Acceso usuarios
Mauro Barberis
Three Remedies for the Crisis of Democracy For the long-standing, maybe eternal crisis of democracy, three remedies are currently proposed: extension of democracy by participation, deepening by deliberation, restriction by constitution. In the first case, the aim is the growth of democracy's quantity, in the second one it is the growth of democracy's quality, in the third one it is the respect of legal procedures. These remedies are compatible with the representative democracy, which is the specific form the article considers. Such strategies, in the central sections of the paper, are confronted and discussed by referring to participatory, deliberative and constitutional institutions. The article analyzes some today's examples of them: participatory budgeting, public debate and allotment, as institutions of participatory democracy; deliberative polls, consensus conferences and experts committees, as institutions of deliberative democracy; fundamental rights, rigid constitution and judicial review of legislation, as institutions of constitutional democracy. Finally, first two strategies are subordinated to third, the constitutional one: a sort of democracy aimed to applying, by specifying and balancing them, generic ethical values formulated in terms of legal and constitutional principles. The result of the inquiry is that there are several reasons for preferring constitutional democracy over participative and deliberative forms of democracy so as to find a remedy against the crisis of democratic regimes today. Constitutional democracy has a higher degree of efficacy from the point of view of the law and it is also more experienced from the point of view of politics. This latter feature depends on the fact that it is an evolutionary outcome of Western democratic systems in their long history of constitutional government. Yet, we need to emphasize the relationship between judges and political representatives. Indeed a certain kind of vagueness as to their relationship has induced many to criticize constitutional democracy in ways that need not be shared. In fact, the argument of one the harshest critics of constitutional democracy, Jeremy Waldron, can be turned the other way around to advocate this specific form of government. According to Waldron, judicial review would only be acceptable where representative democracy does not work well. However, it could be argued that in a true constitutional democracy, judges will intervene only on extremely rare occasions. The mere possibility of seeing laws overruled would hence induce Parliament to passing bills that respect the constitution.
