Between militant democracy and citizen vigilantism: Using citizens’ assemblies to keep parties democratic

Tore Vincents Olsen, Juha Tuovinen

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Abstract

The essential role of parties in democracies makes it important to keep them democratic. The paper argues for sortition based citizens’ assemblies (CAs) organized in and by civil society to formulate democratic standards for political parties to follow, evaluate them individually and to criticize them publicly if they do not. This is a third and potentially complementary way to keeping parties democratic, placed between militant democracy on the one hand and citizen vigilantism on the other. Militant democracy is challenged by the fact that few democratically problematic parties are ostensibly anti-democratic and therefore likely to fall under the legal criteria for issuing party bans and other legal sanctions. Militant democratic measures are also likely to be ineffective and are liable to abuse. Citizen vigilantism, whereby active democratic citizens take on the responsibility for protecting democracy deals better with the ambiguous nature of democratically problematic parties, but suffers from lack of democratic authorization and clear standards of critique. While not perfect, the proposed model remedies many of the shortcomings of both approaches. Contributing to an emerging literature on CAs as instruments in the protection of democracy, the paper evaluates the model’s normative justifiability, feasibility and likely effectiveness.
Original languageEnglish
JournalGlobal Constitutionalism
Pages (from-to)1-22
Number of pages22
ISSN2045-3825
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 15 Dec 2023

Keywords

  • citizen vigilantism
  • militant democracy
  • naming and shaming
  • party regulation
  • sortition-based citizens' assembly

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