BEXP 17A00 - Exploring the Current Challenges to Liberal Democracies in the Western World
This course intends to analyze the latest developments in Western liberal democracies from an interdisciplinary point of view. Democracy as we know it today faces important challenges in various countries throughout the world.
Populism has recently become an objet of legal science, as right-wing political parties have been claiming their opposition towards liberal democracy and their belonging to another category: illiberal democracy (starting with Viktor Orban in Hungary). Various neologisms have been created to describe the phenomenon of reducing rights and freedoms by an elected government using the tools of constitutionalism, such as “Democratorship” (Kim Lane Scheppele, 2016) or “authoritarian constitutionalism” (Mark Tushnet, 2015).
While jurists are trying to make sense of those new legal concepts, and asking if an illiberal democracy can still be defined a democracy or has to be inserted in the category of autocracies, historians have studied this concept for decades, applying it to countries such as the United States (the People's Party), Russia (the Narodniki mouvement) of the 19th century, and later to Argentina (Peronism).
A third discipline seems necessary to explain the phenomenon of populism: sociology. It is indeed impossible to define populism as the “call to the people”, because it would then be applicable to all democrats - i.e. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Nonetheless, there is a specific definition of “the people” that populist discourses refer to. Adopting a case-by-case approach, this seminar will analyze different examples of modern and contemporary populisms, with the goal of putting together a conceptual definition of “illiberal democracies”.