Chapter 10 concludes the book. After summarizing the main arguments and findings, the chapter reflects on the book’s implications for understanding the relationship between popular politics, elites, and institutions in authoritarian regimes. In doing so, the chapter also considers how the theory might apply to other types of authoritarian rule, focusing on its application to military regimes in particular. The chapter concludes by discussing how the theory can contribute to understanding democratic transitions, and by reflecting on the similarities and differences between authoritarian and democratic political systems.

This chapter explores symmetry’s implications for the law of democracy. Symmetry has obvious relevance in this area, given the centrality of election-related disputes to maintaining courts’ political neutrality. At a minimum, symmetric interpretation should encourage the Supreme Court to ensure greater consistency in its emergency orders blocking legal changes before an election. In addition, symmetry may help justify the Court’s controversial decisions leaving both partisan gerrymanders and choices about overall districting procedures to the political process. In combination, if not in isolation, these rulings are symmetric because they avoid constitutionalizing one position or the other on politically charged questions about appropriate criteria for districting. Finally, symmetry should support closer scrutiny of voting rules and procedures with skewed partisan effects, provided that challengers can convincingly establish a meaningful impairment of political competition.

The monist construction of the child-rights identity serves an important purpose of shielding the child from the harmful and abusive social and traditional practices that is part of the everyday life of so many children. However, its downside is that it does not allow children to exercise self-determination in the shaping of their own identity. The power to shape your identity sits at the heart of modern democracy and ideas of inclusion and equality. Complex intersectionality will allow the child to both maintain the protection that comes with its monist construction while also allowing for self-determination that takes the social context of the concrete child into consideration. This together with a deliberate practice of self-critique to challenge false hegemonic consciousness of the image of the child it thinks it serves. This might prepare child rights to serve a forceful and relevant theory for advocates to lean on when we are entering the full effects of the climate crisis, and this will be the most significant stress test of our democratic system we as a world community have experienced to this day.

Europe is living its Weimar moment. The historic task of the European Union (EU) today, the book argues, is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around the shared pursuit of a prosperous future, while rendering “political-economic” questions the main preoccupation of politics. The new imaginary of prosperity today has to be both credible (able to provide answers to contemporary challenges) and appealing (conjuring a world in which people want to live). It has to include not only an alternative macroeconomic framework (a different role for tax, public spending, or welfare provision) but also a different set of microeconomic institutions (a new role for the corporation, technology, industry, finance, and consumption). It is exactly in this latter space that the EU has undertaken the first important steps towards reimagining prosperity. The book analyses several policy fields, showing that the EU has already made significant efforts to foster more caring consumption, circular products and technologies, sustainable industry, and fairer corporate activity. But the EU has to go further and faster – if it intends to respond effectively to the soaring problems, while halting another Europe’s slide into tribalism.

Many Jews coming from various parts of Eastern Europe found refuge in Germany, of all places, in huge “displaced-persons camps.” They made up as many Jews as had lived in the country before the war, only they were younger and unexpectedly active. While few German Jews returned to the “land of the murderers,” the new migrants took their place. This chapter tells the tale of their settlement in Germany, parallel to the building up the Federal Republic, especially under the the US military occupation. They could only observe with unease the signs of antisemitism in the new German state, and support the early acts of restitution as well as the financial agreement with Israel signed in 1952. They were also the first to demand some sort of confrontation with the Nazi past. Fritz Bauer, a Jewish jurist who fled to Denmark and later to Sweden during the war and finally returned to Germany afterwards, took it upon himself, as the Prosecutor of the State of Hessen, to organize and then serve as prosecutor in the so-called Auschwitz trials. The chapter ends with his life-story.

This introductory chapter presents the puzzle of the variation in agrarian elites’ capacity to organize electoral representation across Latin America after the third wave of democratization and discusses the consequences of this variation for redistributive politics. It summarizes the book’s central argument that agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence are explained by two factors: the perception of an existential threat and the level of intragroup fragmentation. Then, it discusses the relevance of that argument for the comparative politics literature, in particular regarding the relationship among economic elites’ representation, democratic consolidation, and redistribution. The chapter also offers background about a series of structural and political transformations that have changed agrarian elites’ sources of power in Latin America over the last six decades and describes my research methods, case selection strategy, and data sources.

Who has the authority to decide on behalf of children the balance between advancing the child rights regime over the legal certainty of real children? This question is put to the test with the Swedish incorporation of the CRC into the national legal system without adhering to normal democratic safeguards; pairing the hierarchy of norms with the corresponding hierarchy of sources when conducing judicial review, or a political question doctrine to maintain the line between the courts and the democratically elected legislator. To incorporate the CRC directly without a process of transference, an international treaty that is as wide in scope and open for interpretation to be directly applicable in concrete cases has caused a persistent condition akin to Agamben’s state of exception, read through Swedish scholar Herbert Tingsten.

This chapter advances theoretical reasons to support symmetric interpretation. First, favoring symmetry accords with the Constitution’s character as a comparatively terse, “framework” document focused on establishing democratic procedures rather than definitive policies. Second, an ethic of symmetric interpretation accords with widely accepted features of judicial role-morality. Finally, symmetric interpretation accords with the framers’ own constitutional aspirations and interpretive methods. Multiple widely accepted theoretical considerations in constitutional law thus support preferring symmetric understandings when possible.

Peru is a multiethnic society whose postcolonial language regime was marked by the dominance of Spanish as the exclusive language of state bureaucracy up until recently. There are now forty-eight different Indigenous languages recognized by the state. The process of language regime transformation in Peru started with state traditions of monolingualism by defect, followed by incremental change in state recognition of Indigenous languages and the subsequent development of Indigenous language rights as manifested in constitutional and legislative norms. The adoption of a multilingual language regime based on linguistic rights for minorities was not the product of the Indigenous movement´s actions, nor those of ethnic parties. Institutional reforms that were not designed, and were not expected, to advance linguistic rights, allowed some actors the framework to accelerate incremental change.

Chapter 2 provides a theoretical framework for the book. I articulate, first, why it is useful to think in terms of social imaginaries, rather than alternative sociological concepts (such as paradigms or ideologies), for analysing social integration in modern societies. I then explore why, in modernity, it was imaginaries of prosperity that provided the most stable foundations for social integration. These imaginaries can bridge, I argue, the plurality of worldviews and identities, while at the same time play into modernity’s strengths, namely democracy and knowledge governance. However, any particular imaginary of prosperity can provide only a temporary foundation, because it will sooner or later produce too many problems and contradictions to continue fulfilling its integrative role. When such problems mount, imaginaries of prosperity become subject to their own dialectics, having to shift eventually between privatised and collective routes to prosperity. If, however, the pressures for change cannot be institutionalised through democratic channels, we have seen in the past – and are seeing again today – that illiberal and undemocratic tribal imaginaries may take hold, making identity (rather than prosperity) the main vector of politics.

Originally established by “we the people,” as its preamble majestically states, the Constitution belongs to us all. But Americans increasingly treat it as the property of one political faction or the other. In keeping with their own preferences, conservatives interpret the Constitution to protect religion, limit gun control, and obstruct administrative governance while allowing state-level regulation of moral questions like abortion. Progressives see a mirror-image constitution that advances social justice, confers broad federal power, and allows flexible administrative regulation while at the same time limiting state and local police authority and guaranteeing sexual and reproductive autonomy. As national politics have grown ever more divided and polarized, preventing either side from implementing its goals through federal legislation, both coalitions have dreamed of capturing the courts and implementing their vision instead through constitutional interpretation. A document that should be a source of unity and shared commitments has become a vehicle for extending political conflict.

This chapter explores how the book’s arguments travel beyond the analyzed cases of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and discusses their broader implications for the field of comparative politics, in particular for the relationship among economic elites’ political representation, democracy, and inequality. It deals with questions such as: under what conditions will landowners respond to existential threats with electoral organization instead of by trying to destabilize democracy? When are candidate-centered strategies a viable substitute for party-building? Do the same factors that shape agrarian elites’ strategic choices explain how other interest groups organize to influence policymaking? First, the chapter tests the scope conditions of the argument by analyzing agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence in a country where democracy is less consolidated: Paraguay during the Lugo administration (2008–2012). Next, it looks at party-building by agrarian elites beyond South America, in a different historical context marked by civil war: post-1979 El Salvador. Finally, the chapter extends the argument beyond agrarian elites, focusing on nonpartisan electoral representation by other interest groups in two contemporary cases: for-profit universities in Peru and conservative religious groups in Colombia.

Democracy is about collective self-rule under conditions that afford everyone political standing and consideration in matters of common concern. But in today’s globalized world, democratic states must respond to a growing number of demands for inclusion from beyond their borders, on issues ranging from migration, to trade, to human rights and the environment. Under these conditions, there is an urgent need for a principled means of determining who is entitled to inclusion, and on what basis. Defenders of the All-Affected Principle claim that inclusions should track the impacts that decisions can have on people’s lives. Defenders of the All-Subjected Principle adopt a similar strategy but use a narrower threshold for inclusion. My argument is that neither principle entirely satisfies. The problem is that both principles are too backwards looking. I offer an alternative formula for democratic inclusion that captures the underlying wrong to which complaints about undemocratic exclusion are seeking to draw our attention. One complaint is about domination: being exposed to the arbitrary and one-sided power of others. Another complaint is about usurpation: having your judgement displaced, without your consent. Using these two complaints as a guide does a much better job explaining when inclusion is justified and the appropriate institutional response.

The All-Affected Principle (AAP) in democratic theory holds that everyone who is affected by a decision has a claim to participate in making that decision. Authors who invoke the principle usually restrict its scope and argue only for enfranchising affected interests within formal political decision-making procedures. In other words, the AAP would expand the demos (e.g. by including people affected by decisions taken in other countries), but need not expand the sites of formal politics to which democratic norms apply. Against these scope restrictions, we argue that the AAP applies to some extra-governmental actors and, in particular, to big philanthropists. We make this argument without endorsing an expansive reading of the AAP as applying to all kinds of decisions, public and private. Rather, we argue that the reasons we have for endorsing the AAP—for thinking that it is wrong for people to be denied influence over exercises of power that affect them—do not pick out formal political decision-making as a uniquely important site of inclusion. We also challenge, on anti-paternalist grounds, the assumption that it is primarily the risk of negative impacts that grounds claims to inclusion.

This chapter investigates (1) whether there is a convincing justification for the All-Affected Principle, (2) whether it is best understood as substantive or procedural principle, and (3) whether it provides a useful way to approach boundary questions. Though the All-Affected Principle is often justified as realizing self-determination in political decision-making, I argue that the AAP does not do so. Instead, the ideal of self-determination, properly understood, supports individual and collective autonomy rights, and institutional arrangements that are at odds with a global democracy of the all-affected.