This webinar is jointly hosted by the CEU Democracy Institute and the ARC Discovery Grant research project, Constitutional Populism: Friend or Foe of Constitutional Democracy?, with the Network for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law at University of New South Wales, Sydney.
András Sajó (CEU Democracy Institute / Department of Legal Studies) will join Honorary Associate Professor Adam Czarnota, Professor Martin Krygier, and Professor Rosalind Dixon (all of the University of New South Wales, Sydney) for a discussion about his recent book, Ruling By Cheating: Governance in Illiberal Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2021). The book centers on analyzing the constitutional system of illiberal democracies and illiberal phenomena in ‘mature democracies’ that are justified in the name of ‘the will of the people’, to explain that this drift to mild despotism is not authoritarianism, but an abuse of constitutionalism.
Illiberal governments claim that they are as democratic and constitutional as any other. They also claim that they are more popular and therefore more genuine because their rule is based on conservative, plebeian and ‘patriotic’ constitutional and rule of law values rather than the values that liberals espouse. However, this book shows that these claims are deeply deceptive – an abuse of constitutionalism and the rule of law, not a different conception of these ideas.
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