional principles' as multilevel governance of transnational public goods (PGs) constraining intergovernmental power politics through judicial protection of transnational rule of law for the benefit of citizens. US President Trump, the 'Brexit', and an increasing number of non-democratic rulers (e.g. in China, Russia, and Turkey) challenge multilateral treaty systems, international adjudication and 'cosmopolitan rights' by ‘populist protectionism’ prioritizing ‘bilateral deals’. This contribution uses the US blockage of the WTO Appellate Body system for illustrating the 'republican argument' that transnational PGs cannot be protected without judicial remedies, rule of law and democratic governance. Adversely affected governments, citizens and courts of justice must hold power politics more accountable so as to protect PGs for the benefit of citizens and their constitutional rights. WTO members should use their power of majority voting for authoritative interpretations of WTO law supporting ‘judicial administration of justice’ in multilevel governance of the world trading system. Multilevel judicial control of trade regulation legitimizes ‘member-driven governance’ by protecting rule of law as approved by parliaments for the benefit of citizens, their equal rights and social welfare.

Lättläst - en demokratifråga

Easy reading novels for young people have increased rapidly during the last years. Authors, publishers, librarians and teachers regard the novels a tool for teaching, and the books are advocated to offer children and teenagers that are considered demotivated and poor readers suitable texts. The democratic argument is vital for the text type is, i.e. that everyone has the right to have access to literary texts. From a critical literacy perspective, the aim of this article is to highlight and discuss aspects of democracy in Swedish classrooms. The empirical material consists of 18 interviews with authors and publishers and text analysis of 17 novels with material for students and teachers. The article shows that authors and publishers use the democratic argument heavily when advocating for the text type. The novels show a gender stereotype pattern and the instructions encourage an efferent reading. The article argues that it is important to have a critical perspective if using the easy readers in the classroom.

A Republican Argument Against Nudging and Informed Consent.

I argue that it is impermissible to use nudges as a tool to influence patients in the context of informed consent. The motivation for such nudges is that their use can help reconcile potential conflicts between a physician's duty of beneficence and duty to respect patient autonomy. I argue that their use places physicians in a position of domination over patients. That is, it violates the republican freedom of patients because it grants physicians the power to arbitrarily interfere. I also argue that if one tries to adjust the duty of beneficence to avoid this conclusion, then the republican freedom of patients is still threatened under conditions of clinical equipoise. As ways to avoid the inevitability of nudging, I suggest the alternative of boosting or the pairing of patients with physicians who share their deep values. This latter option achieves the benefits nudging patients is supposed to provide without violating the republican freedom of those patients.

Democratic epistemology and democratic morality: the appeal and challenges of Peircean pragmatism

Does the wide distribution of political power in democracies, relative to other modes of government, result in better decisions? Specifically, do we have any reason to believe that they are better qualitatively – more reasoned, better supported by the available evidence, more deserving of support – than those which have been made by other means? In order to answer this question, we examine the recent effort by Talisse and Misak to show that democracy is epistemically justified. Highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments, we conclude that the differences between an epistemic conception of democracy and an epistemic justification of democracy are fundamental to determining the relative attractions of different arguments for democracy, and their implications for actual forms of government.

Party Politics and Institutional Internal Party Democracy in Malaysia

Internal party democracy shows an intensive examination of the thought, idea and demonstration of democracy within the political parties. Each political party stands for internal party democracy through a course of actions and decisions, made in relation to those which are affiliated with power and authority. In the case of Malaysia where internal party democracies are low level institutionalization where the absence of free and powerful internal conflicts minimize confrontational political culture. It is acknowledged that political partiescannot undertake their democratic activities if they themselves are not democratic in their internal undertakings. It is much more important to understand how the political parties offer themselves to the general voters. These functions show intra-party democracy as crucial for development of institutional democracy. Firstly, it supports a political culture where the democratic argument and collective ownership are in the decision-making process. Secondly, it is practiced party solidarity through the minimizing f of factionalism. Thirdly, it offers a reasonable internal conflict resolution framework and fourthly, it reduces pioneering and the discretionary utilization of power.Thus, the degree to which political parties can retain internal party democracy relies on the degree to which procedures of successful membership supports are formally practiced. It is basically actualized in the party’s authoritative rules and strategies.Therefore, the objective of this paper is to assess internal party democracy among the major political parties and their political culture and its impact on party politics in Malaysia. Finally, this paper concludes by explaining how the prevailing political culture is pushing the country to the brink of an abyss and discusses the way out as well. Methodologically, it is a qualitative in nature and mostly secondary data such as newspaper reports, observers’ reports, and research reports have been used to prepare this article.

Att göra gott. Svenska förlags- och författarröster om lättläst ungdomslitteratur

Title: The Will to Do Good: Swedish Publishing Houses and Authors on Easy-to-Read Young Adult FictionQuestions about the function of literature are highly relevant, especially considering today’s great concern for the status of literature and for young people’s reading. In this article we investigate easy-to-read, or easy reader, a text type rapidly progressing in Sweden, and increasingly highlighted as a solution to the weak interest in reading among young people. Easy reader books originate from the democratic argument that everyone has the right to be able to read well enough and understand information. Although a significant part of today’s Swedish book market consists of easy-to-read literature, we know very little about the attitudes towards this literature and its readers. While easy-to-read books are made accessible on the market through different channels, the authors and publishing houses play a particularly important role. This article describes and discusses Swedish authors’ and publishing houses’ values and attitudes to their books, their readers and their mission, through interviews with 15 authors and three publishing houses conducted during 2014–2015. The article shows that the will to do good is a major motivation to act within the easy-reading field. The authors and the publishing houses look upon their mission as very important for a group of struggling or reluctant readers. According to the authors and publishing houses, this group requires texts that are characterized by simplicity in terms of recognition of characters, settings and themes. They also want to remove the stigmatization of easy readers, at the same time as the books are intended to serve as a didactic tool. Our results also show that the majority of authors combine their writing with a large number of author visits in schools.