Democracy Unmoored

Tuesday, 27 June 2023, online at 6pm Sydney time

Speaker: Professor Samuel Issacharoff

On this occasion, Samuel Issacharoff* will be joining us for a discussion about his recent book, Democracy Unmoored: Populism and the Corruption of Popular Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, 2022).

The 2016 election of Donald Trump focused people’s minds on populism, and most of the attention paid to the subject since has been on the threat it poses to wealthy democracies. In contrast, this book takes a far wider-angle view of the phenomenon, covering countries from across the globe: Brazil, Poland, Argentina, Turkey, India, Hungary, Venezuela, and more.

Just as importantly, the book focuses on populism’s attack on the institutions of governance.

The book has been described as providing a ‘powerful new account of how populist movements are sabotaging political institutions from within and undermining democracies across the globe’. 

The discussion panel for this webinar will be leaders of our research project, Honorary Associate Professor Adam Czarnota and Professor Martin Krygier, of the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and Professor Wojciech Sadurski of the University of Sydney.

The event is free, but registration is essential to gain access to this webinar.

This session is co-hosted by the CEU Democracy Institute and our project, with the Network for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law.

*Samuel Issacharoff is the Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. He is a leading figure in the study of democracy, constitutions, and the courts, the author of Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts, and has written scores of articles on democratic challenges around the world. He served as a senior legal advisor to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and is long experienced as an appellate advocate in American courts. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (read more)