La degenerazione delle democrazie contemporanee e il pluralismo semantico dei termini “democrazia” e costituzionalismo”

The degeneration of contemporary democracies and the semantic pluralism of the terms “democracy” and “constitutionalism”

Abstract

The degeneration of contemporary democracies has attracted the attention of constitutional law scholars in recent years. The leading categorizations include illiberal democracies, authoritarian constitutionalism and populist constitutionalism. The paper tries to reconstruct the current debate confronting it with the theory of democratization, which was widespread in the 1990’ and 2000’ years. The author considers the current literature on the topic to be a specular paradigm towards the previous transitology pattern but proposes a strict understanding of the new pattern.

Keywords: Constitutional Regression; Illiberal Democracies; Authoritarian Constitutionalism; Populist Constitutionalism; Transition to Democracy.