PANEL SESSIONS III TUESDAY JUNE 26 2018 11.00 AM – 12.30 PM

Room: CPD-LG.59

  • CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS? I
    The early twenty-first century appears of be a period of turmoil in many seemingly stable constitutional democracies. This panel and two others discuss such questions as these: Are there general forces weakening constitutional democracy around the world, or are there nation-specific reasons for crises that simply happen to be occurring at roughly the same time? Why have some major democracies – Canada and Australia, for example – seemingly not experienced these problems? And, finally, might the concerns some scholars have expressed be something like “crying wolf,“ that is, might the developments around the world be more or less ordinary episodes in the ebb and flow of democratic politics, that what some scholars claim to be a constitutional crisis is merely the normal constitutional triumph of political coalitions and policies they do not like?
  • “Defining and Tracking the Trajectory of Liberal Constitutional Democracy“
    We provide some definitional and empirical scaffolding for thinking about whether the Egyptian and Turkish cases are outliers or exemplars of the current state of democracy. This means first considering how “democracy“ should be defined and analyzed. We argue that in thinking about democratic decline, it is most useful to focus on ‘liberal constitutional democracy’‘ as a distinct species of democracy, one that has enjoyed a hegemonic status at least as an ideal since the mid-1990s. Our analysis complements our other work, in which we have broken down liberal constitutional democracy into its consistent parts, and explained how each part can fail or persevere. We then analyze about the present trajectory of democracy, roughly defined in these terms,
  • “Beyond Legitimacy: Europe’s Crisis of Constitutional Democracy“
    I engage with the more particular question, if there is currently a crisis of constitutional democracy in Europe, focusing mainly on the European Union rather than Europe more generally. Before taking on that question, however, there are two preliminary questions we need to address: First, what counts as a crisis of constitutional democracy? Second, how does this apply to the European Union given its supranational sui generis character. Only after addressing these two issues, I move on to the main part of my analysis of the state of European constitutional democracy.