Democratic Backsliding and Diversity-Oriented Federal Models

Date: Friday, March 8
Time: 1:30 pm
Location: Arts 106

This event is free and open to the public. 

About this event

This talk explores the new and emerging intersection between scholarship on democratic backsliding and scholarship on federalism. For more than two decades, federalism scholars have argued that it is necessary to “move beyond” the American tradition of federalism and that the US federal model should no longer serve as inspiration for institutional design in deeply diverse polities.  In brief, federalism scholars have pointed to the democratic deficits that result from adopting an institutional model that recognizes only one demos. Strangely enough, as federalism scholars now start to explore ‘troubling trends’ (e.g., democratic backsliding, de-democratization, democratic decline) in federal states the United States and the American tradition appear, once again, to loom large. Just how prominent is the US in this new and emerging scholarship? Are federalism scholars at risk of repeating the mistakes of their predecessors?  Are they, perhaps, misdiagnosing the form and impact of anti-democratic trends in federal states? Is any scholarship ‘moving beyond’ the US model? 

Arjun Tremblay is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Regina. His scholarship focuses on exploring the near and longer-term prospects of the politics of solidarity in and across deeply diverse democracies. He is the author of Diversity in Decline? The Rise of the Political Rights and the Fate of Multiculturalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and co-author with Alain-G. Gagnon of An Advanced Introduction to Federalism (Edward Elgar, forthcoming). He has also co-edited Federalism and National Diversity in the 21^st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Assessing Multiculturalism in Global Comparative Perspective: A New Politics of Diversity for the 21st Century? (Routledge, 2023). He is co-Editor in Chief of the Review of Constitutional Studies and Associate Editor at the Canadian Journal of Political Science.

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