Much deliberative democracy theory examines the capacity of public institutions to promote governance by deliberation instead of bald coercion. Recent works have even examined the prospects for deliberation during an exercise long thought to be paradigmatically anti-deliberative: referendum voting. Tierney, Fishkin, Kildea, and Levy have assessed the possibilities of designing ‘deliberative referendums‘. Yet these past...
THE COMPARATIVE LAW OF DEMOCRACY
This panel considers central aspects of the comparative law of democracy of relevance for multiple constitutional orders. The papers collectively consider political candidacy, election commissions and democratic decline, and the use of referenda. The panel raises doctrinal, historical, comparative, and theoretical perspectives on these topics.
Election Commissions and Democratic Decline
This paper considers the role that election commissions may play in facilitating or resisting democratic decline. Common across cases of decline are attempts by regimes to capture or eliminate independent institutions that have the capacity to check political power. Capture of the judiciary is a well-recognized tool of would-be authoritarians. This paper argues that similar...
Why the U.S. Supreme Court Should Recognize a Compelling State Interest in Preserving Candidate Time
There are just not enough hours in the day to get the job done! This type of “time drought“ identified by cognitive scientists takes on democratic significance if the person experiencing it is a democratically elected official. Those elected officials may thereby lack the ability to effectively represent the constituents who put them in office....