El Constitucionalista/The Constitutionalist

Crises of democracy, by Adam Przeworski (Cambridge University Press. 2019) Przeworski has the virtue of seriousness. He doesn’t reach easy conclusions, sometimes he rather reaches intuitions to which he arrives by means of the serious and complete study of his subject. Perhaps it is not an author for the general public, but it is for all of us who are permanently interested in democracy. Another virtue of our author is his intellectual honesty. He specifies what he understands by "democracy", for him this is "a political arrangement in which people select   governments through elections and have a reasonable possibility of removing incumbent governments they do not like" (p. 5), accepting that it is a minimal and electoral concept. Continuing with the concern he expressed in his previous book (“Why bother with elections?”), Przeworski delves into the problems of democracy from the expectations that those who participate in the elections, both winne...

(Personal notes of Andrea Greppi's exposition entitled "Democracy and its conditions" in the Seminar "Constitution, justice and democracy", organized by the Constitutional Studies Center of the Supreme Court. May 15, 2018. Mexico City. Alterio in the comments) For the Greppi democracy is a set of rules to make decisions, believes that the discussion about the substantive or procedural definitions of democracy is wrong, while the "field" in which the democratic game is practiced must have certain characteristics, what is necessarily a substantive issue. He proposes that we ask ourselves today what are the conditions that allow the existence of democracy? Inquisition that considers relevant given that the standard theory has entered into crisis to explain the relations between conditions and system result from the counterflow of the last wave democratic, which was assumed unstoppable. Considering the data of Freedom House, Greppi affirms ...