Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century (original) (raw)
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This short piece discusses Hélène Landemore's proposal of an 'open democracy', as outlined in her recent book Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century. Acknowledging the value of Landemore's radical and ambitious proposals, I draw attention to a number of shortcomings and blind spots that have to do with how the case for an 'open democracy' is made: through an unduly brief and dismissive treatment of political parties; a methodological insensitivity to empirical variations of democratic performance and citizens' evaluations of the latter; a failure to distinguish between higher and ordinary law-making in the discussion of the central Icelandic case; and, finally, a surprising concession that realising an open democracy is all but infeasible in established constitutional democracies. If open democracy is to be an attractive ideal, these issues must arguably be addressed.
Let the people rule? Direct democracy in the twenty-first century
The biggest contemporary challenge to democratic legitimacy gravitates around the crisis of democratic representation. To tackle this problem, a growing number of established as well as new democracies included direct democratic instruments into their constitutions enabling citizens to directly influence democratic decision-making. However, there are many different empirical manifestations of direct democracy and their diverse consequences for representative democracy are still an understudied topic. The aim of this volume is to fill this gap in a comparative endeavour.
Direct Democracy Beyond the Logic of Archē
Contrastes, Revista Internacional de Filosofía, Supplement 20, 2015
This article explores the political challenges posed by direct democracy. A consideration of Locke's political thought reveals representative democracy to be nothing more than a compromise meant to maintain an economic structure of laisser-faire, while a Rousseauistic direct democracy that demands homogeneity turns out to be not much of a democracy either. The question at hand is whether there can be a political regime in which both all-inclusive participation in the political realm and an actual diversity of the participants exist. Two different answers to this question are presented through the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. KEYWORDS DIRECT DEMOCRACY, LOCKE, NANCY, RANCIÈRE, REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY, ROUSSEAU RESUMEN El presente artículo explora los retos políticos que plantea la democracia directa. En el pensamiento político de Locke la democracia representativa consiste en el compromiso de mantener la estructura económica de laisser-faire, mientras que la democracia directa rousseauniana que demanda homogeneidad acaba por no ser muy democrática. La cuestión en juego es si puede haber un régimen político capaz de acoger tanto una participación inclusiva como la diversidad existente de los participantes. Se presentan dos respuestas diferentes a esta pregunta a través de las obras de Jean-Luc Nancy y Jacques Rancière.