Representative Democracy in Flux

This book delves into the core of representative democracy in order to explain its main features – institutional and imaginary – and to show the reasons for its increasing dysfunctionality. The collection explores the constitutional imaginaries of representation. It outlines the main factors influencing the failures of representative democracy, in an age of constitutional crisis and transition, being gradually deconstructed via tendencies toward authoritarianism and technocracy. Special attention is devoted to the impact of the politics of fear on representative democracy. The analysis shows the main challenges stemming from national, international, transnational, and supranational technocracy produced by the increased role of administration, agencies, and courts. It exposes representative democracy as a composite phenomenon stretched between reason and emotions and between the constitutional past, present, and future. The volume will be of interest to researchers, academics, and policymakers working in the areas of constitutional law and politics, comparative constitutional law, administrative law, human rights law, and theory and philosophy of law.

Introduction

PART I - The imaginary foundations of representative democracy
1 Imaginaries of representation: there and back again
2 Programmatic government beyond conceptual distinctions
3 Framing political processes through constitution-based symbolic representation

PART II - Crisis, fear, and their impact on representative democracy
4 The global pandemic as a challenge to representative democracy
5 Crisis, fear, and rhetorical democracy: appeals to pathos in Dutch political debates on the COVID-19 pandemic
6 Fake news and democracy: a lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic

PART III - Agencification, transnational administrative networks, and the future of representative democracy: democratic technocratic (dis)balance and trends toward technocracy, bureaucracy, and expertocracy?
7 Administrative legislative policy in EU national communities: assessing benefits and risks amidst the globalization of law
8 The role of European composite administration in the GDPR, the AI Act and the EHDS regulation – what about the rule of law?
9 Coherence in diversity? Exploring the institutional dynamic of enforcement networks in the EU internal market

PART IV International, transnational, and global dimensions of representative democracy
10 Democracy and the rights of representation in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights
11 Global democracy: between people’s representation and participation