The Demoptimism Working Paper series aims to ensure that Demoptimism’s audience can get access to cutting-edge analysis of issues related to democratic crisis and democratic resilience worldwide.

THEMES

Running since 2022 as the Constitutional Repair Working Paper series, in January 2026 this series has been renamed the Demoptimism Working Paper Series. It now publishes a wider range of analysis relevant to the five Focus Areas of our digital research platform. These are:

• Democratic Crisis

• Resisting Threats

• Constitutional Repair

• Renewing Participation

• Redesigning Democracy

QUERIES

Informal queries may also be directed to the Demoptimism Director and Editor of the series, Professor Tom Daly: democraticdecay@gmail.com.

Submissions

Submissions can be sent to: democraticdecay@gmail.com

Abstract: In the past seventy-five years of India’s post-colonial constitutional history, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Indian Supreme Court have shared an ambivalent relationship. Owing to the structural allowance for the Speaker to function in a partisan manner, the Court has been approached to intervene in several matters involving the Speaker’s actions. Studying the Court’s decisions in cases pertaining to the Speaker’s certification of bills as money bills and their actions or inactions on disqualification petitions filed under the anti-defection law, I argue that the Court has increasingly expanded its review powers while formally recognising the principle of legislative privileges and autonomy of the Speaker as the chair of a coequal branch of government. To support such an expansion of its review power, the Court has resorted to abstract constitutional values like accountability and democracy. However, the structural reasons supporting, and perhaps even encouraging, the partisan functioning of the Speaker continue to persist. While acknowledging the limitations of the Court in either sponsoring or supporting a conversation about structural design changes to the Speaker’s office, I argue that enhanced intervention of the Court by way of post-facto review not only fails to discourage partisan performance by the Speakers but, more critically, also contributes to the politicisation of the Court.

Abstract: Democratic crisis worldwide has prompted a raft of innovative theorisation about achieving democratic resilience through constitutional design. However, the dominant focus on formal constitutional amendment and counter-majoritarian control has limited capacity to enhance short-term or medium-term resilience in many democracies under threat worldwide. This paper therefore elaborates a broader functionalist ‘new wave’ constitutional design theory embracing sub-constitutional reform and urging greater normative and practical attention to democratic context, temporality, institutional plasticity, and ‘synergy’; concentrating horizontally on mutually reinforcing institutions and vertically on empowering grassroots actors. The theory is elaborated by critically analysing two dimensions of the evolving landscape: (i) redesign – exploring novel ideas for wholesale reform of constitutions and state institutions; and (ii) repair – drawing design insights from states faced with repairing institutional damage caused during a period of crisis.

Abstract: How can Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) be redesigned to enhance democratic resilience while remaining within constitut-ional bounds? Centring on Brazil and engaging comparative scholarship, this article argues that the STF’s role has been ambivalent: both indispensable to defending liberal democracy and, through distinct mechanisms, a contributor to constitut-ional degradation. It contends that the Court’s responses to Bolsonaro’s illiberal government were shaped by institutional architecture interacting with political dynamics and judges’ preferences. On this basis, it advances a constitutional redesign agenda to: (i) disincentivize court capture; (ii) reduce judicial politicization; and (iii) strengthen the STF’s institutional legitimacy. Given the attention the 2025 decision holding former president Jair Bolsonaro legally accountable for an attempted coup will attract, the aim is to guard against idealization and to offer a framework to inform constitutional design debates in Brazil and beyond.

Abstract: This article explores constitutional court (CC) resilience in a comparative perspective, across nine national jurisdictions and some transnational judiciaries, to help identify sources and approaches enhancing CC capacity to resist autocratization. It attempts to interpret the individual contributions to the special issue, pointing to a set of factors impacting CC resilience. Some articles highlight the essential role of structural conditions, while others rather emphasize the importance of institutional development and agency. The article then outlines avenues for further research of CC resilience, which should engage with new challenges, including renewing democracy through deliberation and trust-building.

Abstract: This is the edited transcript of a keynote speech delivered by Demoptimism Director Tom Daly at the first International Conference on Law and Politics on the theme ‘Democracy, Justice and Constitutionalism’ held in Maceió, Brazil, on 5-6 August 2025. Footnotes have been added to identify key sources. In this speech I examine the state of democracy in Brazil by comparing its democratic crisis to the three other biggest democracies in the world—the USA, India, and Indonesia. I then analyse what short-term repair of Brazil’s institutions might involve, focusing on the judiciary and the response to former president Bolsonaro’s attempted self-coup of 2023. Finally, I reflect on the challenge of enhancing the resilience of Brazil’s democratic system in the medium-term and the long-term.

Abstract: We are increasingly confronted by a pressing question: how can a constitutional democracy be repaired after being deeply degraded, but not ended, during a period of anti-democratic government? This study contemplates the transnational craft of constitutional repair and elaborates a novel syncretic theory of repair. Integrating diverse theoretical frameworks and comparative case-study analysis, the paper pursues four normative arguments: (i) assessing ‘constitutional damage’ requires a methodological design alive to conceptual clarity, disciplinary and perspectival limits, context, and core damage; (ii) ‘constitutional repair’ is best understood as a distinct paradigm of constitutional transition separate from both major constitutional change in stable democracies and democratic transitions from authoritarianism; (iii) reparative measures departing from rule-of-law norms can be deemed legitimate subject to both context and conditions; and (iv) constitutional scholars should approach onerous and risky processes of formal constitutional change with extreme caution if sub-constitutional fixes are sufficient to achieve initial repair.

Abstract: US debates on reforming the Supreme Court, including controversial arguments to break the norm against court-packing to repair the democratic system, have generally focused on historical precedents and the domestic system, with scant comparative analysis. However, the US debate raises fundamental questions for comparative constitutional lawyers regarding the paradoxes of democratic restoration in contexts of democratic decay, framed here as a distinct category of constitutional transition. This study argues that sharpening our analytical tools for understanding such reforms requires a novel comparative and theoretical approach valorising the experiences of Global South states and drawing on, and connecting, insights across four overlapping research fields: democratic decay, democratisation, constitution-building, and transitional justice. The paper accordingly pursues comparative analysis of the legitimacy of court-packing through case-studies of Turkey and Argentina to offer a five-dimensional analytical framework: (i) democratic context; (ii) articulated reform purpose; (iii) reform options; (iv) reform process; and (v) repetition risk. In doing so, the paper seeks not to present a rigid check-list for evaluating the legitimacy of contested reforms, but rather, to foreground important dimensions of reforms aimed at reversing democratic decay as an emergent global challenge for public law meriting closer attention.