This chapter first situates the book’s argument in the context of two global phenomena: The proliferation of hybrid regimes and the diffusion of court-centric constitutionalism. It then shows why a normative look at constitutional courts in hybrid regimes is an important but overlooked topic in the literature. Next, the operating assumptions of the book are specified, and basic terms are defined, including constitutional courts and democracy. The chapter concludes by offering a roadmap of the book.

This chapter summarizes the arguments of the book. It highlights that for judges who are democratically committed, the book has offered the theories and tools to help them build institutional resilience and contribute to democratic values. These tools cannot guarantee these democractic outcomes, as there is a limit as to what judges have control over in authoritarian environments. Nevertheless, constitutional courts are often heavily involved in the shaping of constitutional norms and structures. By pushing beyond the boundaries set by conventional conceptions of the judicial role, this book hopes to have instilled optimism in politically challenging environments and demonstrate how judges who are committed to the democratic cause can improve the chances of survival and success of constitutional courts.

The Peruvian political system has entered a cycle of profound crisis. High levels of instability have added to the endemic incapacity to forge an institutionalized party system. In recent years, party fragmentation has increased, and ideological polarization has reached unprecedented levels of radicalization. As Sartori’s theory predicts, this constitutes the breeding ground for the emergence of radical political projects at the extremes of the ideological spectrum. Chapter 6 focuses on the emergence of an autonomous far-right project in Peru under the leadership of Opus Dei businessman Rafael López Aliaga. Through the appropriation of a former personal party, Renovación Popular has developed into an incipient personalistic party, articulating a socially conservative agenda and populist rhetoric that differentiates it from other right-wing parties like Fujimorismo. Its relatively successful trajectory – third place in the 2021 presidential elections, a national legislative group, and access to the Metropolitan mayorship of Lima along with twelve municipal districts – provides relevant information regarding the characteristics of far-right projects ruling local governments and their consequences for democracy. The chapter conceives the far right’s emergence in Peru as an expected consequence of its political crisis, and argues that its strength should not be considered a surprise.

Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele began his political career as a self-proclaimed “radical progressive leftist,” evolved into an ideologically ambiguous populist, and, finally, embraced far-right ideas during his first term as president. Chapter 4 draws on Bukele’s speeches, campaign materials, public interviews, and social media posts – including a sample of 16,030 tweets – to trace and explain this evolution. It argues that Bukele is, above all, a skilled populist who has strategically adapted his ideological appeals in response to evolving incentives, challenges, and opportunities. While his early leftist appeals helped Bukele rise quickly within the ranks of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), his “populist turn” enabled him to win the presidency by appealing to growing anti-establishment sentiments. Once in office, Bukele’s “right turn” helped him consolidate power and maximize his public support at home and abroad.

This chapter examines what judges can do inside the courtroom to promote democratic norms amid authoritarian pressure. It proposes a two-step adjudicative framework – that of “Sustainable Democratic Adjudication,” which allows judges to systematically incorporate both constitutional legal principles and judicial strategies. Under step one, judges need to form an initial view on what the law requires under the democracy-orienting approach proposed in Chapter 4. During this step, they must apply a presumption of “institutional blindfold,” ignoring the possible influence of prudential considerations. This book terms the tentative conclusion reached at this stage the “formal legal position.” The second step involves judges lifting the blindfold to check whether, and if so how, the formal legal position should be supplemented with or adjusted by strategic considerations. These are questions determined by the level of risk incurred by maintaining the formal legal position. The chapter also examines the strategies in relation to outcome, reasoning, language, and timing that judges can deploy during the adjudicative process.

This chapter argues that courts should play a role in protecting and promoting democratic values in a hybrid regime and lays out how that can be done. The chapter opens with the argument that the counter-majoritarian objection is singificantly less relevant in a hybrid regime context, contending that its reduced relevance permits the constitutional court greater latitude in its support of democratic ideals in a hybrid regime. Five different democracy-enhancing roles of a constitutional court are then proposed, alongside tools that would help facilitate the realization of these roles. The five democratic roles include: (1) The referee role, (2) the interpretative role, (3) the participatory role, (4) the quasi-representative role, and (5) the educative role. The chapter then addresses how competency concerns impact the democratic roles proposed. It argues that the democratic roles are justifiable because there is a lack of better alternatives in a hybrid regime. Courts are a second-best solution: They may not normally be the best institution to tackle certain political failures, but the inadequacies of the political process in a hybrid regime offer reasons for a constitutional court to act.

Given the surprising emergence of the far right in Latin America, there is a notable scarcity of studies on this phenomenon. The conclusion of this edited volume synthesizes the primary findings and offers comparative insights from both cross-national and cross-regional perspectives. It emphasizes identifying ideological convergences and divergences among far-right actors in Latin America. Additionally, it examines their organizational dynamics and speculates on their potential to solidify their presence in the electoral arena. The chapter also highlights some unexpected findings that are crucial for understanding the electoral successes and failures of far-right forces across the region. Finally, it places the far right in Latin America within a broader comparative framework, distinguishing its regional peculiarities and common traits from its counterparts in other parts of the world.

To investigate the micro-level interdependence between technological advancements and institutional diversity in IPR within business corporations, this chapter integrates the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework with the Institutional Complementarities (IC) approach. The former recognizes the importance of informal rules and community characteristics in knowledge governance, while the latter reveals inefficiencies arising from the interdependent nature of knowledge ownership and creation. The combined GKC–IC framework reveals the interplay between the characteristics of knowledge as a shared resource and the formal and informal rules governing its production. This offers insights into how corporations can be understood as knowledge commons within today’s environment that is increasingly shaped by the extensive use of IPR in governing knowledge assets. The chapter shows that the interdependence dynamics between IPR and technology excludes knowledge workers from accessing and utilizing the knowledge they produce, leading to the gradual deterioration of their skills and expertise. This vicious cycle further erodes the institutional diversity of corporate knowledge governance in favour of IPR-based governance mechanisms.

Building on the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework, this chapter examines how processes of knowledge production, transmission, and utilization give rise to various collective action problems and how firms address these problems. Drawing on stakeholder theory in management studies, the chapter distinguishes three governance models – the hub-and-spoke model, the lead role governance model, and the shared governance model – each offering different solutions to these challenges. A case study of the famous Czech firm Bat’a Enterprises in the early twentieth century demonstrates the practical application of the lead role governance model, which grants employees high autonomy while maintaining management’s central role in strategic decisions. Through profit-sharing schemes, decentralized workshops, and internal education, Bat’a effectively aligned individual incentives with the firm’s goals, mitigating collective action problems and fostering innovation. By analyzing Bat’a’s success, this chapter contributes to the understanding of knowledge governance in firms and underscores the connections with the GKC framework and Ostrom’s design principles.

If we take commons to be a kind of institutional arrangement enabling community governance of shared resources, the challenge involved in taking the corporation-as-commons idea forward is to specify what we mean by corporation in this context. We also need to determine who shares the corporation and identify the rules and practices that enable its provision, production, and reproduction in relevant action arenas. This chapter is an attempt to chart this course. Drawing on insights from the literature on the firm, it argues that the firm’s most critical resource is its "corporate mask," a special kind of institutional resource provided by the legal system that enables the firm’s members to operate as a singular actor in the legal and commercial spheres. But the corporate mask is not merely a legal construct – the social recognition of the firm as a corporate actor, a reliable business partner, a reputable producer of goods or services, and so on matter a great deal as well. The corporate mask is a legal and epistemic focal point shared by insiders and third parties with whom the firm contracts and more generally interacts in a network of adjacent action situations.

The Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework draws attention to the content, quality, and consequences of the production, the institutionalized (community) governance, and the sharing of knowledge. In the domain of corporate governance, the key knowledge in question concerns the rules, mechanisms, and infrastructures that enable corporations to be governed. But how do actors understand what is going on and what is at stake in the field of corporate governance? Drawing on the sociological theory of Strategic Action Fields (SAF), this chapter provides an account of how different imaginaries of corporate status, architecture, governance, and purpose are actively created and promoted by different kinds of disciplinary specialists, standard setters, and practitioners. The chapter shows how the knowledge claims made by these epistemic communities up the 1960s and from the 1970s onwards underpin two competing social norms of corporate governance, which were expressed in different configurations of position, boundary, choice, aggregation, information, payoff, and scope rules.

This chapter examines the decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which rely primarily on sociotechnical infrastructures supplied by blockchain technology and consist substantially of combinations of shared computer code and shared data. The chapter considers DAOs using the governing knowledge commons (GKC) research framework, contrasting the GKC perspective with long-standing views of the corporate form as a nexus of contracts, as an instance of hierarchy and decision theory, and as a complex system. The analysis is set against the context of earlier work on the corporation as commons. The chapter concludes that the GKC framework focuses attention on elements of governance that often are not salient in conventional accounts. This is especially true of the important question of how governance responds to and generates social dilemmas associated specifically with practices of sharing knowledge, information, and data.

Corporations act as entities addressing the world with a single face and voice, with the law resorting to metaphors such as “person” and “body” to present the group as an entity distinct from its members. Four historic models of group action, which can hybridize across time, can provide an added functional analysis: the “cathedral” built by self-regulating guilds and societies; the “factory” resting on division of labour and hierarchical organization; the “bazaar” of adjoining enterprises providing some level of market integration between traders; and the “commune” resting on personalized bonds and common purposes. All types are affected by coordination problems arising whenever members must take joint decisions or set up a deliberative system for forming judgements preparatory to taking decisions. While a group can be said to attain corporate status when it functions as a univocal entity owning its actions, in order to act effectively, the corporation must develop techniques to gather and process information attained by its agents, much of which will be predictions of the conduct of other agents. The corporation exists to cultivate and embody common knowledge. Preceding this chapter’s conceptual analysis is a case study of the historically important and now-troubled Boeing.