Three Elements of Modern Democracy Before I get to what I mean by our democracy slipping away, I want to make three points about the nature of contemporary democracies. Firstly, modern democracy is constitutionally v ...
Charles Taylor gives us a long view of democracy as “constitutionally vulnerable” once political representation became its central feature, for from then on democracies faced the unrelenting problem of deciding just ...
Most contemporary commentators posit a tension between multilateralism and democracy.[1. This paper draws on a number of previous publications, which cite the extensive literature on this subject. A selection includes th ...
At least since Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, it has been routine to see democracy and equality as joined—if somewhat problematically—at the hip. Tocqueville saw democratic politics as the outgrowth of a rel ...
War and Democracy Humans have inflicted untold horrors on each other through wars of aggression and preemptive defense. It is therefore ironic to consider that wars and the threat of war have been responsible for som ...
The habitat of most contributors to the SSRC’s Anxieties of Democracy initiative is the political maelstrom. They have studied and assessed it all—from the 1998 attempt to impeach a popular president to debt-ceiling ...
From its ancient provenance, democracy has always provoked anxieties of excess, lawlessness, and spontaneity, and thus also the anxiety of having within itself the disruptive energy to unsettle any stable regime of power ...
The current crisis of democracy has many causes. The one I discuss here is the inability of our democratic institutions—and our understanding of those institutions—to keep up with our collective needs.[1. The followi ...
1. In Latin America, the institutions of representative democracy have only very rarely been robust enough to successfully represent society. From these institutions' inception as republics, the capitalist economy of Lat ...
Representative democracy is a matrix that engenders and sustains five connected, but distinct, principles of modern government: Popular sovereignty: citizens have a political voice, and their interests and preferenc ...