Alice el-Wakil

University of Copenhagen · Department of Political Science

Do democratic systems that include binding referendum and initiative processes violate a core principle of democracy, namely that legislators should be accountable? Some have argued that they do: these popular vote processes would grant the right to legislate to ordinary voters even though they cannot be held accountable—i.e., face possible consequ...

Ceva and Ferretti provide rich, comprehensive, and thought-provoking answers to the question of what political corruption—understood as corruption that occurs in public institutions—is and when and why it is morally wrong. One aspect that greatly contributes to the book's originality and political relevance is its commitment to a “continuist” conce...

How do face-to-face, assembly processes, and non-face-to-face, popular vote processes impact the decisions made by citizens? Normative discussions of the comparative merits of these two broad types of participatory decision-making processes partly rely on empirical assumptions concerning this question. In this paper, we test the central assumption...

In Uster denken gerade 20 zufällig gewählte Menschen die Demokratie neu: Ein sogenanntes BürgerInnenpanel hat vor zwei Wochen Massnahmen zum Klimaschutz diskutiert. Auf nationaler Ebene haben die Grünen eine parlamentarische Initiative zur Schaffung eines Klimarats eingereicht. Simon Muster spricht mit Politikphilosophin Alice el-Wakil über die dem...

Despite controversy over recent referendums and initiatives, populists and social movements continue to call for the use of these popular vote processes. Most political and academic debates about whether these calls should be answered have adopted a dominant framework that focuses on whether we should favour ‘direct’ or ‘representative’ democracy....

L’expérience montre le potentiel des assemblées citoyennes et la nécessité d’une mise en œuvre réfléchie

Referendums and initiatives have long been described as deliberatively deficient and unfit to implement deliberative democracy. Categorized as aggregative mechanisms, they would undermine quality deliberation by setting predefined policy options to potentially polarizing mass votes, with no room for face-to-face exchange nor opportunities for citiz...

Quelle relation entretiennent les référendums et les initiatives avec la démocratie ? La plupart des réponses à cette question suggèrent que ces procédures de votations se rattachent à un modèle démocratique particulier, celui de la démocratie directe, opposé au modèle de démocratie représentative. Toutefois, un récent article en théorie politique...

What is the relationship between referendum and initiative processes and democracy? The dominant understanding is that these popular vote processes are institutions associated with a model of direct democracy that stands in opposition to representative democracy. However, this pervasive approach is rarely justified and appears to limit the study of...

Democratic theorists generally ignore that the institutional design of popular vote processes varies in important ways. However, these differences in design influence the kind of role that these processes play in and their impact on democratic systems. We intend to remedy this situation by launching a normative discussion about the institutional de...

The main aim of this final essay is to draw on the insights gathered in the Debate “Do Referendums Enhance or Threaten Democracy” to inform future normative and empirical discussions about the design of popular vote processes. We first offer some clarifications regarding three of the concerns raised by respondents about our introductory essay. We t...

These comments on the global fate of democracy, the first in a three-part series, Is Democracy Dead or Alive?, are gathered by Democratic Theory and co-published by The Conversation with the Sydney Democracy Network. Several of these comments will feature as full-length articles in a special issue of Democratic Theory https://theconversation.com/de...

Geht es um die Reform der Altersvorsorge, scheint die schweizerische Demokratie überfordert. Helfen könnten Bügerkomitees wie in Irland und in Kanada, schreiben Alice el-Wakil und Michael Räber

Deliberative democracy theorists have long dismissed direct democratic mechanisms, suspecting them of fundamentally contradicting the deliberative ideal. One reason for this dismissal is that, as aggregative devices, all direct democratic institutions would implement a purely procedural view of democracy deemed undesirable. In this article, I conte...

After the First and Second World War period, during which the constitutional democratic procedure was largely suspended, the Swiss population mobilised and launched direct democratic procedures to put an end to this state of exception. In September 1949, the people and the federal state accepted the popular initiative “Back to direct democracy” (Re...

In his Theory of justice, John Rawls argues that we as individuals can decide self-interestedly how we are to behave in the markets. In the economic system, justice doesn't require us to consider anything more than whether we can afford what we want or not. Distribution of wealth in society is just insofar as the basic structure of that society res...