DEFINITIONS AND METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

The crisis of democracy and the crisis of constitutionalism have been discussed for at least ten years, and the discussion has taken on dramatic tones in the recent epidemiological emergency, adding new profiles and elements to the subject. It is a methodologically complex issue, both from the point of view of definitions and from the perspective of the disciplinary approach, since it is dealt with by different disciplines.

In the last 30 years, reflections on the ‘intermediate’ forms of political systems have been frequent. However, those who spoke of ‘other’ democracies or ‘imperfect’ or ‘uncertain’ democracies in the 1990s and 2000s referred to countries of recent democratisation, and often even in cultural contexts distant from Western ones. Conversely, the most recent debate, which can be dated to the period immediately following the great economic crisis of the first decade of the 2000s (and the explosion of globalisation), goes beyond the ‘culturally different’ systems affecting the same Western hemisphere.

It is not easy to put these categories in order, both because of terminological difficulties and because of the addition of positions with different cultural imprints. I am referring not only to the necessary synergy between different disciplines of social sciences (constitutional law, political science, sociology), but above all to the different cultural approach of European legal doctrine compared, for example, to that of the United States, where the strand of studies on non-liberal constitutionalism is rather dated.

The reference to hybrid, spurious or intermediate political systems is generally used critically by constitutionalists to deny the possibility of a degenerate form of constitutional democracy (be it illiberal democracy or illiberal constitutionalism): the traditional approach of constitutional law or comparative law studies, which is ’ Western-centric‘, generally denies dignity to these conceptual categories. A greater sensitivity to less rigid interpretations can be found in research on non-Western political systems that highlight the peculiar transformations that constitutional models of liberal origin undergo when they are exported or imposed in contexts different from those in which they historically originated.