| Kommentar |
The Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen (who many consider the greatest legal theorist of the twentieth century) famously argued that modern democracy was unthinkable without political parties. More recently, the 1980s and 1990s saw a great deal of enthusiasms for civil society as a crucial factor to make democracies flourish. Today, the role of associations in democracies is much more doubtful. Theorists of democracy have revived the notion that parties are inherently oligarchic, assemblies of citizens chosen by lot are proposed as an alternative to traditional concepts of representative democracy. Civil society, disenchanted social scientists are telling us, can be faked, as happens in many autocratizing, as well as fully autocratic, states; in any case, civil society might be genuine, but composed of groups that actively oppose democracy (the Weimar Republic is one frequently cited example; some would also point to the contemporary United States).
The seminar revisits the fundamental normative issues at stake, but also engages in systematic comparisons of the US and Germany, which take fundamentally different approaches to the regulation of parties (and, to a lesser degree, civil society). We examine existing laws governing parties (including the regulation of parties’ internal political activities and their financing); we also explore mechanisms for banning them (party prohibitions are a central element of Germany’s “militant democracy;” they are often seen as a completely alien idea in US constitutionalism). Finally, we also study the role of opposition parties and movements in autocratic and autocratizing regimes. |
| Literatur |
Jan-Werner Müller, Freiheit, Gleichheit, Ungewissheit: Wie schafft man Demokratie? Suhrkamp, Berlin 2021, Kap. 3
Anna-Bettina Kaiser, Die Organisation politischer Willensbildung: Parteien, VVDStRL 81 (2022), im Erscheinen |
