Representation journal special edition: Courts and Representative Democracy
Representation The Journal of Representative Democracy
Special Issue: Courts and Representative Democracy
This special issue reflects and seeks to advance debates on the impact and legitimacy of the judicialisation of democratic politics. It does so in two main ways. First, it brings together scholars holding different perspectivessome more critical of and others more favourable to judicialisationand who employ different methods, be they normative, qualitative or quantitative, that reflect the different disciplinary approaches to the topic found in law, political science and sociology. Second, it focuses specifically on the contrasts and complementarities of law and politics as modes of democratic representation.
On one hand, the transfer of policymaking power from popularly elected representatives to a judicial elite would seem to subvert democracy in a fairly straightforward, zero-sum way. On the other hand, political representation has defects that might justify remedial judicial intervention. Indeed, a representative democracy, of the kind typical of all contemporary democratic polities, would have been classified as a form of oligarchy by Aristotle, and has been viewed since the eighteenth century as a mode of elite rather than popular rule.
Some scholars have suggested that judicialisation can compensate for the representative failures of democracy by providing a venue for a more active participation by citizens, while others see in judges a form of representativeness akin to that of legislators. This special issue probes these accounts of judicialisation and explore their implications for the role of courts within a representative democracy.
