This article addresses a neglected class of cases of civic resistance involving the anonymous and covert disruption of institutions and practices. Such cases have become more commonplace in the first decades of the twenty-first century with the rise of "hacktivism," but they sit uneasily within the traditional conceptual and normative framework of civil disobedience the legitimacy of which is premised on the publicity of dissent and on the willingness of dissenters to accept the legal consequences of their actions. To make sense of these new forms of civic resistance, the article introduces the concept of "disruptive disobedience." It elaborates the concept by contrasting it with other forms of civic resistance, and proposes a moral justification for it by presenting it as a corrective to democratic exclusion. Finally, it tests that justification by applying it to a prominent contemporary case involving Aaron Swartz's illegal download of JSTOR research articles.
The authors are presenting and interpreting the data on Croatian citizens' attitudes on regulating hate speech, contentious symbols and public commemoration. The data was collected in two nationwide surveys conducted in 2016 and 2018. The data is analyzed within a normative framework of militant democracy versus anti-democratic tendencies. In the conclusion the authors, invoking the available data, advocate a minimal model of regulating public speech by focusing on public utterances of direct and symbolic hate speech.
The article offers a defense of liberal perfectionism in the light of
criticism of perfectionist politics stated in Jonathan Quong?s book
Liberalism without Perfection. It argues against Quong?s claims that
perfectionism is incompatible with demands of individual autonomy and
non-paternalism as requirements of liberal commitment of treating all persons
as free and equal.
The main goal of this article is to explore the relationship between populism and representative democracy. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, the paper offers a detailed analysis of the three criticisms of populism and the implications these criticisms have on our understanding of representative democracy. First, it addresses the argument that populism inevitably relies on demagogy and it examines the inference this argument has on the concept of political representation in democracy. Second, it discusses the claim that populism relies on the oversimplification of political issues and what this claim reveals about the democratic ideal of the informed and politically responsible voter. The third criticism deals with the anti-pluralist character of populist politics, which, the paper argues, can also be extended to the concept of popular sovereignty itself. In the second part, the article looks more closely at the relationship between populism and representative democracy. Relying on the insights from the first part, it examines different institutional restraints on the will of the majority and how populism redefines these restraints as anti-democratic and elitist barriers to popular will. Finally, the paper questions the prevailing view that sees populism as a phenomenon arising from the tension between liberal and democratic principles within representative democracy and offers an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between populism and democracy.
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