Scientific Coordinator: Assoc.Prof. Triantafyllia Lina Papadopoulou
Coordination: ΑUTH
co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund- ESF) by the Operational Programme Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning 2014-2020, Project: Supporting Researchers with emphasis on young researchers, Project No: EDULL34,
Duration: 13 June 2018 – 12 September 2019
Researchers : Assistant Prof. George Karavokyris, Dr. Charalampos Kouroundis, Dr. Styliani Christoforidou
The representative democracy constitutes in the era of modernity the basic institutional form through which the principle of popular sovereignty is implemented. The 21th century started with the mass belief that there is no alternative to representative democracy, at least for the western countries. Direct democracy is a chimera considering the complicated institutional issues of contemporary societies and the size of the population, the liberal but not democratic representation of the constitutional monarchies is considered to be historically out of date, while the soviet system has been distorted from Stalin’s era and finally collapsed in 1989. However, the triumphalism for the predominance of parliamentarism over its various enemies has been overtaken during the last decade by the political crisis which most European countries suffer without signs of recovery. The current crisis has opened the debate on the future of democracy in a European level. Our research, without ignoring this interesting and fruitful debate, focused on the one hand on the dialectic between democracy and the principle of representation and on the other hand on the position of the Parliament in a contemporary system of separation of powers. Thus, our research presented at first the development of representative democracy from early parliamentarism until now, focusing especially in the greek case. Subsequently, the crisis of representation in Greece is presented not only as a product of the economic and political crisis, but also as a spotlight which has shown the problems of the constitutional mechanics of representation in the same country. In this framework, the research examined the mechanics of representation in Greece during the current crisis and suggested certain proposals concerning the quality of representation. These, both de constitutione ferenda and de lege ferenda, proposals aim at enhancing the democratic aspect of representation as much as the rule of law one.