Bruno Leipold Postdoctoral Fellow Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: October 2017–September 2018 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »Constitutionalizing Popular Democracy« Project outline: This research project explores and defends constitutional alternatives to liberal democracy, which realise genuine popular control and widespread political participation. There has been increasing interest from constitutional and political theorists in exploring these alternatives. This has been motivated by the mounting empirical evidence, gathered by political scientists and political economists, of the elite capture of the democratic process. Examples of the kind of institutional alternatives that have so far been explored include the selection of public officials by lottery rather than by election, trials of public officials by citizens, and public bodies that explicitly exclude richer citizens from membership.
My proposed research expands upon this body of literature by exploring a constitutional idea that is traditionally associated with popular democracy but has been neglected in contemporary discussions: the idea of imperative mandates. This is where representatives are legally bound to follow the instructions of their constituents. They are currently banned in the constitutions of many liberal representative democracies, which instead enshrine the idea of free mandates, where representatives exercise their own legislative judgement. My research project aims to both uncover the neglected constitutional history of imperative mandates and show why they are a promising constitutional mechanism to combat elite capture in modern democracies.
(Bruno Leipold) Funding of the stay: »Justitia Amplificata. Rethinking Justice − Applied and Global«Scholarly profile of Bruno LeipoldBruno Leipold received his PhD from the University of Oxford with a dissertation entitled »Citizen Marx: The Relationship between Karl Marx and Republicanism«. From September 2018 he will be a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence.Website: Please find more information about Bruno Leipold here. Main areas of research: Karl Marx; theories of popular democracy; the republican political tradition; nineteenth-century social and political thought.Selected publications:
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