Democrazia rappresentativa e populismo: riflessioni sull’esperienza italiana nell’ottica comparatistica. Una "democrazia assediata" che muove verso la ‘democrazia illiberale’?

Political representation and popular sovereignty are the two main theoretical themes that help the constitutionalist to qualify the institu-tional/constitutional manifestations of modern liberal democracy. The latter finds its historical origins in the French revolutionary events of discontinuity with the absolute state and its development in the forms of social and participatory democracy of the post-war constitutionalism. The analysis of the Italian constitutional model is at the heart of the paper. This model proposed a highly innovative due to the enhance-ment of popular sovereignty and the political forms of its exercise as they focus on the central role played by the provision of the participa-tion of political parties in determining national politics. In particular, the paper analyzes the Italian constitutional model to grasp its evolu-tion in the context of internal democratic life and concerning the con-crete conditioning of public institutions carried out by them. In this perspective, the article raises two questions. On the one hand, it asks whether a democracy without parties is possible in the context of the transformation and crisis of parties. On the other hand, in a compara-tive analysis perspective open to countries of pluralist democracy on both sides of the ocean, it questions whether the interventions on the institutions of constitutional democracy ‒ even of a manipulative type ‒ do not disclose worrying scenarios of a 'besieged democracy' that still conforms to the experiences of illiberal democracy.

Silvio Gambino, Democrazia rappresentativa e populismo: riflessioni sull’esperienza italiana nell’ottica comparatistica. Una "democrazia assediata" che muove verso la ‘democrazia illiberale’? in "CITTADINANZA EUROPEA (LA)" 2/2020, pp 5-32, DOI: 10.3280/CEU2020-002001