RAGIONI PARTIGIANE E AGENCY DEMOCRATICA

While parties play a fundamental role within democratic systems, from a normative perspective providing a justification of parties and partisanship is all but obvious. According to this anti-partisan approach, parties and partisanship cannot be considered fully legitimate because they polarize political debates, create ideological divisions that cannot be respect-fully composed within democratic decision-making, and aim at defeating their enemies in-stead of striving for the common good. This anti-partisan perspective has been reinforced by the deliberative framework, according to which citizens should ground their claims in publicly justifiable arguments, assess political proposals on their merits, and critically dis-cuss with one another so as to identify what is best for the polity. The ideal political actors, according to this view, are independents, not partisans. In the past few years various scholars challenged this idea by holding that it does not distinguish partisanship from factional-ism. While the latter cannot be considered legitimate, the former ensures that citizens are motivated to exercise their political agency and grants discursive conditions that are necessary to publicly justify collective decisions. In this paper I will consider this defence of party spirits and claim that while it is undeniable that partisanship performs motivational and justificatory functions that are necessary for the proper working of a democratic system, it requires an account of political justification that is not compatible with traditional interpretations of deliberative ideal

Introduction: Democracy, Diversity

The article introduces a collection of essays which represents the final outcome of a research project (Urbanitas) carried out by the authors on the theme of cultural diversity and on the political response e to the tensions and conflicts produced by the encounter of so many differences in the same democratic space

New methodologies for the detection, identification, and quantification of microplastics and their environmental degradation by-products

Sampling, separation, detection, and characterization of microplastics (MPs) dispersed in natural water bodies and ecosystems is a challenging and critical issue for a better understanding of the hazards for the environment posed by such nearly ubiquitous and still largely unknown form of pollution. There is still the need for exhaustive, reliable, accurate, reasonably fast and cost efficient analytical protocols allowing the quantification not only of MPs, but also of nanoplastics (NPs) and of the harmful molecular pollutants that may result from degrading plastics. Here a set of newly developed analytical protocols, integrated with specialized techniques such as pyrolysis-gaschromatography-mass spectrometry (Py-GC/MS), for the accurate and selective determination of the polymers most commonly found as MPs polluting marine and freshwater sediments are presented. In addition, the results of an investigation on the low molecular weight volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released upon photo-oxidative degradation of microplastics highlight the important role of photoinduced fragmentation at a molecular level both as a potential source of hazardous chemicals and as accelerators of the overall degradation of floating or stranded plastic debris

A multidimensional account of democratic legitimacy: how to make robust decisions in a non-idealized deliberative context

This paper analyses the possibility of granting legitimacy to democratic decisionmaking procedures in a context of deep pluralism. We defend a multidimensional account according to which a legitimate system needs to grant, on the one hand, that citizens should be included on an equal footing and acknowledged as reflexive political agents rather than mere beneficiaries of policies, and, on the other hand, that their decisions have an epistemic quality. While Estlund\u2019s account of imperfect epistemic proceduralism might seem to embody a dualistic conception of democratic legitimacy, we point out that it is not able to recognize citizens as reflexive political agents and is grounded in an idealized model of the circumstances of deliberation. To overcome these ambiguities, we develop an account of democratic legitimacy according to which disagreement is the proper expression of citizens\u2019 reflexive agency and the attribution of epistemic authority does not stem from a major expertise or specific ability, but it comes through the public confrontation among disagreeing agents. Consequently, the epistemic value of deliberation should be derived from the reasons-giving process rather than from the reference to the alleged quality of its outcomes. In this way, we demonstrate the validity of the multidimensional perspective of legitimacy, yet abstain from introducing any outcome-oriented criterion. Finally, we argue that this account of legitimacy is well suited for modeling deliberative democracy as a decision-making procedure that respects the agency of every citizen and grants her opportunity to influence public choices