Democracy and the Spectacle of Consent
Year: 2022

As the global instability caused by climate change places heightened stress on democratic societies, there is the danger that autocracies, exploiting the spectacle of consent as an effective substitute for electoral democracy, will continue to proliferate. More than seventy-five years after the founding of the United Nations, authoritarian regimes and parties leveraging the spectacle of consent remain a serious threat to the practice of electoral democracy in every part of the world, in spite of