Rodrigo Kaufmann 'Democracy: An Analytical Framework'

Dr Rodrigo Kaufman is Assistant Professor in Constitutional Law at Tilburg University. Dr Kaufman's presentation addresses the difficulties in understanding democracy. The goal of his paper is to offer an understanding of democracy’s conceptual structure that accounts for its institutional practice – large electoral processes – in what we would consider today’s largest working democratic orders. The argument presented in the paper seeks to provide an explanation of our current institutional practices as they are. The level of the argument, then, is entirely conceptual: it provides an offer regarding how to think about democracy, which can then be deployed when interpreting and dissecting analytically the institutional practices that we associate today with democratic regimes and, above all, electoral processes.