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This volume of essays brings together a group of leading political scientists, legal scholars, and political theorists to describe and analyze the body of constitutional law and practice within and upon democratic institutions, in particular examining how constitutional law shapes electoral democracy. Constitutional law and practice on this question are complex and varied. This volume therefore takes a thematic and regional approach: it selects a range of key theoretical questions related to democratic constitutional design and offers a series of chapters featuring a diverse range of voices, as well as a blend of theory, qualitative studies, and quantitative methods. Readers will gain a multifaceted understanding of a phenomenon of growing importance. The volume will also be useful to students of comparative constitutionalism, who will gain a rich array of empirical evidence to stimulate further work. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The burgeoning literature in comparative constitutional has not devoted sufficient attention to the constitutional functions of political parties, nor has it systematically explored the constitutional law of electoral design. This volume examines the constitutional treatment of parties and elections both as a matter of constitutional theory and from the perspective of historical and contemporary practice. To this end, it draws together a series of contributions from a diverse range of scholars working in distinct disciplines. Political scientists tend to treat political parties as their key object of study, while comparative constitutional lawyers have largely ignored them, preferring to focus on other institutional question. What follows brings each perspective into conversation with the other.
This chapter maps the effects and implications of a judicial presence in the constitutional law of parties and elections. It first aims to clarify some theoretical premises of this constitutional design choice raised by a potential judicial role in elections and party managements. It then develops an analytic taxonomy of potential judicial tasks in managing elections, offering numerous examples, with the general ambition of fostering democratic stability. This taxonomy of beneficial uses is complemented with an enumeration of potential risks. This theoretical and analytic work counsels against simple and unidirectional prescriptions about the role of courts in protecting democracies, although it does clarify the stakes of their role, and their comparative advantages (and disadvantages) in relation to fourth-branch bodies.
How does a democracy that has survived a close brush with authoritarianism start to recreate conditions of meaningful democratic political competition? What steps are to be taken, and in what order? Certain lessons can be gleaned from comparative experience with the challenges of “front-sliding”—that is, the process of rebuilding the necessary political, legal, epistemic, and sociological components of democracy. This essay maps out those challenges, examines the distinctive and difficult question of punishing individuals who have been drivers of democratic backsliding, and reflects on how to sequence different elements of front-sliding.
No observer of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s career in the law can miss the tension between her unflinching support for substantive justice and her tempered view of the “measured” judicial steps possible under that flag. That contrast is starkly posed by a snapshot comparison between her praxis as a lawyer and her praxis as a judge.