How has discrimination changed over time? What does discrimination look like today? This chapter begins by highlighting severe and systematic acts of discrimination throughout American history. It then assesses contemporary discrimination through a range of audit studies and other methods and then delves into individual perceptions of discrimination.

Chapter 3 provides a review of democratic theory, moving from the “minimal conception” of democratic politics to democracy in its representative, constitutional, participatory, deliberative, and epistemic forms. The chapter offers a comparison of where America stands today among the world’s democracies and introduces the question of whether democracy carries the assumption of equality; it also reviews data on inequality throughout American history and on the more recent increase in inequality. We propose the idea that inequality is not extraneous to our democratic politics, but a direct result of it.

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process that engages citizens in public investment decisions through a mix of deliberation, representation, and voting. This chapter describes how this democratic innovation has been practiced, elaborates its goals, provides an overview of its origins and diffusion, and reviews research on its outcomes for citizen engagement, local governance, and community empowerment. These findings are illustrated by two case studies. Porto Alegre, Brazil, not only represents the birthplace of PB, but also is an example of uniquely pronounced changes in government responsiveness to underserved communities and in the strength of civil society organizations after PB’s implementation. New York City’s program is fairly representative of PB as practiced in the Global North. Controlling a smaller share of city budgets, processes like PBNYC have been more able to replicate Porto Alegre’s model of equitable citizen engagement than to transform urban governance or the organization of local civil society.

Most people in most societies do not fall into the four problematic categories of populists, extremists, deniers, and authoritarians. It is important to consider deliberation involving everybody else in these diabolical times. We could then get a deliberative democracy and a citizenry that are robust in the face of the threats to democracy and that can join in with deliberation against these threats. Equally important in light of the specific concerns we have raised in the previous four chapters, truly inclusive and effective public deliberation should reduce the proportion of people who, out of despair at the democratic alternatives, find themselves attracted to the four problematic positions. This includes allegiant citizens satisfied with existing democratic institutions, dissatisfied citizens, and critical citizens who want to participate more. We then turn to categories of people whose voice ought to be facilitated more effectively in public deliberation, including the working class, women, and marginalized cultural groups. Different deliberative forms are likely to attract different kinds of citizens, which suggests a variety of differentiated practices ranging from contestatory deliberation to more constructive and respectful deliberation oriented to the common good, all of which can join active resistance to anti-democratic transgressions and contribute to democratic renewal.

To respond to the ecological, social and democratic crises we face we need to realize that participatory democracy is the necessary permaculture of healthy representative and accountable democracies. Democracy is brought into being and generated by being democratic here and now in everyday relations. And, for all types of democracies to be sustainable they have to be integrated into the “mutual aid” or “gift-gratitude-reciprocity” relations of biodiversity by which life sustains life on this planet: Gaia or Earth democracy. The coordination and integration of democratic diversity set out in this volume has the capacity to bring about eco-democratic succession, modelled on ecological succession, as the alternative to failed reform and revolution.

The discursive view of human rights, emphasised throughout this book, suggests that human rights must be understood as an ongoing and ever-changing discourse about what it means to be human and about what should comprise the rights of common global citizenship. If this is the case, it is most important to examine the nature of that global dialogue. Who is responsible for maintaining that discourse, who contributes, who does not, and whose voices are the most powerful in defining what is to count as ‘human rights’? As discussed in Chapter 1, one of the consequences of globalisation has been localisation, and this has led to the identification of the global and the local as the sites of significant change and praxis. For this reason, the discussion in this chapter will be divided into a consideration of global and local dialogues around human rights.

We draw on V-Dem data to present global democratic trends since 1789 and revisit key descriptive questions on the global spread of democratic institutions. We provide a comprehensive, nuanced, and disaggregated assessment of democratic development through modern history. We first consider the spread of electoral democracy from 1789 until the present day. Over this period, the world has witnessed a massive spread of electoral democracy. However, the spread has been uneven; substantial upturns and downturns have tended to cluster in different time periods, and all along there have been noteworthy cross-region differences in levels of electoral democracy. Second, we take on a disaggregate perspective and look at trends in sub-components of electoral democracy, namely adult suffrage, elected officials, clean elections, freedom of association, and freedom of expression. Finally, we change our focus from electoral democracy to describe trends pertaining to “thicker” understandings of democracy, that is, ‘liberal democracy’, ‘deliberative democracy’, ‘participatory democracy’, and ‘egalitarian democracy’.

This chapter has four objectives: (1) to explain the main concepts and the normative stance of the book, (2) to develop the main theory of the book, (3) to overview the history of constitutions and constitutionalism in the Arab world in relation to the book’s theory, and (4) to provide a concise introduction to the Arab Spring constitutional bargains across the region.

Using an original worldwide data on 195 constitutions adopted in 118 countries from 1974 to 2015 as well as an original dataset of all constitutions in the Middle East and North Africa from 1861 to 2020, this chapter studies the impact of the process of drafting constitutions on their democratic content. It suggests that both individual-level participation and group-level inclusion improve the democratic content of constitutions by guaranteeing more rights. Particularly, this chapter builds on participatory and deliberative theories of democracy, first to conceptualize and operationalize democratic processes and democratic constitutions, and second to emphasizes the importance of constitution-making processes for democracy. Differentiating between individual-level participation and group-level inclusion as two democratic, albeit distinct, forms of democratic processes, this chapter offers robust statistical evidence that greater inclusion and participation are associated with an increased number of democratic provisions in constitutions, specifically de jure constitutional rights, indicating that broad participatory and inclusive processes can improve the democratic content of constitutions.

This essay examines Charlotte Lennox’s satirical poetry in her collection of thirty poems in Poems on Several Occasions (1747). Many of these poems were republished between 1750 and 1785 in periodicals and miscellanies, such as The New Foundling Hospital of Wit, published in England and America. I argue that Lennox’s targets were frequently the social systems designed to restrict women’s influence to domestic settings. At a time when elements of participatory democracy were gaining global traction and when many political poems engaged with social unrest, Lennox wrote, “Satire, like a magnifying Glass, may aggravate every Defect, in order to make its Deformity appear more hideous.” Lennox’s amplifying attention to the dominant culture’s method of entrapping women and her advocacy for participatory democracy are informed by her exposure as a preteen with Scottish and Irish parents to a diverse range of national and racial backgrounds, including Mohawks, Hurons, Iroquois, Africans, Dutch, and French residents, in Albany and Schenectady, New York. She uses satiric poetry to cast an accusing light on unjust power structures and to promote democratic aims by alluding to the belief that the power of the government is vested in all those who are governed.

Dicusses attitudes towards technology - including computers - and democracy in the period between 1945 and 1990.

This chapter examines the free assembly and free association case law, focusing on political parties and, to a lesser extent, trade unions. The case law on political parties shows a commitment to liberal democracy; there is a substantive democratic component as well which appears in the party dissolution cases. The chapter concludes by looking at how the free association rights support deliberative and participatory democracy especially in the context of trade unions.