Concepts of democracy in/and crisis in parliamentary debates

Abstract

‘Democracy’ as well as ‘crisis’ are contested concepts with various uses in political debates. The panel focuses on parliament as key arena of political debate and the symbolic centre of democracy with the aim to illuminate the construction of politically contested concepts of democracy and crisis. While the Eurozone crisis drew public attention to economic definitions of crisis and migration crisis evoked demographic understandings, the Covid-19 pandemic as well as climate change stress medical and scientific understandings of the concept. However, the political notions of crisis emerge in controversy and debate. Given the underlying connotations of urgency and threat, crisis discourse as well as times of crises can also bring to the fore (new) conceptions of democracy and demos. We invite papers that focus on conceptual controversies, e.g., on rhetorical strategies for connecting crisis discourse to democratic decline or defence; claims for exclusion and inclusion as an (allegedly) inevitable means to overcome a crisis and avert its (existential) threat. We also invite papers to analyse parliamentary debates, asking for example how MPs conceive of crisis and democracy and/or their interrelatedness; what political or ideological implications their concepts convey; in what ways ideologies and conceptions of democracy shape policy preferences in crisis management or state of emergency situations.

Title	Details
Health crisis of democracy? Debating Covid-19 measures and protest in plenary debates in the Austrian National Council	View Paper Details
Constructions of the people and ‘we’ in phases of rupture and crisis – parliamentary debate and media discourse	View Paper Details
Conceptual disputes during the pandemic crisis: Analysing the Spanish parliamentary debates in the COVID-19 context	View Paper Details
“The European Parliament”: On the politics of naming	View Paper Details
The Catalan crisis: an empirical analysis of the contestation of "democracy" and "Europe" in parliamentary debates (2012 – 2021)	View Paper Details