Resurgent Fundamentalism, Politics, and the Anti-Liberal Agenda: Challenges for South Africa's Constitutional Democracy

Fundamentalism from the Perspective of Liberal Tolerance

Politics as Anti-Politics: The World Bank’s Neopopulist Agenda

Building on the case of the Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS), this working paper provides an analysis of the World Bank’s new aid allocation mechanisms in relation to representative politics. As such, this paper provides an analysis of why parliaments have overwhelmingly been bypassed in the PRS process and more interestingly, how they have come to be replaced de facto by certain depoliticise...

Constitutional Economics/Constitutional Politics

Why does the treatment of American constitutional politics presented in We the People depart so radically from models of constitutional deliberation developed in the type of constitutional economics pioneered by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock? The paper defines three premises that account for the divergence, and concludes by proposing an inquiry into constitutional design that requires insig...

Public Service and Liberal Democracy

The debate on television’s "public service"obligations can only make full sense if integrated in the broader context of the debate on the best political model for society. In fact, the classic "public service"rationale is based in a normative conception of good and in a suspicious view of the average citizen that is largely tributary of a Platonic or Elitist approach to the political organizati...

Constitutional Democracy and Public Judgements

This paper proposes a new conceptual framework of a liberal social order, which emphasizes the freedom of action in social interaction and the freedom of participation in social rule-making process. Our articulation of public decision-making process can be interpreted as a formal way of capturing the essence of constitutional democracy, which is an impure mixture of constructivist rationalism a...