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III Factors, 25 Populism versus Democratic Governance

Samuel Issacharoff

From: Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?

Edited By: Mark A. Graber, Sanford Levinson, Mark Tushnet

From: Oxford Constitutions (http://oxcon.ouplaw.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2023. All Rights Reserved.date: 20 March 2023

The current populist wave presents an existential challenge to democracy. Populism claims to be the true expositor of the will of the people, enabled where it can through the electoral conquest of government office. An engaged electoral majority claiming its due appears as both the realization of democratic aspirations and its demise. It is a short step from the will of the people to the tyranny of the majority. Undoubtedly, the rise of elected governments is the historic legacy of the period after the fall of the Soviet Union. Using a relatively austere metric of...
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