The transformations of contemporary democracies

Declining electoral turnouts, decreased trust in elected institutions, the undermining of the rule of law in so-called “consolidated democracies”, as well as failures to “export” democracy via military interventions have undermined long-held, implicit postulates in the social sciences about the superiority of the “Anglo-American” or “Western” model of democracy and the robustness of a “third wave” of democratization leading, eventually, to the global dominance of liberal democracy. At the same time, new social movements (eg Black Votes Matter, Yellow Jackets, the environmental justice movement, etc.) and ensuing conflicts, together with the institutionalization of new research fields in academia, are generating debates about aspects of Western democracies that had previously elicited little public interest or were under-researched. These include, notably, controversies over the race-based and gendered dimensions of democratic institutions (not to say, of the social contract philosophy itself), the impact of fossil fuel dependence on the quality of democratic government, the intersections between social, ethnic and environmental inequalities, etc.

The aim of the course is to analyze how current research in the social sciences contributes to renewing perspectives and analytical frameworks about the state of democracy in today’s world. Adopting a comparative perspective, it also intends to introduce students to ongoing academic and political discussions with which they may not be familiar (such as, for example, the conflict on “critical race theory” now raging in the US education system and political field).