Paradox Of Democracy Research Articles

The analytical–Continental divide: Styles of dealing with problems

What today divides analytical from Continental philosophy? This paper argues that the present divide is not what it once was. Today, the divide concerns the styles in which philosophers deal with intellectual problems: solving them, pressing them, resolving them, or dissolving them. Using ‘the boundary problem’, or ‘the democratic paradox’, as an example, we argue for two theses. First, the difference between most analytical and most Continental philosophers today is that Continental philosophers find intelligible two styles of dealing with problems that most analytical philosophers find unintelligible: pressing them and resolving them. Second, when it comes to a genuine divide in which not understanding the other side’s basic philosophical purposes combines with disagreement on fundamental questions of doctrine, the only such divide today is that between those analytical philosophers who tend to solve problems and those Continental philosophers who tend to press problems (roughly, the heirs of Derrida). It is among these subgroups that there is a real philosophical divide today. So the analytical–Continental divide is more a matter of style than of substance; but as we try to show, differences in style shape differences over substance.

Las paradojas de la democracia: partido dominante, gobierno y redes políticas en la Ciudad de México

Con base en una propuesta teórico-metodológica que sustenta el estudio empírico realizado del año 2009 a 2012 en la Ciudad de México, este artículo aborda los procesos políticos subyacentes al mantenimiento del poder por parte del Partido de la Revolución Democrática (prd). Se estudian las prácticas políticas insertas en lo que definimos como campos de reproducción de la dominación: a) representación y participación ciudadanas, b) ejercicio de gobierno y, c) redes políticas. Colateralmente, también abordamos otro campo: la dimensión partidaria. Sin escatimar los avances en materia de derechos civiles y humanos, protección social y apoyo a los sectores más desfavorecidos, entre otros, el ensayo profundiza en las formas de consolidación de los grupos de interés insertos en este partido (facciones) y las prácticas que utilizan pa-ra garantizar su permanencia en los espacios político-territoriales de la ciudad.

Revisiting the democratic paradox of environmental and sustainability education: sustainability issues as matters of concern

In this article, we address the democratic paradox in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) by drawing on Bruno Latour’s conceptual distinction between ‘matters of fact’ and ‘matters of concern’ and the notion of attachments that goes with it. We present an analysis of three cases (nature excursions, workshops that promote ecological behavioural change and making documentary films) focusing on how diverse educational practices deal with sustainability issues as matters of fact, matters of value and/or matters of concern. We examine how these Latourian concepts incite an analysis of educational practices that enriches the discussion about the democratic paradox in ESE. This finally brings us to point out how a concern-oriented ESE might take shape.

On Bernard Bosanquet’s “The Reality of the General Will”

Previous articleNext article No AccessOn Bernard Bosanquet’s “The Reality of the General Will”*Robert SternRobert Stern Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 125, Number 1October 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/677010 Views: 78Total views on this site © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

A funny thing happened on the way to the mosque: promoting civil society and religious pluralism through local conflict

Understood primarily as a meta-narrative reflecting citizens' reluctance to accept migration and Islam as permanent components of their society, grass-roots protests against mosque construction also highlight a democratic paradox regarding multi-level governance: while national governments bear chief responsibility for ensuring fundamental religious freedoms, local authorization procedures affecting mosque construction (e.g. zoning, building permits) have rendered communal spaces a Ground Zero for the regulation of Islamic faith communities. While similar protests have taken place across Europe, German officials face special problems in responding to challenges by neighbourhood groups, rooted in the complicated nature of federalism, the legacy of National Socialism and a new, if misunderstood, element of ‘militant democracy’ at local levels. The Pankow-Heinersdorf case, staged on the outskirts of eastern Berlin, shows that multifaceted interventions can help contesting parties come to terms with religious differences, develop their networking and dialogue skills and actually contribute to more effective democratic participation at the local level.

Democracy against Neoliberalism: Paradoxes, Limitations, Transcendence

Procedural (formal, liberal, capitalist or bourgeois) democracy is the political form of neoliberalism, and it dominates political thought and state practice today. This modality of management of class relations is currently in crisis, expressed through the evacuation of politics, the erosion of civil liberties and the emergence of authoritarian governance. This article offers a Marxist critique of neoliberal democracy, concluding that neoliberalism is incompatible with the expansion of democracy into key areas of social life. This is expressed by six paradoxes of democracy. Conversely, the expansion of democracy can provide an effective lever for the abolition of neoliberalism. This approach is promising for three reasons: first, the expansion of democracy is valuable in itself. Second, the contradictions between economic and political democracy illuminate the limitations of contemporary capitalism. Third, struggles about the nature and content of democracy can throw into question the limitations of capitalism as a mode of production.

Heretics, Democracy, the Beyond

This short essay first describes (in Part One) what the heretics are, pesky yet needed provocation from outside our “right” orthodoxy, and then details (in Part Two) the heretics in sections from A through I, which joyously ties up the entire survey of the heretics invincible, soaring cosmically beyond. Protesting heretics take hold of their criticizing selves, to invite us all to self-criticize, and so they are resented by the orthodox already right. Heretics are idios, lone “idiotic” and independent, to resolve two paradoxes of democracy. Many factual examples are cited, recent and historical, USA and abroad, to show how essential the brave heretics are, risking their lives to jolt afresh the orthodox status quo, to go beyond it. Heretics have their sociality; self-critical, they never err. Thus, heretics provoke us to go beyond us, going-beyond is living, and so heretics provoke us alive homo-cosmic.

The “Democracy-Politics Paradox”: The Dynamics of Political Alienation

Contemporary political scientists have observed a democratic paradox that has crystallized around the disconnection between how citizens imagine their democracy and how politics is practiced. Citizens continue to believe in the values of liberal democracy but are increasingly disillusioned with how their political systems work and the politics that are practiced in the name of democracy. This article revisits the root causes of political alienation to better understand this democratic paradox. It provides both a conceptual understanding of political alienation and its domain of action and insights into how the concept can be operationalized and measured in empirical research. It argues that while democracy itself may not be in crisis, the politics on which its operation rests is in peril.

A formal solution to a paradox of democracy

Richard Wollheim pointed out a paradox which he claims relates to democracy. We argue that this paradox is not exclusively related to democracy but actually arises whenever there is a conflict between personal preferences and preferences of accepted authorities. Furthermore, we provide a formal explanation of how one can rationally ?accept? or ?switch to? the preference of the authority she personally accepts and still have different preferences than the authority in question. Our formal solution is based on dynamic epistemic logic, while our philosophical explanation is inspired by Kant?s practical philosophy. On the other hand, we point out to what we believe to be the real exclusive restriction in democratic elections and we argue that, unlike Wollheim?s paradox, this restriction is a special feature of democracy.

Using Electoral Law to Construct a Deliberative Referendum: Moving Beyond the Democratic Paradox

Abstract Referendums are paradoxical. For some, they represent an ideal model of democracy. For others, however, the referendum is a dangerous device precisely because it is considered to imperil democracy—envisaged by the referendum's critics in exclusively representative form—and as such is best excluded from processes of constitutional change. In this article I address the three main objections to the referendum: that they lend themselves by definition to elite control and manipulation; that there is an in-built tendency of the referendum process merely to aggregate pre-formed opinions rather than to foster meaningful deliberation; and that referendums consolidate and even reify simple majoritarian decision making at the expense of minority and individual interests. I argue first that these objections are problems of practice not principle, and secondly that the recent turn in deliberative theory offers solutions to each of these problems by suggesting ways to instantiate good practice in the design an...

Chasing newsroom diversity: from Jim Crow to affirmative action

Social change triggered by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s sent the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) on a fifty-year mission to dismantle an exclusionary professional standard that envisioned the ideal journalist as white, straight, and male. In this book, Gwyneth Mellinger explores the complex history of the decades-long ASNE diversity initiative, which culminated in the failed Goal 2000 effort to match newsroom demographics with those of the U.S. population. Drawing upon exhaustive reviews of ASNE archival materials, Mellinger examines the democratic paradox through the lens of the ASNE, an elite organization that arguably did more than any other during the twentieth century to institutionalize professional standards in journalism and expand the concepts of government accountability and the free press. The ASNE would emerge in the 1970s as the leader in the newsroom integration movement, but its effort would be frustrated by structures of exclusion the organization had embedded into its own professional standards. Explaining why a project so promising failed so profoundly, Chasing Newsroom Diversity expands our understanding of the intransigence of institutional racism, gender discrimination, and homophobia within democracy.

Katherine Isbester (ed.), The Paradox of Democracy in Latin America: Ten Country Studies of Division and Resilience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. xv+396, $39.95, pb.

Katherine Isbester (ed.), The Paradox of Democracy in Latin America: Ten Country Studies of Division and Resilience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. xv+396, $39.95, pb. - Volume 45 Issue 3

Democratic Paradoxes: Women's Rights and Democratization in Kuwait

The 1999 decree by Kuwait's emir granting women electoral rights, and its subsequent parliamentary rejection, is more than just an instance of women's oppression in action. It also demonstrates a potential paradox between two axes of democratization: liberalization, the existence of a sphere of meaningful public contestation, and participation, that the right to participate in that sphere is extended to all. In Kuwait, 1999 represents an instance where those two axes were in direct competition. This article explores the 1999 enfranchisement as a way of understanding this democratic paradox and then follows these issues through the successful 2005 enfranchisement and the election of female Assembly members in 2007 and in the 2012, post-Arab Spring elections.In 1999, Kuwaiti women had the right to vote for six months, during which time there were no elections. The basic facts of this curious moment in Kuwaiti politics are these. The Kuwaiti National Assembly was dissolved on May 4, 1999, for the third time in Kuwaiti history; for the first time, elections were scheduled within two months, as is required by the constitution. On May 16, the emir, Shaykh Jabir al-Ahmad Al Sabah, decreed that Kuwaiti women would have the right to vote and be elected in the parliamentary elections in 2003. Immediately, there was an outpouring of support from high-ranking women within Kuwaiti society, women's rights activists in Kuwait and abroad, and international actors, such as religious leaders and Western governments. There was also immediate opposition to the decree, both from Islamists within and outside Kuwait who opposed women's voting rights on religious grounds and from liberals who said that the decree was an unconstitutional attack on the power of the National Assembly.When the parliament reconvened on July 17, it contained both strong Islamist and liberal blocs - 20 Islamists, 16 liberals, and 14 pro-government elected members, in addition to 15 government-appointed cabinet members. Immediately, the constitutionality and permissibility of the emir's decree became hot topics for debate, as the new assembly had to confirm or reject all of the decrees passed during the suspension. Many liberals and most Islamists opposed the decree, while the pro-government members followed the government line. On November 23, the Assembly rejected the emir's decree by a vote of 41 to 21. However, a group of liberals, who supported women's voting rights but opposed the emir's action, introduced an identical bill. On November 30, the parliament-initiated bill failed, by a vote of 32 to 30. All 15 of the government-appointed members of parliament supported the bill, as did 15 elected members, but two elected supporters of women's rights abstained. All 32 votes against the bill came from elected members. The National Assembly did not pass legislation giving Kuwaiti women the right to vote until May 16, 2005; women were able to vote for the first time in 2007.Following the coverage in the Western media, a reader would find herself confined to a single narrative about Kuwaiti women's oppression at the hands of Kuwaiti men and the conflict between traditional Islamic values and modern liberal values. But in the Kuwaiti context, the issue of women's political rights is part of a broad system of contestation that marks struggles over the consolidation and increasing strength of democratic institutions. This decades-old policy controversy is not merely an interesting footnote to the story of women's rights in the region; rather, it helps to demonstrate important tensions in the relationship between democratic institution-building, women's rights, and the multiplicity of actors involved in both processes.In this article, I use the example of the 1999 failed enfranchisement to explain the way that these tensions are constitutive of the politics of democratization in Kuwait. I begin by exploring the two elements of democratization I am discussing here: open contestation and full participation. …

Intervention and Promotion of Democracy. The Paradoxes of External Democratization and the Power-Sharing Between International Officials and Local Political Leaders

AbstractSince the end of the Cold War new practices of external interferences in the domestic affairs of states have revealed an unprecedented relationship between international intervention and the promotion of democracy. In fact, the new generation of peace-building missions is oriented toward the democratization of the target country. Moving from the paradoxes brought about by the goal of democratization, the paper offers an explanation of the power-sharing between international officials and local political actors in the target country. On the one hand, a democratic approach to international intervention fosters self-determination, tends to grant sovereignty and independence and considers the international mandate as temporary. On the other hand, the goal of democratization entails the establishment of enduring neo-trusteeships, violating the sovereignty and independence of the target-state. The paper focuses on three case-studies (Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor) to assess how those paradoxes lead to conflicting attitudes by international officials – who both concede and retain essential powers over local political actors – creating a power-sharing in the target country.

Democratic Legitimacy of the European Union: A Diagnosis and Some Modest Proposals

Debates and controversies about the democratic legitimacy of the EU have of course accompanied the Union from the very beginning. The “democratic paradox” of the EU exists because while committing itself to promote and scrutinize democracy in its member states, in candidate states, and in third states with whom it enters into contact, it does not display equivalent democratic features in its own functioning. Some commentators tried to define the problem out of existence; by pointing out that the EU is not a state-like polity, they argued that state-specific criteria of legitimacy, such as representative, participatory or deliberative democracy, do not apply. They postulated outcome-based or, at best, public reasons based, conceptions of legitimacy as applicable to the EU, and concluded that it satisfies those standards. But this argument is based on a non sequitur: from the statement that the EU is not a state (not even a quasi-federation or federation in statu nascendi) it does not follow that it should not be judged by the standards of democratic legitimacy. The EU is a complex, untidy polity which amalgamates inter-governmental and supranational elements in its constitution, and therefore this article postulates a bifurcated approach to democratic legitimacy. In so far as the EU contains inter-governmental elements, indirect legitimacy is all that is required, i.e., democratic legitimacy of governments representing their respective states in the Council. The second face of the EU – its supranational character – calls for democratic legitimation of its institutions, in particular, in accordance with the promise contained in Article 10 TEU, proclaiming representative democracy in the institutional setup of the EU. This requires changes to the electoral system of the EP in order to provide incentives for a more trans-European electoral process; strengthening of the supervisory role of the EP over the Commission; the strengthening of the role of the EP with regard to legislation, and endowing it with the competence of legislative initiative. Overall, the idea is for the institutional setup to resemble a canonical model of separation of powers and inter-institutional accountability, with the EP in a dominant position. Additionally, the first gesture towards direct democracy in the EU, the European Citizens’ Initiative, should be strengthened, both by upgrading the status of successful initiatives and by lowering thresholds and administrative requirements.

Using Electoral Law to Construct a Deliberative Referendum: Moving beyond the Democratic Paradox

This paper argues electoral law can be used to help construct a ‘deliberative referendum’. This can be done by legal controls in areas such as independent oversight of question-setting, citizen engagement in question formation, guidelines on referendum timing and campaign length, franchise rules, the provision of information to citizens, and laws regulating funding, expenditure and advertising. Two case studies will be cited: the United Kingdom Political Parties and Referendums Act 2000 and the on-going process of designing a referendum to be held in Scotland on independence in 2014, which each offer strong evidence to suggest that referendums can be meaningfully regulated by law and that a deliberative referendum process can be constructed.

„Critical Citizens“ oder „Critical Decisions“ – Eine Erwiderung

Critical Citizens or Critical Decisions - a Reply Abstract: In engaging with Markus Patberg's constructive criticism, this reply develops a third model for the empirical study of legitimacy, which moves beyond the dichotomy of measurement and judgment. Substantially, I thereby juxtapose Patberg's interpretation of the data as the rise of critical citizens with the democratic paradox arising from the de- creasing dignity of majority decisions (critical decisions).

The Illegalisation of Ethnic and Religious Parties and What the European Court of Human Rights Has to Say About It

Over the last two decades, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has been frequently called to pronounce itself on the legitimacy of bans of ethnic political associations or parties on the basis of the European Convention of Human Rights’ (ECHR) Freedom of Assembly and Association clause (Article 11). The Court found, in most cases, a violation on part of the state of article 11. I will look particularly at the Court’s case law concerning the compatibility of the bans of ethnic parties and associations with the rights granted in the Convention to these organisations. But why have certain countries, especially from South Eastern Europe, been particularly targeted by such jurisprudence of the ECtHR? In this article, I will argue that the (Jacobin) state nation concept, which different countries from South Eastern Europe took over from France, can help explain this situation.The article will be subdivided into three parts: The first part of this article will give a general introduction to the democratic paradox of banning political organizations. It will introduce to the jurisprudence of the ECtHR in relation to the violation of article 11 in cases concerning political parties.The second part will look at the ECtHR’s case law concerning the existence of ethnic associations or political parties from Bulgaria, Turkey, Poland, Macedonia and Greece.In the third part, we will clarify why such judgments, particularly relating to ethnic parties, have disproportionately affected certain countries. Most of these countries in fact are inspired by the heritage of the French state nation concept. The state nation concept builds on popular sovereignty, individual rights as opposed to group rights and the principle of the indivisibility of the nation. Although seemingly neutral, these characteristics have an implicit bias against minorities. The article will conclude by arguing that while, in the case of ethnic minorities, the Court has constantly upheld in its jurisprudence the rights of ethnic minorities, therefore reflecting a European standard established in this area, the same cannot be said about religious minorities, particularly when concerning Islam.

Learning to trust our students

Thayer-Bacon uses this opportunity to further explore Rancière's ideas concerning equality as described in The Ignorant Schoolmaster and their connection to democracy, as he explains in Hatred of Democracy. For Rancière, intelligence and equality are synonymous terms, just as reason and will are synonymous terms. Rancière recommends the only way to really teach a student is by viewing the student as an equal. Thayer-Bacon learned to view students as equals through her experience as a Montessori teacher, and so she brings Montessori into conversation with Rancière to further explore the idea of equality between teachers and students, as well as between citizens in a democracy. There are problems with both Rancière's perspective and Montessori's that feminist theory, in the form of a relational ontology and epistemology, can help us solve by finding our way out of the paradoxes of democracy and on to trusting our students, our future democratic citizens.

Resolving the Democracy Paradox

Increasing levels of democratic freedoms should, in theory, improve women’s access to political positions. Yet studies demonstrate that democracy does little to improve women’s legislative representation. To resolve this paradox, we investigate how variations in the democratization process—including pre-transition legacies, historical experiences with elections, the global context of transition, and post-transition democratic freedoms and quotas—affect women’s representation in developing nations. We find that democratization’s effect is curvilinear. Women in non-democratic regimes often have high levels of legislative representation but little real political power. When democratization occurs, women’s representation initially drops, but with increasing democratic freedoms and additional elections, it increases again. The historical context of transition further moderates these effects. Prior to 1995, women’s representation increased most rapidly in countries transitioning from civil strife—but only when accompanied by gender quotas. After 1995 and the Beijing Conference on Women, the effectiveness of quotas becomes more universal, with the exception of post-communist countries. In these nations, quotas continue to do little to improve women’s representation. Our results, based on pooled time series analysis from 1975 to 2009, demonstrate that it is not democracy—as measured by a nation’s level of democratic freedoms at a particular moment in time—but rather the democratization process that matters for women’s legislative representation.