Rethinking democracy through constitutional adjudication across spaces, methods and identities.
This paper helps understand how the phenomenon of constitutional adjudication can facilitate beyond-disciplinary thinking about democracy. Constitutional courts have conventionally been discussed in legal scholarship as countermajoritarian institutions limiting democracy, the latter understood in a sheer majoritarian manner with (free and fair) elections as not only a necessary, but also sufficient institution for democracy’s realization. Mainstream political science scholarship questioned the countermajoritarian character of constitutional courts but largely aligned with outputs from legal studies on the minimalist conception of democracy. The conception of democracy in globally visible fora began to be pluralized only in the 1990s and early 2000s. Empirical evidence collected mainly by socio-legal scholars and qualitative political scientists unsettled oversimplified associations between majority rule and constitutional review. Nevertheless, disciplinary gaps persist. Using selected data from a pilot coding exercise of scholarly resources on constitutional adjudication and democracy amidst the global concerns of deterioration of the latter since 2010, this paper shows how, when alternative readings of the purpose and practice of constitutional adjudication are accounted for, greater plurality of conceptions of democracy comes to the fore. Ultimately, these findings bear lessons for the spaces, methods and identities of knowledge generation and show the value of studying constitutional adjudication beyond disciplinary confines.