Susan Rose-Ackerman joins the podcast to discuss her new book Democracy and Executive Power: Policymaking Accountability in the US, the UK, Germany, and France. Susan is the Henry R. Luce Professor Emeritus of Law and Political Science at Yale University. Many of these things that you and I are talking about are simply initiatives put... Continue Reading →
Executive Power in Democracies Democratic theory rarely reflects on executive power or the administrative state. Deliberative theory, for example, emphasizes the legislative process where representatives have an opportunity to discuss and deliberate among each other. Of course, few people expect the civil service to deliberate before every email, phone call, or decision. It’s just not... Continue Reading →
Tom Ginsburg is a professor of international law and political science at the University of Chicago. He is the coauthor of How to Save a Constitutional Democracy with Aziz Huq and the author of Democracies and International Law. At the end of the day, I am optimistic despite all the evidence. First of all, I think... Continue Reading →
International Law and Democracies International is a riddle for the political theorist. It exists despite the absence of any formal state or government. So, not only is there no international body to enforce its edicts, but it lacks any formal institution to promulgate its laws. It bypasses the notion of sovereignty traditional democratic theory depended... Continue Reading →
Robert Meister is the author of the new book Justice is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the Twenty-First Century and a Professor of Social and Political Thought in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. So, now I've developed a way of talking about revolution as an... Continue Reading →
Justice is an Option Rarely do I read a book that leads me to think differently about economics, but Robert Meister’s effort to quantify the price of historical justice has done exactly that. His latest book, Justice is an Option, builds on the debates surrounding distributive justice. It builds on the work of John Rawls,... Continue Reading →
Donald Horowitz joins the podcast to discuss the formation of constitutions in democracies. Donald is the James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science Emeritus at Duke University. His most recent book is Constitutional Processes and Democratic Commitment. The most beautiful thing that happened in Indonesia, by the way, which was a polarized society along... Continue Reading →
Constitutions In October 2020 Chileans made the monumental decision to rewrite their constitution. Many view this as a democratizing event despite the fact that Chile democratized in 1990 with the negotiated transition from the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Nevertheless, the transition to democracy was widely considered as incomplete at the time, because the Pinochet... Continue Reading →
Rana Siu Inboden joins the podcast to discuss China's participation in the international human rights regime. Rana is a senior fellow with the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas–Austin. Her new book is China and the International Human Rights Regime: 1982-2017. Chinese participation in the human rights regime... Continue Reading →
Timothy Frye joins the podcast to discuss Russia's personalist autocracy. Tim is a Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University and a research director at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. His new book is Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia. Putin in the past could claim to have won... Continue Reading →
