By Roland Axtmann
Textual content offers a fantastic creation and survey to the major subject matters and concerns principal to the learn and realizing of democratic politics this day. established round 3 significant elements: ideas, associations and political habit, and ideologies and activities. contains instructional questions. Softcover, hardcover on hand.
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Extra resources for Understanding Democratic Politics: An Introduction
Sample text
One need only consider that the European Union has its own parliamentary, 18 Concepts executive and judicial institutions, its own extensive policy jurisdiction, its own budget, its own internal and external security capacity, its own (largely accepted) claim to the direct applicability of its laws to individuals (and not merely states) and to the supremacy of its laws over national laws, and even its own conception of European citizenship, to appreciate how impoverished such a view is. But if it is in principle legitimate to think of post-state ‘polities’ or ‘processes’ in constitutional terms, the legacy of state-centred constitutionalism generates two sets of problems.
Summary ● ● ● There exists an integral connection between rights and democracy. The place of a ‘bill of rights’ in a democratic constitution is, however, highly controversial. A defence of ‘human rights’ must confront the following challenges: – Are the judgments of an unelected judiciary, which annuls parliamentary legislation on the basis of ‘human rights’ conventions, ultimately ‘undemocratic’? – Given the internationalization of human rights issues, how can the democratic accountability of international human rights bodies be ensured?
For example, to what extent should property by privately owned? Should public money be spent on improving our roads or public transportation? Should group rights protect minority cultures at the expense of the rights of single individuals within these communities? Apart from resolving the conflicts that arise between individual citizens, a theory of social justice must also resolve conflicts between citizens and state authorities. In particular, principles of social justice should tell us when, where and how a state can legitimately use force to entice individual citizens to cooperate rather than free-ride.
