Bruno Leipold Postdoctoral Fellow Aufenthalt am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Oktober 2017–September 2018Forschungsthema am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »Constitutionalising Popular Democracy«Projektbeschreibung: This research project explores and defends constitutional alternatives to liberal democracy, which realise genuine popular control and widespread political participation. There has been increasing interest from constitutional and political theorists in exploring these alternatives. This has been motivated by the mounting empirical evidence, gathered by political scientists and political economists, of the elite capture of the democratic process. Examples of the kind of institutional alternatives that have so far been explored include the selection of public officials by lottery rather than by election, trials of public officials by citizens, and public bodies that explicitly exclude richer citizens from membership.
My proposed research expands upon this body of literature by exploring a constitutional idea that is traditionally associated with popular democracy but has been neglected in contemporary discussions: the idea of imperative mandates. This is where representatives are legally bound to follow the instructions of their constituents. They are currently banned in the constitutions of many liberal representative democracies, which instead enshrine the idea of free mandates, where representatives exercise their own legislative judgement. My research project aims to both uncover the neglected constitutional history of imperative mandates and show why they are a promising constitutional mechanism to combat elite capture in modern democracies.
(Bruno Leipold) Förderung des Aufenthaltes: DFG-Kollegforschergruppe »Justitia Amplificata. Rethinking Justice − Applied and Global«Wissenschaftliches Profil von Bruno LeipoldBruno Leipold promovierte an der Oxford Universität mit einer Arbeit über »Citizen Marx: The Relationship between Karl Marx and Republicanism«. Ab September 2018 ist er Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow am European University Institute, Florenz.Website: Weitere Informationen zu Bruno Leipold finden Sie hier. Forschungsschwerpunkte: Karl Marx, Theorien der Volksdemokratie, Republikanismus, politische und gesellschaftliche Theorien des 19. Jahrhunderts Veröffentlichungen (Auswahl):
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