

Constitutional dictatorship is an epic concept. In this article, I use the concept of constitutional dictatorship as a heuristic, as a way of thinking more explicitly about constitutional violence than is customary in comparative constitutional law. En este sentido, se ha recurrido al análisis de archivos, gacetas, periódicos y textos constitucionales para estudiar la historicidad del concepto e identificar los motivos y fines políticos por los cuales este fue implementado, así como los debates que generó en la opinión pública sobre las posibles consecuencias que podrían derivarse de esta práctica. Es por eso que en el presente artículo se establecen los motivos y posibles influencias -tanto sociales como culturales- que llevaron a la élite política del Nuevo Reino de Granada a recurrir a la implementación del concepto de dictadura en el año de 1813, aunque se hará especial énfasis en el discurso político surgido en torno a la figura de Juan del Corral, quien fue nombrado como dictador durante este período convulso en la provincia de Antioquia. The paper considers present-day Russia as a radical case of plebiscitarian politics and traces some of its key developments.Ī inicios del siglo XIX se dieron en los territorios americanos una serie de revoluciones que conllevaron a la independencia de las antiguas colonias y a la creación de nuevas naciones, por lo que surgieron diversas ideas de gobierno y proyectos políticos basados en los ideales conocidos provenientes, en gran medida, del mundo europeo.

In identifying democracy with elections, the minimalist view promotes the electoralization of political regimes and favors the contemporary rise of plebiscitarianism. Additionally, it demonstrates that the plebiscitarian ideas proposed by Max Weber and Carl Schmitt have affected the minimalist definition of democracy espoused by Joseph Schumpeter, and therefore keeps enjoying a wide influence in political science. This paper identifies key principles as well as the main contradictions of plebiscitarian regimes. Plebiscitary democracy produces direct democratic legitimacy for a strong leader while severely reducing the role of the masses under a drastic and rapid extension of suffrage. Combining monarchical power with universal suffrage created the political system of the Second Empire in France, and was later thoroughly theorized in Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic.

This paper reverts to the plebiscitarian theory of democracy to address these issues.
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A theoretical problem for contemporary political science arises how can this proactive recourse to the popular voice coexist with the obvious depoliticization and concentration of personal power? Describing the Russian political regime as intermediary and inferior as opposed to full democracies cannot account for its electoral enthusiasm nor its robustness and endurance. It meets its first critics.Įlectoral procedures, such as elections, voting, or opinion polling, play a pivotal role in the Russian political system. In their Greco-Roman synthesis dictatorship is re-described as `temporary tyranny by consent' and the tyrant as a `permanent dictator.' Dictatorship, a venerated republican magistracy, the ultimate guardian of the Roman constitution, is for the first time radically reinterpreted and explicitly questioned. The two historians placed the two figures alongside one another and found them to be almost identical, blurring any previous empirical, analytical, or normative distinctions. In their histories, the traditional interest in the relationship between the king and the tyrant is displaced by a new curiosity about the tyrant and the dictator. Although the twentieth century is credited for fusing the tyrant and the dictator into one figure/concept, I trace the origins of this conceptual synthesis in a much earlier historical period, that of the later Roman Republic and the early Principate, and in the writings of two Greek historians of Rome, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Appian of Alexandria.

The article examines the inaugural encounter of the Greek theory of tyranny and the Roman institution of dictatorship.
