Voters expect their elected representatives to pursue good policy and presume this will be securely founded on the best available knowledge. Yet when representatives emphasize their reliance on expert knowledge, they seem to defer to people whose authority derives, not politically from the sovereign people, but from the presumed objective status of their disciplinary bases. This book examines the tensions between political authority and expert authority in the formation of public policy in liberal democracies. It aims to illustrate and better understand the nature of these tensions rather than to argue specific ways of resolving them. The various chapters explore the complexity of interaction between the two forms of authority in different policy domains in order to identify both common elements and differences. The policy domains covered include: climate geoengineering discourses; environmental health; biotechnology; nuclear power; whaling; economic management; and the use of force. This volume will appeal to researchers and to convenors of post-graduate courses in the fields of policy studies, foreign policy decision-making, political science, environmental studies, democratic system studies, and science policy studies.

At an unsettled time for liberal democracy, with global eruptions of authoritarian and arbitrary rule, here is one of the first full-fledged philosophical accounts of what makes governments legitimate. What makes a government legitimate? The dominant view is that public officials have the right to rule us, even if they are unfair or unfit, as long as they gain power through procedures traceable to the consent of the governed. In this rigorous and timely study, Arthur Isak Applbaum argues that adherence to procedure is not enough: even a properly chosen government does not rule legitimately if it fails to protect basic rights, to treat its citizens as political equals, or to act coherently. How are we to reconcile every person’s entitlement to freedom with the necessity of coercive law? Applbaum’s answer is that a government legitimately governs its citizens only if the government is a free group agent constituted by free citizens. To be a such a group agent, a government must uphold three principles. The liberty principle, requiring that the basic rights of citizens be secured, is necessary to protect against inhumanity, a tyranny in practice. The equality principle, requiring that citizens have equal say in selecting who governs, is necessary to protect against despotism, a tyranny in title. The agency principle, requiring that a government’s actions reflect its decisions and its decisions reflect its reasons, is necessary to protect against wantonism, a tyranny of unreason. Today, Applbaum writes, the greatest threat to the established democracies is neither inhumanity nor despotism but wantonism, the domination of citizens by incoherent, inconstant, and incontinent rulers. A government that cannot govern itself cannot legitimately govern others.

By re-examining the political thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, this book offers a reflection on the nature of modern democracy and the question of its legitimacy. Pedro T. Magalhães shows that present-day elitist, populist and pluralist accounts of democracy owe, in diverse and often complicated ways, an intellectual debt to the interwar era, German-speaking, scholarly and political controversies on the problem(s) of modern democracy. A discussion of Weber’s ambivalent diagnosis of modernity and his elitist views on democracy, as they were elaborated especially in the 1910s, sets the groundwork for the study. Against that backdrop, Schmitt’s interwar political thought is interpreted as a form of neo-authoritarian populism, whereas Kelsen evinces robust, though not entirely unproblematic, pluralist consequences. In the conclusion, the author draws on Claude Lefort’s concept of indeterminacy to sketch a potentially more fruitful way than can be gleaned from the interwar German discussions of conceiving the nexus between the elitist, populist and pluralist faces of modern democracy. The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy will be of interest to political theorists, political philosophers, intellectual historians, theoretically oriented political scientists, and legal scholars working in the subfields of constitutional law and legal theory. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315157566, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

"How can democracies effectively represent citizens? The goal of this Handbook is to evaluate comprehensively how well the interests and preferences of mass publics become represented by institutions in liberal democracies. It first explores how the idea and institutions of liberal democracies were formed over centuries and became enshrined in Western political systems. The contributors to this Handbook, made up of the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation, examine how well the political elites and parties who are charged with the representation of the public interest meet their duties. Clearly, institutions often fail to live up to their own representation goals. With this in mind, the contributors explore several challenges to the way that the system of representation is organized in modern democracies. For example, actors such as parties and established elites face rising distrust among electorates. Also, the rise of international problems such as migration and environmentalism suggests that the focus of democracies on nation states may have to shift to a more international level. All told, this Handbook illuminates the normative and functional challenges faced by representative institutions in liberal democracies"--

While liberal-democratic states like America, Britain and Australia claim to value freedom of expression and the right to dissent, they have always actually criminalized dissent. This disposition has worsened since 9/11 and the 2008 Great Recession. This ground-breaking study shows that just as dissent involves far more than protest marches, so too liberal-democratic states have expanded the criminalization of dissent. Drawing on political and social theorists like Arendt, Bourdieu and Isin, the book offers a new way of thinking about politics, dissent and its criminalization relationally. Using case studies like the Occupy movement, selective refusal by Israeli soldiers, urban squatters, democratic education and violence by anti-Apartheid activists, the book highlights the many forms dissent takes along with the many ways liberal-democratic states criminalize it. The book highlights the mix of fear and delusion in play when states privilege security to protect an imagined ‘political order’ from difference and disagreement. The book makes a major contribution to political theory, legal studies and sociology. Linking legal, political and normative studies in new ways, Watts shows that ultimately liberal-democracies rely more on sovereignty and the capacity for coercion and declarations of legal ‘states of exception’ than on liberal-democratic principles. In a time marked by a deepening crisis of democracy, the book argues dissent is increasingly valuable.

It's a commonplace that citizens in Western democracies are disaffected with their political leaders and traditional democratic institutions. But in Democratic Legitimacy, Pierre Rosanvallon, one of today's leading political thinkers, argues that this crisis of confidence is partly a crisis of understanding. He makes the case that the sources of democratic legitimacy have shifted and multiplied over the past thirty years and that we need to comprehend and make better use of these new sources of legitimacy in order to strengthen our political self-belief and commitment to democracy. Drawing on examples from France and the United States, Rosanvallon notes that there has been a major expansion of independent commissions, NGOs, regulatory authorities, and watchdogs in recent decades. At the same time, constitutional courts have become more willing and able to challenge legislatures. These institutional developments, which serve the democratic values of impartiality and reflexivity, have been accompanied by a new attentiveness to what Rosanvallon calls the value of proximity, as governing structures have sought to find new spaces for minorities, the particular, and the local. To improve our democracies, we need to use these new sources of legitimacy more effectively and we need to incorporate them into our accounts of democratic government. An original contribution to the vigorous international debate about democratic authority and legitimacy, this promises to be one of Rosanvallon's most important books.

Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy highlights the use of religious identity to fuel the rise of illiberal, nationalist, and populist democracy. In Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy, David Elcott, C. Colt Anderson, Tobias Cremer, and Volker Haarmann present a pragmatic and modernist exploration of how religion engages in the public square. Elcott and his co-authors are concerned about the ways religious identity is being used to foster the exclusion of individuals and communities from citizenship, political representation, and a role in determining public policy. They examine the ways religious identity is weaponized to fuel populist revolts against a political, social, and economic order that values democracy in a global and strikingly diverse world. Included is a history and political analysis of religion, politics, and policies in Europe and the United States that foster this illiberal rebellion. The authors explore what constitutes a constructive religious voice in the political arena, even in nurturing patriotism and democracy, and what undermines and threatens liberal democracies. To lay the groundwork for a religious response, the book offers chapters showing how Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism can nourish liberal democracy. The authors encourage people of faith to promote foundational support for the institutions and values of the democratic enterprise from within their own religious traditions and to stand against the hostility and cruelty that historically have resulted when religious zealotry and state power combine. Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy is intended for readers who value democracy and are concerned about growing threats to it, and especially for people of faith and religious leaders, as well as for scholars of political science, religion, and democracy.