Letter from the Connecticut Federation of Democratic Women to Geraldine Ferraro

Letter from the Connecticut Federation of Democratic Women to Geraldine Ferraro, showing their support. Includes data entry sheet.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/vice_presidential_campaign_correspondence_1984_connecticut/1067/thumbnail.jp

Constitutional Pluralism and Democratic Politics: Reflections on the Interpretive Approach of Baker v. Carr

Baker v. Carr is one of the Supreme Court\u27s most important opinions, not least because its advent signaled the constitutionalization of democracy. Unfortunately, as is typical of the Court\u27s numerous forays into democratic politics, the decision is not accompanied by an apparent vision of the relationship among democratic practice, constitutional law, and democratic theory. In this Article, Professor Charles revisits Baker and provides several democratic principles that he argues justifies the Court\u27s decision to engage the democratic process. He examines the decision from the perspective of one of its chief contemporary critics, Justice Frankfurter. He sketches an approach, described as constitutional pluralism, for thinking about Baker and other cases involving judicial supervision of democratic politics. Using constitutional pluralism as an interpretive tool, he argues that the aim of judicial involvement in democratic politics ought to be to vindicate specific democratic principles. To the extent that a challenged democratic practice serves multiple and legitimate democratic ends, the federal courts should respect the judgment of democratic actors

Between empowerment and abuse: citizen participation beyond the post-democratic turn

In this special issue on “Democratization beyond the Post-Democratic Turn. Political Participation between Empowerment and Abuse”, we have explored changing understandings of participation in contemporary Western representative democracies through the analytical lens of the concept of the post-democratic-turn. We have investigated technology-based, market-based, and expert-led innovations that claim to enhance democratic participation and to provide policy legitimation. In this concluding article, I revisit the cases made by the individual contributors and analyse how shifting notions of participation alter dominant understandings of democracy. I carve out how new and emerging ideas of participation are based on different understandings of political subjectivity; furthermore, how constantly rising democratic expectations and simultaneously increasing scepticism with regard to democratic processes and institutions point to a growing democratic ambivalence within Western societies. Making use of Dahl’s conceptualization of democracy, in this article, I review changing understandings of participation in light of their contribution to further democratization. The article shows how under post-democratic conditions the simulative performance of autonomy and subjectivity has become central to democratic participation. It emphasizes that what in established perspectives on democratization might appear as an abuse of participation, through the lens of a post-democratic-turn might be perceived as emancipatory and liberating

DEMOCRATIC DECONSOLIDATION IN DEVELOPED DEMOCRACIES, 1995-2018. CES Open Forum Series 2018-2019

Until recently, many political scientists had believed that the stability of democracy is assured once certain threshold conditions – prosperity, democratic legitimacy, the development of a robust civil society – were attained. Democracy would then be consolidated, and remain stable. In this article we show that levels of support for democratic governance are not stable over time, even among high-income democracies, and have declined in recent years. In contrast to theories of democratic consolidation, we suggest that just as democracy can come to be “the only game in town” through processes of democratic deepening and the broad-based acceptance of democratic institutions, so too a process of democratic deconsolidation can take place as citizens sour on democratic institutions, become more open to authoritarian alternatives, and vote for anti-system parties. Public opinion measures of democratic deconsolidation are strongly associated with subsequent declines in the actual extent of democratic governance and predict not only recent democratic backsliding in transitional democracies, such as Venezuela or Russia, but also anticipated the downgrades in Freedom House scores occurring across a range of western democracies since 2016

Clinton Maintains NH Lead 11/20/2007

Hillary Clinton continues to lead in the New Hampshire Democratic primary race. However, almost half of Democratic voters say they have yet to make their final choice. Election: NH Primary 200