The article discusses some of the paradoxes of minority accommodation in Eastern Europe 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the course of doing so, it focuses on four specific issues: volatility, sequencing, a shift from nationalism (group) to social conservatism (grid), and on the radicalisation of mainstream parties. Volatility is tied to the ebb and flow of shifts in the status quo associated with minority accommodation, which elucidates both why radical right mobilisation accelerates and why it loses steam. The expansion of minority rights leads to political ‘extreme reactions’. Sequencing matters since minority accommodation coincided with democratisation in Eastern Europe, so the struggle over minority rights is confounded with a concurrent regime change. Shifts from group to grid refer to the recent rise in socially conservative issues as sources of polarisation. Finally, extremist parties can threaten democratic pluralism. Nevertheless, large radicalised mainstream parties that control parliaments, not small extremist parties, subvert the institutions of democratic oversight. The threat originates from the mainstream and is exacerbated by the fact that liberal democracy has not ‘locked in’ in most of Eastern Europe.

This article examines the debated relationship between liberal-democratic politics and states of exception in conditions of emergency. After Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, it is often maintained that today we live in a situation of perennial exceptionalism, where emergency measures have become a regular practice even by governments we name ‘democratic’. In these circumstances, exception is deemed to threaten democracy and hinder individual and collective political agency. Yet, such interpretation remains rigidly focused on the expanded governmental powers ushered by the exception. The article first unpacks how the relationship between exception and democracy has been differently addressed by juridical and biopolitical approaches. Then, it attempts an alternative heuristic: it discusses possibilities of democratic associative practices in emergency by looking at the notion of resistance that Michel Foucault links with power. This route remains unexplored in the literature on the concept of the exception.

Australia, like many Western liberal democracies, has experienced an unprecedented shift toward market driven policy governance in the past decade, influenced heavily by the demands of globalization but also the dominance of conservative ideas of liberal democracy and market oriented neoliberalism. In this context nonprofit advocacy organizations (NPAOs) have not only been subject to criticism and a reduction in governmental support, but have had their legitimacy challenged and questioned. This paper responds to an audible, visible, and highly contestable critique of NPAOs by exploring their contemporary place and role in Australian democracy. This discussion relies on a review of some key ideas and theories of liberal democracy and an overview of the current Australian context in which NPAOs operate, particularly in regard to their participation in policy governance. A key observation about how integral NPAOs are to ensure an active and open democracy, challenges the current directions of Australian governance and suggests a need for reflection on what actually constitutes a fully functioning democracy that fits the demands of the twenty-first century.

Democracy and liberal democracy, in particular, are at a turning point and the European Union constitutes a fertile ground to study this phenomenon. Although there have been many studies on the crises of democracy, this article aims to make a contribution by concentrating on the nature of the dissensus over liberal democracy. While there is a broad academic consensus that dissensus is “the essence of politics” (Rancière, 2010), it has been rarely studied per se. This is precisely the ambition of this article: to understand the growing dissensus over liberal democracy, or put differently, the lack of consensus over liberal democracy. This article proposes an empirical definition of dissensus supported by a typology of ideal types. The article is organised as follows: Section 2 depicts the phenomenon under consideration and questions whether dissensus can be studied through the lenses of well-established concepts in political science, namely opposition and contestation. Section 3 proposes an empirical definition of dissensus as well as a typology, both coined to enable researchers to understand how the nature of the conflict over liberal democracy and the heterogeneity of actors’ goals can lead to four types of dissensus: mild, constructive, disruptive and destructive. These four ideal-types are then explained and illustrated by concrete examples in references to the principles of liberal democracy and its practice.

This article introduces the Special Issue examining the growing dissensus over liberal democracy in the EU. While the early twenty-first century appeared to herald democratic triumph following the Cold War and the democratization waves of the 1980s and 1990s, recent decades have witnessed an increasing contestation of liberal democracy. The Special Issue explores this phenomenon and aims to understand the nature of the current dissensus over liberal democracy, the roles of different actors, and its implications for EU policies and instruments. Dissensus is defined as a conflict between different types of actors, either about the fundamental principles of liberal democracy and rights or their implementation through specific policies, or both. This article explains the puzzle and situates the concept of dissensus in the literature. It then discusses how dissensus can be studied as the dependent and independent variable and provides an overview of how the contributions in this issue address these questions. The Special Issue examines how this dissensus shapes both policies and polity in the EU context, particularly as it coincides with the growing success of radical and populist parties at the national level and increasing centralization of powers among executives at the EU level.

The language we use for democracy matters, the struggles over how it is defined are real, the outcomes are consequential. This is what a conceptual politics approach emphasizes, pointing to the vital role played by contestation in determining which meanings prevail and which are marginalized. Among all the meanings of democracy that exist, it is liberal democracy that stands at the center, it has effectively won conceptual and political battles resulting in its current primacy. In this sense, liberalism is much more deeply baked into contemporary discussions about democracy than some might be comfortable admitting. This is not without cause, as liberal democracy has achieved, and continues to unevenly provide, political, economic, and social goods. In the rush to dig up alternatives, it is important not to lose sight of how and why this liberal conception of democracy has come to dominate and the ways it conditions democratic possibilities.

Can civil disobedience be transnationalized? This question presumes civil disobedience to be a fundamentally domestic concept—one constitutively tied to both the nation-state and the normative underpinnings of liberal, constitutional democracies. This article shows how this assumption mistakes one version of civil disobedience's twentieth-century intellectual history for the whole of it, and risks reproducing binaries (domestic vs. international, democracies vs. non-democracies) that trouble attempts to theorize the transnational. Turning to an alternative intellectual history—a network of civil rights and anticolonial activists—reveals a novel theory of civil disobedience as decolonizing praxis, as well the stakes of these binaries: the disavowal of white supremacy as pervasive and durable global structure of governance, linking the domestic to the international, and democratic rule to domination.

This critical commentary discusses Stephan Lessenich's recent work on democracy. It argues that—to understand the structural boundaries of welfare capitalist democracy—we must critically unearth the limits of liberal democracy. This article first maintains that the absence of an economic democratization dimension is an outcome of liberal democracy's shrinking of the meaning of the political. It next claims that defining democracy in terms of rights does not duly consider how these unfolded historically and recently, nor clarifies their relation with negative freedom. The article then contends that the environmentally destructive dialectic of democracy and the belittlement of reproductive work stem from the constitution of a narrowly defined economic sphere, from which “reproductive activities” are excluded. Finally, the text reflects on what “democratizing democracy” should entail.

This article investigates civic-political and cognitive participation as they play out in democratic theory. Its core purpose is to develop a conceptual-normative critique of the presupposition in liberal democratic theory that these logics are mutually reinforcing and complementary. This misunderstanding of a theoretical ambivalence contributes to inhibiting constructive assessment of epistocratic*technocratic frameworks of democratic interpretation and theory. I demonstrate that these logics circulate contrasting views of democratic power and legitimacy and should be disentangled to make sense of liberal democratic theoretical and political spaces. This critique is then fed into a political-epistemological interrogation of post-truth and alt-facts rhetorical registers in contemporary liberal democratic life, concluding that neither logic of participation can harbor this unanticipated and fundamentally nonaligned way of doing liberal democratic democracy.