Why are religious minorities well represented and politically influential in some democracies but not others? Focusing on evangelical Christians in Latin America, I argue that religious minorities seek and gain electoral representation when (a) they face significant threats to their material interests and worldview and (b) their community is not internally divided by cross-cutting cleavages. Differences in Latin American evangelicals’ political ambitions emerged as a result of two critical junctures: episodes of secular reform in the early twentieth century and the rise of sexuality politics at the turn of the twenty-first century. In Brazil, significant threats at both junctures prompted extensive electoral mobilization; in Chile, minimal threats meant that mobilization lagged. In Peru, where major cleavages divide both evangelicals and broader society, threats prompt less electoral mobilization than otherwise expected. The multi-method argument leverages interviews, content analysis, survey experiments, ecological analysis, and secondary case studies of Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala.

This chapter explores the crises of the Roman and American republics. Understanding these crises requires that we view politics as an arena of identity contestation rather than simply interest articulation. What changes in both Rome and the United States is that participants came to see each other as Strangers, no longer sharing the same background assumptions, the same sense of the past, nor the same anticipation of the future. Borne of distrust, norms of getting things down turned into norms of obstruction. This had implications for how politics was experienced. The changes in these norms not only disabled these institutions, making them unable to actualize a future, but also made possible alterations in the political framework that might have been inconceivable before. In particular, one sees the elevation of individuals who offered solutions by promising to bypass those ineffective and unresponsive institutions. That is, as institutions and processes become distant abstractions that no longer answer to fundamental questions of the future of the community, the individual becomes the tangible personification of politics, answering these questions in a singular voice.

During the 1920s, Harold Laski worked on producing a comprehensive account of a political philosophy appropriate for the new age of social democracy that was just emerging. During the 1930s, however, his optimistic political outlook waned and with this he modified his position and, in its place, presented a materialist account of British constitutional arrangements. This paper explains this later development of his thought. It examines the unfolding of his argument through his studies of the crisis of parliamentary democracy, the nature of the modern state and his materialist analysis of the British constitution and offers critical reflections of the significance of this phase of his work.

This chapter deals with the relationship between the rule of recognition of a legal system and the material constitution. While the former concerns the ultimate criteria to identify the law, the material constitution points to those of such criteria (rules) that are supreme within a legal order. We contend that the material constitutions can be conceptualised as the ’original constitution’. Instead, we propose understanding it as a facet of the rule of recognition. Thus intended, this notion can help illuminate the complex interplay between written and unwritten constitutional rules. Moreover, after casting doubts on the idea of the material constitution as a descriptive device to detect the ordering forces within society, we sketch the contours of a material constitution based on a normative political conception of the rule of recognition. The normative presupposition of such a conception is a strong linkage between the individuation/acceptance of the law by laypeople and the existence of a given constitutional order. In virtue of such a strong linkage, the material constitution, as a legal notion, enjoys a specific normative legitimacy within a legal order. In pluralistic contemporary societies, such legitimacy hinges fundamentally on democratic/procedural principles rather than substantive goals.

Has decentralization contributed to democratic accountability, civic engagement, transparency, and efforts to combat corruption in the contemporary Arab region? This chapter presents key findings from a two-year study assessing decentralization policies and initiatives in five countries – Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen. The chapter discusses several findings of our fieldwork. One is the legacy of colonial experiences which made deconcentration rather than decentralization prevail. Another is the simultaneous promotion and subversion of decentralization, which was not only practiced by governments across the region, but was often subsidized by international assistance. Still another finding discusses how effectiveness of local governments in the region is constrained by opaque regulatory environments and limited human and financial resources at their disposal. Finally, our study also points to instances of success and innovation, against many odds, where capable leadership, engaged civil society, and other factors have paved the way toward palpable improvements in service delivery and urban management. Accordingly, we find that, despite many constraints, decentralization policies in the Arab region may occasionally present significant policy windows that could form opportunities for social, political, and economic changes, if mobilized adequately.

This chapter focuses on the process of designation of MCZs in English waters at the basis of MCZs designation. The designation of MCZs is a very interesting case to study attempts at democratising conservation regulation as it has contemplated extensive participation. Departing from the technocratic and purely science-based approach to site selection typical of domestic and European nature conservation law, socio-economic considerations and participatory techniques have been key elements of the designation process of MCZs in England from the start. However, a critical reading of the participatory approach reveals certain weaknesses, mainly to do with the choice of an aggregative rather than a deliberative model of democracy. Advocating for a relational ontology and epistemology, the chapter ends with a call for bringing forth new, ‘thicker’ models of participation that are more attentive to multiple forms of communication and identities and more conducive to commoning practices.

This chapter discusses environmental democracy from an institutional perspective focusing on the role Inshore Fisheries Conservation Authorities and environmental NGOs have in marine conservation regulation. Environmental NGOs are the ‘usual suspects’ when discussing environmental democracy. They are the voice of the more-than human, operating as a proxy, and they are defending the environmental rights of present and future generations through a variety of strategies, more or less confrontational. Thus, NGOs are an obvious subject in discussions of environmental democracy. For radical scholars, Inshore Fisheries Conservation Authorities may seem less interesting. After all, their transformative potential is tamed by the statutory obligations governing their behaviour, they are local arms of the state. However, the chapter reveals that their set up and operation display important democratic aspects. Although both organisations contribute to the democratisation of regulation, they also experience some challenges and constraints, which the chapter discusses.

This chapter positions the IPCC in the context of global efforts to understand and combat climate change. Throughout its first three decades, as nations have sought to understand and prioritise climate change in global policy, the IPCC has served as the world’s principal knowledge-making institution. It has created, authorised, and narrated a new kind of global knowledge, profoundly shaped global public imagination of the climate emergency, and provided epistemic support to the call for collective global action to tackle it. Looking forward, however, it is less clear whether the IPCC is well positioned to help support the work of institutions around the world to end fossil fuel use and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The chapter asks, therefore, whether the IPCC needs to be re-imagined if it is to help advance the transition to a climate-neutral global economy and energy systems.

Several concerns stand to lead policing away from its mandate to protect the full range of citizens in a pluralist democracy. Among them are special interests, coarse majoritarian rule, and populism. Given that policing involves the discretionary allocation of power and resources in a strategic sense, and that the enforcement of a wide range of laws is subject to police discretion in individual encounters, each of these concerns can turn policing toward illiberal ends when they exert undue influence. In this sense, the discretionary nature of police power is most typically turned toward injustice in the pursuit of sectarian or populist goals that may have a veneer of democratic process, but are insufficient to justify the ensuing disparities of privilege, protection, or access to public space. The duty of the police to resist this impulse and only act upon reasons that treat citizens as substantive equals (i.e., by employing Rawlsian public reason) is a critical way to mitigate this hazard. The chapter closes by recounting the failed but valiant struggle of police to prevent populist rioters from seizing the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 as an example of the duty of the police to safeguard democracy from virulent populist interests.

This chapter argues that policing can be justified at its various levels (e.g., strategic, transactional) utilizing the requirement of Rawlsian public reason, wherein the reasons supplied for coercive government decisions that take up basic matters of justice must be ones that all citizens can access and evaluate from positions of equality. It uses the highly publicized arrest of two Black men for trespassing at a café in Philadelphia to illustrate the concern that procedural justice without public reason can yield troubling outcomes, especially when our intuitions tell us the reasons motivating the procedural transaction do not apply equally to all citizens (e.g., concerns of trespass in a café in a wealthy neighborhood would not apply equally to all citizens based on race, no matter how scrupulously the police employed Tyler’s procedural justice in response to the trespass allegations). While a public reason approach to police justification is a process that would not rule out the subjective judgments police make in complex and evolving situations, it would provide an adequate basis for evaluating overall resource allocations, and more importantly set a high expectation of reason giving grounded in equality as police make lower-level discretionary judgments.

The introduciton opens my exploration of Cicero’s notion of will. I argue that the will is an original Latin contribution to the Western mind. Cicero’s letters, speeches, and treatises show how his skill for language gave him a subtler take on events and a richer repertoire of persuasion. Practical uses of will are foremost: mapping alliances, winning elections, and navigating the “economy of goodwill.” From his earliest writings, however, voluntas emerges in normative claims about law and politics: that Rome’s mass of precedents could be rationalized through Greek ideas. Chief among these is Plato’s precept that reason must rule, and thus an alliance of philosophy and tradition can save the dying Republic. Transmuting political failure into philosophical innovation, Cicero lays the foundation for an idea – the will and its freedom – with tremendous consequences for Western thought. For Cicero, voluntas populi becomes the binding force of a nominally popular but functionally aristocratic constitution. If this state of affairs looks familiar in today’s “democratic” republics, we have Cicero in part to thank. Insistence on the singularity of popular will and mistrust of the common citizen lie at the heart of today’s political crisis and will require Ciceronian creativity to fix.