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The Abuse of Constitutional Identity in the European Union
The idea of constitutional identity has been central to the negotiation of authority between EU and national constitutional orders. Many national constitutional courts have declared that the reach of EU law is limited by certain core elements of the national constitution, often labelled 'constitutional identity'. With the rise of illiberal democracies within the EU, the idea of constitutional identity has increasingly come under criticism, being seen as easily embedded in authoritarian, nativist rhetoric and vulnerable to being abused. In The Abuse of Constitutional Identity in the European Union, Julian Scholtes provides novel insights into how European authoritarians have utilised the conc...
Flexible Authoritarianism
Flexible Authoritarianism challenges the idea that the transnational rise of authoritarianism is a backlash against economic globalization and neoliberal capitalism. Flexible authoritarianism--a form of government that simultaneously incentivizes a can-do spirit and suppresses dissent--reflects the resonance between authoritarian and neoliberal ideologies in today's comeback of strongman rule. The book conveys the look and feel of flexible authoritarianism in Russia through the eyes of up-and-coming youth. Drawing on field observations, in-depth interviews, and analyses of documents and video clips, Anna Schwenck demonstrates how flexible authoritarianism is stabilized ideologically by the insignia of cool start-up capitalism and by familiar cultural forms such as the summer camp. It critically evaluates how loyalty to the regime--the order underlying political and economic life in a polity--is produced and contested among those young people who seek key positions in politics, business, the public sector, or creative industries.
The Power of Opposition
Proposing a novel way to look at the consolidation of democratic regimes, this book presents important theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of democratic consolidation, legislative organization, and public opinion. Theoretically, Simone Wegmann brings legislatures into focus as the main body representing both winners and losers of democratic elections. Empirically, Wegmann shows that the degree of policy-making power of opposition players varies considerably between countries. Using survey data from the CSES, the ESS, and the LAPOP and systematically analyzing more than 50 legislatures across the world and the specific rights they grant to opposition players during the policy-making process, Wegmann demonstrates that neglecting the curial role of the legislature in a democratic setting can only lead to an incomplete assessment of the importance of institutions for democratic consolidation. The Power of Opposition will be of great interest to scholars of comparative politics, especially those working on questions related to legislative organization, democratic consolidation, and/or public opinion.
Regime Dynamics in EU's Eastern Neighbourhood
This book examines the effectiveness and consistency of EU democracy promotion in its Eastern neighbourhood between 1991 and 2014. It concludes that the EU’s democratization role in this region was, not surprisingly, weak within this time period. However, this weak role only took shape under four domestic and transnational conditions: (a) a higher cost-benefit balance of rule transfer, (b) a lower structural difficulty a given country would need to overcome on its way towards a democratic regime, (c) increased levels of authority distribution across branches of power, and (d) a higher extent of democratic diffusion resulting from regional interactions. In those countries where these domestic and transnational conditions were present, as in Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia, the EU’s democratizing influence was in causal terms only the tip of the iceberg. Most variation in regime dynamics remains to be explained by domestic and transnational contexts.
Contested, Violated but Persistent
Presidential term limits have been a crucial institutional feature of the third wave of democratization. They are meant to safeguard democracy by promoting alternation in office and preventing the personalization of power. However, since the 1990s term limits have been subject to frequent contestation by incumbents. Such contestation process has often been considered a sign of autocratization, particularly when it involves the weakening of other constitutional constraints, such as courts and legislatures. Term-limit contestations have attracted the attention of scholars working with a global perspective as well as with a regional or country-specific one too. Latin America and sub-Saharan Afr...
The Limits and Legitimacy of Referendums
The possibility of democracy-enhancing uses and anti-democratic abuses of referendums reveals a paradox: mechanisms of democracy can be exploited to do violence to the basic principles of democracy. The Limits and Legitimacy of Referendums seeks to identify standards we might use to assess the democratic legitimacy of a referendum when we cannot rely on the norms of traditional liberal democracy. This innovative book explores how referendums manage the tension between liberalism and democracy, and whether this device holds promise for reconciling these two commitments. A range of scholars from around the world expose how referendums may be abused on one hand to achieve short-term political o...
The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial
Working to demystify the enigmatic process behind enacting public policies, The Politics of Meaning Struggles uses the case of the 2011 prohibition of hydraulic fracturing by the French government to address the wider phenomenon of governmental shifts in policy decisions.
The Veil of Participation
Hudson provides new evidence about the roles of political parties, leaders, and citizen-participants in constitution-making processes.
Constitutional Politics in Central and Eastern Europe
The contributions to this edited volume discuss constitutional politics in 20 Central and Eastern European countries. The country chapters describe all constitutional amendments and new constitutions after the first post-communist constitution-making, all failed amendment attempts, and the political discourses about constitutional politics. Framed by a broad comparative chapter, the country studies are embedded in the established literature on constitutional politics. The book thus provides a better understanding of constitutional politics in the region and beyond.
Constitutionalism in Context
A broad-ranging, interdisciplinary, and context-rich exploration of the fields of constitutional studies and comparative constitutional law for research and teaching.
