Why and when democracies ban political parties : a classification of democratic state orientations to party bans

BERNATSKYI, Bohdan

doi:10.1057/s41295-024-00381-9

Why and when democracies ban political parties : a classification of democratic state orientations to party bans

dc.contributor.author	BERNATSKYI, Bohdan
dc.date.accessioned	2024-05-06T16:08:04Z
dc.date.available	2024-05-06T16:08:04Z
dc.date.issued	2024
dc.description	Published online: 29 April 2024	en
dc.description.abstract	Defending democracy requires undemocratic steps; one of the most radical is the prohibition of political parties. The functioning of political parties is fundamental to healthy and pluralistic democracies. Thus, their exclusion from the political process raises a severe dilemma for a democratic society, which has to address sufficiently why and when a political competitor can legitimately be kicked out of the political arena. The latter is crucially important because of the rise of far-right parties and attempts by authoritarians to infiltrate the domestic political competition of democratic countries. The approaches of various national courts in cases concerning the prohibition of political parties are far from uniform. Experiences in Spain, Ukraine, the UK and, eventually, Germany demonstrate significant contrasts regarding the political theory and legal rationale for prohibition. While democracy is a universal value for a pan-European context, the courts set different limits of democratic tolerance for guarding it. The paper offers a new paradigm that explains why and when democracies ban political parties. The classification of democratic state orientation to party bans consists of liberal, institutional and militant models, which illustrate different concepts around finding the balance between personal rights on the one hand and the interests of a democratic society on the other.	en
dc.description.sponsorship	This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - Springer Transformative Agreement (2020-2024).	en
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf	en
dc.identifier.citation	Comparative European politics, 2024, OnlineFirst	en
dc.identifier.doi	10.1057/s41295-024-00381-9
dc.identifier.issn	1472-4790
dc.identifier.issn	1740-388X
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76845
dc.language.iso	en	en
dc.orcid.upload	true	*
dc.publisher	Springer	en
dc.relation.ispartof	Comparative European politics	en
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess	en
dc.rights.license	Attribution 4.0 International	*
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/	*
dc.title	Why and when democracies ban political parties : a classification of democratic state orientations to party bans	en
dc.type	Article	en
dspace.entity.type	Publication
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person.identifier.orcid	0000-0002-9682-0454
person.identifier.other	47944
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