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After a recent spate of terrorist attacks in European and American cities, liberal democracies are reintroducing emergency securitarian measures (ESMs) that curtail rights and/or expand police powers. Political theorists who study ESMs are familiar with how such measures become instruments of discrimination and abuse, but the fundamental conflict ESMs pose for not just civil liberty but also democratic equality still remains insufficiently explored. Such phenomena are usually explained as a function of public panic or fear-mongering in times of crisis, but I show that the tension between security and equality is in fact much deeper and more general. It follows a different logic than the more familiar tension between security and liberty, and it concerns not just the rule of law in protecting liberty but also the role of law in integrating new or previously subjected groups into a democratic community. As liberal-democratic societies become increasingly diverse and multicultural in the present era of mass immigration and global interconnectedness, this tension between security and equality is likely to become more pronounced.
Combining insights from the history of citizenship with contemporary legal analysis, this article both highlights and problematizes what we may call sorting strategies – restrictive closure and selective openness – which rely on ‘varieties of affluence’ (income, wealth, equity, credit, and the like) in shaping possibilities for entry, settlement, and naturalization. By emphasizing the growing significance of income barriers and thresholds on the one hand, and fast-tracked investment-based entryways on the other, this article investigates the role of wealth as both accelerator and barrier to citizenship, contributing to the varied toolbox used by governments to advance goals that may at times appear contradictory; these tools both tighten and relax the requirements of access to membership at the same time. These new developments represent different facets of the same trend. Without explicitly stating as much, programs that turn wealth into a core criterion for admission conceptually reignite an older, exclusive, and exclusionary vision according to which individuals must hold property (in land, resources, or in relation to one’s ‘dependents,’ including women, slaves, and children) in order to qualify as a citizen. While such a trajectory is no stranT8ger to ancient models, it raises profound challenges to modernist accounts of political membership that place equality at their core.
Within the last decades, western democracies have experienced a rise of inequality, with the gap between lower and upper class citizens steadily increasing and a widespread sentiment of growing inequalities also in the political sphere. Against this background, and in the context of the current “crisis of democracy”, democratic innovations such as direct democratic instruments are discussed as a very popular means to bring citizens back in. However, research on direct democracy has produced rather inconsistent results with regard to the question of which effects referenda and initiatives have on equality. Studies in this field are often limited to single countries and certain aspects of equality. Moreover, most existing studies look at the mere availability of direct democratic instruments instead of actual bills that are put to a vote. This paper aims to take a first step to fill these gaps by giving an explorative overview of the outputs of direct democratic bills on multiple equality dimensions, analyzing all national referenda and initiatives in European democracies between 1990 and 2015. How many pro- and contra-equality bills have been put to a vote, how many of those succeeded at the ballot, and are there differences between country groups? Our findings show that a majority of direct democratic bills was not related to equality at all. Regarding the successful bills, we detect some regional differences along with the general tendency that there are more pro- than contra-equality bills. Our paper sheds new light on the question if direct democracy can serve as an appropriate means to complement representative democracy and to shape democratic institutions in the future. The potential of direct democracy in fostering or impeding equality should be an important criterion for the assessment of claims to extend decision-making by citizens.
Despite the popularity of direct democracy in recent decades, research on the actual output effects of popular decision-making is rare. This is especially true with regard to equality, where there are at least three major research gaps: 1) a lack of cross-national analyses; 2) insufficient investigation of the differential effects of different direct democratic instruments on equality; and 3) a failure to distinguish between different aspects of equality, i.e., socioeconomic, legal and political equality. This article takes a first step to tackle these shortcomings by looking at all national referenda in European democracies between 1990 and 2015, differentiating between mandatory, bottom-up and top-down referenda. We find that a large majority of successful direct democratic bills—regardless of which instrument is employed—are not related to equality issues. Of the remaining ones, there are generally more successful pro-equality bills than contra-equality ones, but the differences are rather marginal. Mandatory referenda tend to produce pro-equality outputs, but no clear patterns emerge for bottom-up and top-down referenda. Our results offer interesting, preliminary insights to the current debate on direct democracy, pointing to the conclusion that popular decision-making via any type of direct democratic instrument is neither curse nor blessing with regard to equality. Instead, it is necessary to look at other factors such as context conditions or possible indirect effects in order to get a clearer picture of the impacts of direct democracy on equality.
This paper seeks to analyse the debate on equality between women and men found in the claims against the subjects related to Education for Citizenship. These claims were resolved in the Spanish Supreme Court and High Courts of the Autonomous Communities. In this debate, there is a strong rejection of antidiscrimination law assumptions, namely that the different roles and social roles of women and men have a cultural and social base and it is unnatural, as evidenced by the concept of gender. But many appellants and judgments defend the difference between women and men as if it was informed and legitimated on human nature. Hence gender is considered an ideology, that is, a category of analysis by means of which the reality of true human nature can be concealed or distorted. But these arguments are opposed to recent legal reforms since they are questioning its normative value, by prioritizing certain moral principles against these laws. We are talking about the Organic Law for Effective Equality between Women and Men, the Law on Integrated Protection Measures against Gender Violence and the Law on Education. However their arguments are not fully justified.