Tag: Democracy
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Richard Ekins: Constitutional Lessons from America
This is part of a series of posts in which Richard Ekins reflects upon Lord Sumption’s Reith Lectures. You can find the first posts here and here. In his fourth Reith lecture, broadcast yesterday morning and entitled “Rights and the Ideal Constitution”, Jonathan Sumption turns to the American experience of struggling to reconcile democracy with…
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Richard Ekins: Representative Politics and the Limits of Law
This is the first of a series of posts in which Richard Ekins reflects upon Lord Sumption’s Reith Lectures. In his second Reith lecture, “In Praise of Politics”, broadcast on Tuesday, Jonathan Sumption aims “to make the case for the political process, with all its imperfections.” He develops a forceful argument for the capacity of…
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David Vitale: Leaving the EU: A Matter of “Trust”?
Since the referendum in 2016, the Government has repeatedly justified its decisions on Brexit by invoking the concept of public trust. In December last year, the Prime Minister rejected the idea of a second referendum because, in her view, it “would do irreparable damage to the integrity of our politics, because it would say to…
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Leah Trueblood: More Good Days for Democracy: The Report of the Independent Commission on Referendums
At the beginning of Democracy in America, de Tocqueville writes that in studying democracy its “…Faults strike one at first approach, but its qualities are only discovered at length.” The report of the Constitution Unit’s Independent Commission on Referendums, published 11 July, demonstrates de Tocqueville’s point. The virtues of democracy are not always immediately clear,…
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Tom Hickey: The Republican Core of the Case for Judicial Review
Richard Bellamy is right about many things. One of them is that judicial review cannot be defended on the basis of what he calls its “epistemic properties:” on its supposed capacity to bring about better outcomes in disputes about rights. This is because of the fact of reasonable disagreement about rights combined with the fact…
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Albert Weale: The Constitution of Democracy and the Pretensions of the Plebiscite
When the UK’s High Court rendered its decision on whether the government could trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty under the royal prerogative to initiate the UK leaving the European Union, it released a storm of abuse against the judiciary in the press and among cabinet ministers. ‘Enemies of the people’ snorted the Daily…
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Patrick O’Brien: The Democratic Legitimacy of Changing Your Mind: A Response to Richard Ekins
In his post of last week, Richard Ekins argues that political and legal elites should resist the urge to ‘treat other voters as fools or monsters or deny the outcome of the fair and legitimate decision-making process which they did not otherwise contest’. The many and varied legal and political arguments offering ways to soften,…
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Tom Quinn: Mandates, Manifestos & Coalitions: UK Party Politics after 2010
One of the most important assumptions underlying this view of British politics since 1945 was that governments were given mandates by voters in elections. That followed from the fact that they were directly elected by voters, as there were no post-election coalition negotiations to intervene between voters’ choices and government formation. Mandates followed from voter…
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Nick Barber: Does China Enjoy Greater Legitimacy Than Any Western State?
I was listening to the radio a little while ago, and heard Martin Jacques talking about China. I listened with renewed concentration. Jacques was formerly editor of Marxism Today, so he is a man who knows a thing or two about oppressive pseudo-socialist regimes. Much of what Jacques had to say was insightful, but one…
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Jeff King: Down with Pirates
In this post, I argue against protest voting for fringe parties that mock the conventional party systems. To some it may look liberal and progressive, but it in fact offers a false and faddish mirage of progressive action that is liable to have precisely the opposite effect. It encourages dropping out of a viable party-system…