In the midst of a New England winter long ago, young people of Boston filed into a drafty meeting hall up the road from the harbor. They had assembled on that January morning in 1839 for the seventh annual meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society.
Political sociologist Claus Offe has diagnosed the participatory deficit in North Atlantic democracies as the product of an imbalance in state–market relations. When the market is supreme, public policy can do little to constrain the market’s ever-expanding realms.
By now, we know the pattern: A constitutional democracy, flawed but in reasonably good standing, is hit by a transformative election.
With the rise of populist political leaders in the West, such as President Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, the study of populism has become a central concern.
The rule of law and the rule of God appear to be on a collision course.
Professors Tom Ginsburg, Aziz Huq, and Mila Versteeg (GHV) have written a mile-a-minute, and decidedly one-sided, account of the decline and fall of liberal constitutionalism throughout the world in the past generation.
Equality is guaranteed in every liberal-democratic constitution around the world, but inequality of wealth and income is widespread and on the rise.
The European Union was founded in the 1950s as an experiment in postwar regional integration, in part to help rebuild national economies damaged by World War II through economic integration, and in part to ward off, by means of closer legal and political integration of states, the threat of totalitarianism and Soviet expansion.
