Democracy 2020: E-Book, Webinar Recordings, and Conference Report

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The Virtual Global Roundtable ‘Democracy 2020: Assessing Constitutional Decay, Breakdown and Renewal Worldwide’ was a truly global event held on 18-26 November, featuring 58 speakers from 5 continents across 9 webinars, and an audience of almost 600 from 54 countries. This announcement post provides some reflections based on the global conversation fostered by the event, a short conference report, and launches two central outputs from the event. 

Launching the Conference e-book and Webinar Recordings

We are delighted to announce the launch of two central outputs today, 17 December:

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  • The conference e-book, gathering all speakers’ contributions, and issued on 17 December 2020: access here. 

Over 250 pages in length, and including a full table of contents and index, this is an excellent collection for anyone seeking to understand the state of democracy worldwide right now. It is divided into 4 parts: (i) global challenges; (ii) regional overviews; (iii) country spotlights; and (iv) renewal. 

  • The webinar recordings, providing access to the full 2.5-hour discussion at each session, including speaker presentations and open discussion: access here. 

All recordings have been lightly edited and we have begun uploading them today. In some cases, a speaker has been unable to provide permission to appear in the recording (one speaker in each of Webinars 3 and 6), and the recording has been edited accordingly.

Reflections on the Roundtable

For anyone interested in the health and trajectory of constitutional democracy worldwide, the conference e-book (and other outputs, such as recordings and speaker interviews) are a treasure trove. Taking the collection as a whole, one gets a sense of how the field as a whole is developing. 

On the side of democratic decay and constitutional breakdown, we do see familiar themes from existing literature, such as executive aggrandizement and abusive constitutionalism. We see attacks on courts, media freedom, and civil society – the institutions that ensure power is held to account and is not concentrated in one government, party, or ruler’s hands. We see debates about the legitimacy and capacity of domestic organs to act as a bulwark against anti-democratic governments, as well as international intervention. However, this collection provides greater nuance, detail, and fresh case-studies to sharpen our understanding of these processes, including understudied countries (e.g. Bangladesh, Ecuador, Malaysia, and Malta) and regions (e.g. overview of Arab states). 

We also get a sense of clear shifts, such an increasing focus on the inner workings of parliament (e.g. abuse of procedure, the Speaker’s role, the values of bicameralism), the importance of political parties (including party discipline, dominant parties, and the importance of the opposition), and electoral processes; how they are manipulated, how they can be shored up, and how they can become part of the solution to democracy’s ills. The view of already-central organs in constitutional thought, such as courts, is also shifting: authors chart how they can help to act as useful ‘decelerators’ in the face of rash constitutional action (e.g. in the UK), and can be unexpectedly assertive (e.g. in Ecuador), but also have clear limits – and, when captured or fully cowed (e.g. in Hungary or Sri Lanka), hold out little hope. Perhaps most striking is the view, in multiple contributions, of the Supreme Court of India as having simply capitulated to the Modi regime; its legitimacy and standing appear to have collapsed, at least among scholars. Additional issues include the relationship between anti-democratic trends and religion, especially the use of law to favour a majority religion, and how courts have been complicit in these trends in France, the US, and India. 

We also see a greater focus on issues that have not been foregrounded, or at least fully teased out, in the constitutional literature to date, and which affect every democracy worldwide, including: the relationship between algorithmic governance, public and private power; between automation, inequality and democracy (addressed in the Australian context); and between corruption and viable democratic rule. The latter issue crops up as such a central issue from country to country, and as a threat for entire political projects (e.g. the European Union) that it merits a roundtable of its own. 

The impact of COVID-19 also looms large, as would be expected. This come through not only in country case-studies, assessing rights protection, the (ab)use of emergency powers, executive dominance, constitution-making (both positive and abusive) from Chile to Poland to Sri Lanka – with many states seeing acceleration of authoritarian trends due to the pandemic. It also comes through in the big questions and big solutions contemplated: will the pandemic ultimately weaken populism? Should states provide full training and job guarantees to mitigate the effects of automation? Should political advertising be regulated more strongly? The latter speak to perhaps a changing view of the state’s role in actively addressing root causes of democratic decline and crisis (albeit only applicable where the state remains in the hands of democrats).

The collection, and discussions at the Roundtable itself, raise important questions to grapple with as a global research agenda including: How can constitutionalists better understand the nature of power beyond public power (whether tech giants like Apple or Facebook, the military, or political dynasties) and how to subject it to limits? How can we better address the impacts of inequality and technology on the viability of constitutional democracy, even when no anti-democratic government is in place? What lessons can the Global North learn from the Global South, rather than vice versa (e.g. in addressing electoral integrity, public participation)? How can we best understand non-linear patterns of democratic development featuring contradictory features of progress and backsliding? (particularly obvious in chapters on Latvia and Lithuania, Malta, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, and Slovakia). 

Most importantly, the Roundtable provided many causes for hope. Webinar 9, of course, focused on democratic resilience and renewal most squarely – including ‘toolkits’ for pushback against anti-democratic governments and the untapped potential of existing institutions (especially the Barangay Assembly in the Philippines). But hope could be found throughout the Roundtable, whether the appetite for addressing the big challenges facing democracy, the possibility of addressing discrete but fundamental issues like voter suppression, shifting to a broader view of where pushback and resilience might be found (e.g. the importance of civil society and opposition parties) and younger demographics. 

It was only in Webinar 7 that Menaka Guruswamy had the great idea to ask the speakers “what gives you hope?”: We wish we had done this at the end of each webinar, but that remains the animating force behind this global conversation. To anatomise serious challenges but to focus on what solutions are available, and to feed resolve rather than fatalism. If there are two overarching lessons from the Roundtable, first is that constitutional democracy contains the seeds of its own recovery; and second is that constitutionalists worldwide are vital to this process – and we now have a greater capacity, due to the pandemic, to connect and share our knowledge in a truly global way. 

Our sincere thanks to everyone who has contributed to the stunning success of this event. We welcome queries about the event at iacldemocracy2020@gmail.com. 

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Conference Report

9 webinars took place on 18, 19, 24, 25, 26 November 2020. Each webinar was 2.5 hours long.

58 speakers from 5 continents presented across 5 days: The event’s aim was to bring together a group of leading and emerging experts, to engage in a global ‘stock-taking’ exercise, aiming to map the health and trajectory of key democracies world-wide, pin-point gaps in analysis, and divine what broader lessons may be learned from multiple contexts and experiences.

Inter-related webinars: Due to the pandemic, what was initially envisaged as a 2-day event was re-imagined as a series of 9 inter-connected webinars across 2 weeks, devoted to an array of themes:

Webinar 1 - Global Challenges: Threats & Resilience – 18 November

Webinar 2 - Global Challenges: The Big Picture – 18 November

Webinar 3 - Americas: Constitutional Decay, Breakdown & Resilience – 19 November

Webinar 4 - Middle East & Africa: Constitutionalism, Corruption & Courts – 19 November

Webinar 5 - Asia: Non-Linear Constitutional Pathways – 24 November

Webinar 6 - Europe: Constitutional Impatience & Uncertainty – 24 November

Webinar 7 - Asia: Spotlight on India & Sri Lanka – 25 November

Webinar 8 - Europe: Spotlight on Hungary & Poland – 25 November

Webinar 9 - Saving Constitutional Democracy: Remedies & Renewal – 26 November

Over 30 countries represented: The Roundtable featured speakers from, and analysis of, at least 30 countries and territories: Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, France, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malawi, Malta, Nepal, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Palestine, Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey, UK, USA and Zimbabwe.

Multimedia model & outputs: The Roundtable was organised as an innovative multimedia event, with a variety of outputs and activities beyond the webinars themselves, published before, during, and after the event. These include: 

574 registered participants from 54 countries and territories: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Norway, Palestine, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Turkey, United Arab Emirates (UAE), United Kingdom, United States of America.

Diversity: Although the event was organised on the basis of a call for papers, every effort was made to ensure a diverse and inclusive event:

  • 25 of 58 speakers (43%) and 4 of 8 chairs were female.

  • 5 of 9 webinars had gender parity (1, 6 and 9) or female-majority (3 and 8).

  • 17 of 58 speakers (29%) were early career scholars (i.e. doctoral or post-doctoral researchers). Early career scholars were included as equal speakers within each webinar.

  • The IACL’s bilingual nature as an organisation was reflected in French-language versions of website information and program, and simultaneous interpretation at webinars featuring French speakers.