Liberal Democratic Regimes Research Articles

The populist challenge to the liberal democratic regime in Italy and Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro and Matteo Salvini

Brazil and Italy, Jair Bolsonaro and Matteo Salvini, two populist leaders who, in Latin America and Europe, and alongside Donald Trump in the US, experienced a strong affirmation in 2018 – Italy and Brazil — and 2016 US, respectively. This paper aims to analyse whether and to what extent Bolsonaro and Salvini have effectively created the People through the equivalential chain. That is, according to Laclau, the specificity of populism lies in the ability of a leader to transform a shapeless social group into a unique People. The leader’s speech establishes the borders, and it is through identification with the leader’s speech that the People’s collective identity is formed. Using three dimensions – the leader, the ideology and the audience – we analyse the similarities and differences between the two experiences. The results show how the populist reason of the Brazilian and Italian leaders was highly functional in creating a broad consensus but also how precarious and fragile this consensus was.

Climate refugeehood: A counterargument

This paper argues against the idea of climate change refugeehood. Drawing on political realism, it reconstructs the idea and function of refugeehood in international politics. Refugees are not the agencyless victims merely in search of rescue by states of the Global North, as the idea of climate refugeehood as a form of humanitarian refugeehood would have it. Nor are they simply a function of reparative justice, or of defending international state legitimacy. To liberal democracies, refugees are those fleeing political oppression. They hold an important political function in inter-state relations in undermining rival political systems and strengthening liberal democratic regimes, both ideally and materially. The idea of climate refugeehood collides with the role refugeehood plays in international politics, the reasons for their admission, and the conceptualization of their plight and function. It ought, hence, to be rejected.

Legal Basis of the Formation and Functioning of the Democratic Regime: the Antinomy of Liberalism and Totalitarism

The article is devoted to the problems of the legal foundations of the formation and functioning of a democratic regime in its liberal and totalitarian dimensions. At the same time, since the unlimited power of the people hides the danger of totalitarianism, which has repeatedly manifested itself in the past of both our country and the world as a whole, the study of the democratic regime is of an urgent nature. Therefore, the purpose of this study is the legal basis of the formation and functioning of a democratic regime in the context of its interaction with liberalism and totalitarianism. The implementation of the specified goal requires the performance of a number of scientific tasks. The article substantiates that «pure» political regimes have a sufficiently abstract character. It was found that within the framework of the «dual» approach there are two dichotomies of political regimes: depending on the interaction of the state with the individual and according to the affiliation of sovereignty. It is proven that as a result of duality, the regime of «totalitarian democracy» is distinguished, an example of which is the USSR during the era of the personality cult of Y. Stalin, and the regime of «liberal democracy», the example of which is the USA for a significant part of its history. The article concludes that the philosophical foundation of «totalitarian democracy» was formed within the framework of the so-called «theory of collectivist democracy», according to which the people were considered as a multi-headed single collective being, which could often have negative consequences in the form of, for example, the maxim «enemy of the people». It is emphasized that the involvement of the broad masses of the people in the repressive Stalinist system created a certain «democratic surrogate» - the Soviet «totalitarian democracy», under which the Soviet people are involved in the trials of the «enemies of the people» (democratic dimension), and the nature of the repression itself has a mass character, which brings it closer to genocide (totalitarian dimension). It was found that the liberal-democratic regime in the USA was formed as a result of the combination of the fact that the people take an active part in the sending of state power (democratic dimension) and the constitutional and legal declaration, as a fundamental principle, of freedom (liberal dimension). The practical value of the work lies in the need to create safeguards for the revival of totalitarianism in the world in conditions of active use of the postulates of democracy by non-democratic regimes.

Reviewing Southern Africa’s Status as a Developmental Region through Governance and Development

This case study discusses how the democratic governance principles and norms impact development in the SADC, and how institutional and structural reforms require greater participation by society to address the governance challenges encountered in this subregion of Africa. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to examine and assess the relationship between SADC’s governance, democratic principles and norms, development plans and processes. A comparative analysis was conducted using SADC’s key democratic achievement connected to policies, processes, and remaining challenges. Subsequently, the key causes of SADC’s slow development on the African continent were explored, focusing on the failure to institutionalise liberal democratic governance consistently during postcolonial transition periods, speculating SADC’s slow development. The findings suggest that SADC is impacted by democratic principles, norms, and processes, such as local governance, civil society, and decentralisation of power. Bearing in mind Southern Africa’s economic frailty, elevated levels of civil unrest and poor service delivery, SADC authorities require a strong sub-regional governance strategy supported by robust national programmes to determine and overcome the factors hindering the institutionalisation of democratic principles in SADC, and promote strengthened institutional capacity. The unambiguous progression towards the consolidation of democracy, within the SADC, has impacted the governance and development successes of the region, resulting in democratic values and practices remaining shallowly rooted, and slow progress toward open and transparent governance.

Challenges in teacher education

Teacher education is influenced by a global meta-narrative that states that improving the quality of teacher education will lead to improved pupil outcomes, which in turn will lead to economic competitiveness in the global context. Thus, teacher education is seen as a powerful lever for achieving this ambition and is therefore positioned as a policy problem. This article outlines some of the key global challenges both in terms of global teacher education policy and in relation to wider societal influences. It problematises the notion that global challenges can be addressed by wholesale global solutions, arguing that liberal democratic governance in the global north mitigates against longer-term reform that does not achieve results within one election cycle. Instead, the article suggests that certain programme/partnership-level changes can work in powerful ways to achieve the ambition of more socially progressive teacher education

Conspiracy beliefs and social media: Addressing a systemic risk

Conspiracy beliefs are an important lever for hybrid threat activity. It presents a risk for liberal democratic governance at multiple levels. The widespread circulation of conspiracy beliefs on social media contributes to discrediting sources of authority, science, and expertise. This article addresses the circulation of conspiracy beliefs on social media as a systemic risk. Because social media companies operate within a legal loophole of facilitating illegal and harmful content, they have become the primary medium for the spreading of conspiracy beliefs. This article suggests closing the legal loophole since it provides a space for potential hybrid threat activity. Social media companies should be made responsible for content published through their services in a similar fashion to that of regular news media. It explores the extent to which regulation of social media could be a systemic response to the challenge of conspiratorialism as a space for hybrid threat activity directed at our democratic societies.

Digitalising Asylum Procedures: The Legitimisation of Smartphone Data Extraction for Retrospective Border Control

ABSTRACT The smartification and digitalisation of border controls in Europe has been widely associated with the expansion and interoperation of databases like EURODAC, SIS, or VIS. This article examines the legitimisation of a new instrument of dataveillance for retrospective border control, namely smartphone data extraction in asylum governance. In particular, it asks how smartphone examinations could become a legitimate policy instrument in asylum procedures in the Central European region of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Applying Critical Discourse Analysis to policy documents, including parliamentary protocols, laws, public commentaries and implementation documents, it argues that the introduction of smartphone data extraction against concerns over privacy and social injustice was based on moralising securitisation strategies as well as techno-solutionist rationalisations. Overall, the (re-)appropriation of personal digital data in the service of border control displays established characteristics of a governmentality of unease but also distinctly Big Data-related legitimisation patterns linked to data/meta-data differentiations and machine-based readouts. The case study raises questions about the implications of using personal digital data for a liberal democratic governance of borders and about its capacity to become an acceptable geopolitical tool for identification and return procedures.

Reparative public policy

ABSTRACT This paper aims to map out a framework for thinking critically about race and coloniality in policymaking, through utilizing what I am calling a reparative public policy procedural approach. Demands for reparations have long aimed to address racialized inequalities set up through slavery, genocide and colonialism. Yet while being sort as an outcome of public policy by those impacted by colonization, slavery and genocide, reparations can also inform the process of policy making in liberal democracies. Through drawing on insights from the literature on reparations, I seek to illuminate the way coloniality and racism are written into aspects of liberal democratic policymaking, but also how a reparatiive approach to public policy making can help policy makers in liberal democracies find ways to challenge and transform such practice. This is what I am calling a reparative public policy approach – a framework for policymakers that draws attention to a presumed neutrality of policy-making processes which are maintained through methodological nationalism, deployment of liberal time, accumulation through dehumanization and racialization, and the universalism of liberal democratic governance.

The European Audiovisual Media Services Directive: Normative precursor in the global governance towards VoD platforms?

The commentary emphasizes the potential diffusion of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) provisions in Australia, Mexico, South Africa and Canada. It argues that the revision of the AVMSD has changed the framework of possibilities for several public authorities in the audio-visual media sector and that today a dynamic wave of new provisions towards Video-on-Demand (VoD) streamers is taking place across several liberal democratic regimes. However, the commentary shows that even though transnational VoD services represent disruptive new actors, creating industrial, technological and institutional shock, the latter does not lead to the same political issue cross-nationally.

Breaking the silence, challenging the official discourse: the torture of far-left militants during the 1970s–1980s in Italy and its denials

Drawing on critical literature on state violence, torture and social movements, and based on archival documents and secondary sources, this article explores the cases of torture of far-left militants during the 1970s–1980s in Italy. It shows that these cases are still surrounded by silence, despite recent revelations and confessions by police officers, and analyses mechanisms of denial and recurrent tropes in the official discourse that contributed to shield state institutions and silence testimonies. It engages with the ‘emergency’ as a legal and discursive paradigm, creating sociopolitical conditions that enabled state violence and sustained its denial. Finally, it challenges the liberal approaches that postulate the incompatibility of liberal democratic government with state violence, and reminds the key role played by solidarity campaigns and mobilisations to condemn torture and demand truth and accountability.

Racial experience and knowing the political in liberal democracies

ABSTRACT Liberal democracies politicize racist incidents at the expense of institutionalizing antiracist ideologies through party politics. This article is concerned with how racial experience shapes how people come to ‘know the political’ in Ceuta, a Spanish city on the Spanish-Moroccan borderland. Knowing the political is an embodied form of subjectivity that makes meaningful sense out of governmental politics as an extension of social life. After examining racial experiences in the lives of Muslim politicians and their supporters, the article examines how the UDCE, a political party primarily composed of Muslims, practices and articulates political ideologies shaped by their experiences as Muslims in Ceuta. Popular and political reactions to the UDCE’s political interventions reveal social unease with racialized peoples conducting political affairs as racialized peoples. This unease, in turn, is rooted in broader sociocultural and historical processes that exclude racial experience from the core practices and ideologies of liberal democratic governance.

CONSTITUTION IN TIME OF EMERGENCY – SCHMITT AND KELSEN

‘The strike against Prussia’ (Preussenschlag) was part of the failure of the Weimar Republic (WR) and it started ten days after Schmitt had published Legalität und Legitimität. On July 20, 1932 the president Von Pappen used an emergency decree and authorized the Reich chancellor to depose the government of Prussia based upon the Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which consequently put the biggest German state under martial law. At that time, the liberal democratic government in Prussia was giving a lot of trouble to the executive powers that were losing control over their political decisions.

Social Origins Theory: Untapped Potential and the Test by the Pandemic Crisis

Abstract The paper examines the explanatory potential of the social origins theory advanced by L. Salamon and H. Anheier. This examination follows two tracks. The first track is a comparative investigation of the conceptual affinity between the social origins, on one hand, and the theories of welfare regimes and varieties of capitalism, on the other. We argue that the conceptual affinity between these three theories lies in the fact that they explore what could be referred to as vertical and horizontal interactions between state and market. Vertical interactions are based on the legitimate coercion by government authorities, while horizontal relations develop at the initiative of their autonomous members. The social origins approach introduces yet another essential dimension, that of civic self-organization, into the analysis of vertical and horizontal interactions embodied in state/market relationships. Similarity of underlying conceptual foundations might suggest that all three theories would generate similarly strong academic interest in reexamining their analytical tools and applying their approaches to the diversity of new social and economic realities. The literature indicates that both the welfare regimes and varieties of capitalism have generated robust academic discussions, whereas the conceptual and analytical potential of the social origins remains relatively less explored. It has become particularly evident in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic which gave rise to a number of studies that apply the frameworks of the welfare regimes and varieties of capitalism to examine cross-country differences in government social welfare policies. However, the social origins theory seems not to have generated comparably rich research testing its explanatory power in the new conditions triggered by the pandemic challenges. To address this gap, the paper follows a second track which investigates pandemic-induced transformations in nonprofit sectors of Germany, Austria, UK and USA – countries representing three “basic” nonprofit regimes immediately corresponding to Esping-Andersen’s welfare state typology: welfare partnership, social democratic and liberal. Applying the analytical lens of the social origins approach, we look at how the impact of the pandemic moved the measurable parameters of nonprofit sectors: the scope of the third sector, the volunteer share of the workforce, the extent of nonprofits’ engagement in the provision of social services, and the share of government financial support for the sector. We further look at the pandemic-induced changes in the composition of the “tool kit” employed in government-nonprofit cooperation. Thus, testing the explanatory potential of the social origins approach, we observe that responses to pandemic challenges have contributed to a degree of convergence of both liberal and social democratic nonprofit regimes with the welfare partnership pattern. However, path dependency, which is suggested by the regimes’ “moorings” embedded in the social origins approach, remains strong enough to explain the observed viability of the core features typical of “basic” nonprofit regimes in times of the pandemic crisis.

Politicisation of the public service during democratic backsliding: Alternative perspectives

AbstractThis Research Note explores the issue of politicisation of the public service against the backdrop of the emergence of populism. A common feature of populist governments is a lack of trust in the civil service and its willingness to implement the populist political project. An important consequence of marginalising the civil service and its expertise in policy making is detrimental to policymaking. Also, increasing politicisation, that is replacing career public servants with people loyal to the populist regime, drains the public service of organisational memory on how to deal with policy issues. However, liberal democracies in many countries, too, have experienced increasing politicisation over the past decade, albeit within the confines of liberal democratic rules and norms. This emerging, more politicised model of the civil service assumes that neutrality can be an impediment to effective governance and that public servants should be committed to the program of the government. The civil service would be expected to support the government of the day actively and energetically, and therefore there would be fewer barriers. Thus, while politicisation in different forms is a feature of both liberal and populist government, the consequences of politicisation are different in the two regimes.Points for practitioners In liberal democracies, the civil service offers expertise to support politicians in the policy‐making process. Populist governments, emphasizing loyalty to the regime more than expertise, tend to increase the number of political appointees in the public service. Most of the populist leaders elected are political outsiders and do not want to be constrained by what they consider to be entrenched and self‐serving elites. The most pressing dangers for liberal democracy are when populist governments consider policies that would change political and social rights. Liberal democratic government, too, have increased political control of the public service although without altering the rules and norms of democratic governance.

CZECH PRESIDENCY OF THE COUNCIL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION: FIRST RESULTS

The article discusses the features of the Czech presidency of the EU Council, which took place in the second half of 2022. The author draws attention that program documents was due to both external factors (special military operation in Ukraine) and internal (coming to the power of the liberal-democratic government of P. Fiala). The new Cabinet, following the rhetoric of a return to the Havel course, focused on promoting a value policy. This approach has led the Czechs to prioritize helping Ukraine and combating energy dependence on Russian natural resources. In turn, the extremely urgent goals of post-pandemic recovery were not properly articulated. The author analyzes the results of the previous Czech presidency and concludes that the topics raised 13 years ago have penetrated the European agenda by 2022, becoming current trends in the development of the EU. The continuity of the two presidencies is also indicated. The paper notes that the current chairmanship can hardly be considered as a tool for promoting the long-term national interests of the Czech Republic due to the possible deterioration of the country’s socio-economic situation.

Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Global Retreat of Democracy: A Curated Discussion

To the surprise of many in the West, the fall of the USSR in 1991 did not lead to the adoption of liberal democratic government around the world and the much anticipated “end of history.” In fact, authoritarianism has made a comeback, and liberal democracy has been on the retreat for at least the last 15 years culminating in the unthinkable: the invasion of a democratic European country by an authoritarian regime. But why does authoritarianism continue to spread, not only as an alternative to liberal democracy, but also within many liberal democracies where authoritarian leaders continue to gain strength and popularity? In this curated piece, contributors discuss some of the potential contributions of management scholarship to understanding authoritarianism, as well as highlight a number of directions for management research in this area.

The Tragedy of Liberal Democratic Governance in the Face of Global Threats.

In hindsight, the early response of liberal governments to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was chaotic and generally inefficient. Though one might be tempted to attribute these failures to the incompetence of certain political decision-makers, we propose another explanation. Global threats require a coordinated international response, which is only possible if the threat is perceived in the same way by all, and if government priorities are similar. The effectiveness of the response also relies on massive adhesion of citizens to the measures imposed, which in turn requires trust in government. Our hypothesis is that certain fundamental features of liberalism complicate such global and collective responses: neutrality of the state and primacy of the individual over collective society. Liberalism considers that institutions and public policy must not be designed to favor any specific conception of the common good. That which is best for all is usually determined by a “competition of opinions,” which frequently leads to scientific expertise being considered as only one opinion among many. Liberalism also imposes strict respect for individual freedoms and private interests and tends to reject any form of collectivism or dictate imposed by the common good. In order to solve these structural problems and improve society's management of global threats, we make several proposals, such as the introduction of a minimal and consensual definition of the common good and the promotion of a health policy guided by One Health-like concepts. Overall, our analysis suggests that because political ideologies provide their own definitions of the common good and the place of scientific knowledge in the governance process and can thus affect the response to global threats, they should be urgently taken into consideration by public health experts.

Secret Intelligence and Public Diplomacy in the Ukraine War

Intelligence is generally collected and used in secret to inform internal audiences. Before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, the UK and US governments have deployed intelligence extensively to influence external audiences, both publicly and privately, regarding Russian intentions, capabilities and practices, and the consequences of Russian actions. While the scale, manner and initially pre-emptive nature of these disclosures represent a significant evolutionary step in how liberal-democratic governments use their intelligence assets, current practice has built upon historical precedents. This article examines why states choose to use intelligence – including fabricated intelligence – for influencing external audiences; the different methods they deploy for doing so; the gains and costs of publicising intelligence; and how the use of intelligence during the Russia–Ukraine conflict should be understood within broader historical and contemporary trends. The authors conclude that while liberal democracies’ use of intelligence in public is to be welcomed for its greater transparency, careful risk management will be needed if this approach is to continue.

The Democratic Limits of Populist Politics

The Democratic Limits of Populist Politics

Who is afraid of fake news? Modeling risk perceptions of misinformation in 142 countries

Using survey data from 154,195 respondents in 142 countries, we investigate internet user perceptions of the risks associated with being exposed to misinformation. We find that: 1) The majority of regular internet users globally (58.5%) worry about misinformation, and young and low-income groups are most likely to be concerned. 2) Risk perception among internet users varies starkly across regions whereby concern is highest in Latin America and the Caribbean (74.2%), and lowest in South Asia (31.2%). 3) Differences are unrelated to the prevalence of misinformation, yet concern is highest in countries with liberal democratic governments. We discuss implications for successful policy and platform interventions.