The Constitutional Law and Politics Working Group will host a paper presentation featuring Lidia Bonifati (University of Bologna).
The paper explores federal dynamics in light of the process of democratic backsliding occurring in European constitutional democracies. Legal scholarship has long questioned the relationship between federalism and democracy, and in the last decade, several constitutional scholars have highlighted the crises of constitutionalism, pointing to a progressive erosion of democratic principles, norms, and institutions.
However, the role of courts has remained only marginal in the studies on federal dynamics in times of crises. Among the manifestations of crises, this research focuses specifically on the process of democratic backsliding in the European Union, exploring the impact of national constitutional courts on federal dynamics (i.e., dis/integration, a/symmetrisation, and de/centralisation). In other words, the goal of the paper is to assess whether domestic constitutional courts tend to expand or contract federal dynamics in addressing democratic backsliding. Specifically, the research intends to test the hypothesis according to which constitutional/supreme courts tend to expand federal dynamics as a reaction to democratic backsliding. This means that, in times of crises, domestic courts are more likely to favour strong cohesive systems with a reduced space for subnational autonomy, thus strengthening integration, symmetrisation, and centralisation. To do so, the article analyses federal dynamics on the basis of the indicators of subnational autonomy and cohesion developed by Popelier. These indicators are applied to four case studies: Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
The cases allow an in-depth study of four European constitutional systems having different models of territorial organisation (federal, regional, devolutionary) and are characterised by different degrees of constitutional asymmetry, deriving from a pervasive internal ethnocultural diversity, at the central level (Belgium) and/or substate level (Italy, Spain, the UK).
Furthermore, the selected cases represent different stages in the process of European integration, from the origins of the European project (Italy and Belgium) to the intermediate enlargement (Spain) and the first case of withdrawal from the EU (the UK).
Overall, the paper integrates doctrinal analysis, on which it builds the theoretical and methodological framework on federal dynamics and democratic backsliding, with case-law analysis, to better grasp the role of constitutional courts and assess whether these tend to contract or expand federal dynamics.
All interested fellows, PhD researchers, professors and visiting academics are invited to participate.
The Zoom link will be shared with participants upon registration.
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