University of Milan  ·  24–25 June 2026

Project Kick-off
Workshop

Discussions about the crisis of representative democracy have become so frequent and charged that one may wonder whether this set of political institutions was ever truly in good health. Amid declining political trust, rising polarization, increasing oligarchic tendencies, and populist backlash, one institution has come under particularly intense scrutiny: the electoral process itself.

Political theorists have long neglected elections, dismissing them as the minimalist concern of political scientists overly focused on preference aggregation. Yet this is no longer the case.

A growing body of normative scholarship on political parties has shed new light on these critical engines of the electoral process. Elections have also become the focus of a rising number of contributions exploring the ethics of voting and the duties of citizens.

These developments intersect with a well-established literature on democratic representation, the responsibilities of representatives, and the limited role of elections as mechanisms of selection and accountability. This makes it a timely moment for a renewed discussion about whether elections have genuine democratic value and how they should be institutionalized to realize it.

Main Questions to Be Addressed
1
Do elections have democratic value, or are they inherently aristocratic or oligarchic?
2
Can alternative institutional arrangements or decision-making procedures better uphold democratic values of political equality and collective autonomy?
3
Are elections adequate instruments of accountability?
4
Can responsiveness and responsibility be both feasible and desirable in democratic representation? Are they really compatible?
5
What role should political parties play in electoral democracies, and is this role dependent on the existence of elections?
6
How should parties be structured — internally and in relation to each other — to fulfil that role?
7
What forms of political participation should be expected from citizens, and should our institutions reflect those expectations?
8
Are there epistemic or moral requirements that citizens must meet as voters?

Format

The workshop brings together scholars working on political parties, representation, and the ethics of voting, in the hope that our interconnected research agendas will yield fresh perspectives on the challenges confronting representative democracy.

The programme will include three panels with three speakers each, followed by a concluding round table. Each speaker will have 30 minutes for their presentation, and each panel will conclude with a one-hour joint Q&A session.

Venue & Access

The workshop will take place in Milan, at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan. The room location will be announced in the run-up to the workshop.

The workshop will be run in hybrid format, with online participation enabled via Zoom. On-site and online registration procedures as well as the preliminary programme will be announced shortly.

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Structure
3 panels × 3 speakers
30 min presentations · 1 hr Q&A per panel
Concluding round table
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Location
Department of Social and Political Sciences
University of Milan, Italy
Registration: On-site and online registration procedures, along with the preliminary programme, will be announced shortly.