Thursday seminar: Sofia Serra-Silva + Oscar Mazzoleni

Book launch: Open Parliaments: The Reality of Public Engagement in European Democracies

by Sofia Serra-Silva
Democratic institutions are under strain. The bond between citizens and political institutions has significantly frayed, and parliaments, long positioned as the institutional heart of representative democracy, find themselves at the center of this legitimacy crisis. This book asks whether they can be part of the solution. Can parliaments deliver on their commitments to openness and public engagement? Do their efforts live up to their promises, or do they amount to symbolic transformation without structural change?

Open Parliaments makes no prior assumption that they can. Instead, it asks how, where, when, and to what extent parliaments deliver on their promise to open up, and who can access and participate in these newly opened spaces. To answer these questions, the analysis draws on a comparative study of twenty-one European parliaments and two in-depth case studies, Austria and France, where novel institutional engagement practices have been embedded in parliamentary life.

This book reveals empirically how legislative institutions have achieved only a narrow openness: doors technically unlocked but never truly open, information formally disclosed, participation nominally possible. Yet this openness proves neither accessible nor inclusive. Content remains difficult to read and navigate for ordinary citizens, participatory instruments are not designed nor equipped to make participation consequential, and engagement consistently skews toward those already proximate to power. Caught between the temptations of engagement myopia and magical thinking, parliaments offer citizens a performance of openness rather than its substance.

Bio

Sofia Serra-Silva is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Comparative Politics (2020), and her research examines how political institutions and citizens engage within the contemporary globalized digital landscape. Her work has been published in leading journals including Party Politics, Policy & Internet, Parliamentary Affairs, Journal of Legislative Studies, South European Society and Politics, European Politics & Society, and Mediterranean Politics, among other outlets. She is currently Principal Investigator (PI) of the FCT-funded project Bridging the Gap: A New Approach to Understanding Citizen Attitudes and Perceptions Towards the Portuguese Parliament (ref. 2023.12063.PEX).

Democratic weaponizing: the challenge of the contemporary radical right

by Oscar Mazzoleni

For most of the twentieth century, the enemies of democracy were easy to recognize: fascist and authoritarian movements openly sought to abolish parliaments, elections and individual rights. The radical right of the twenty-first century doesn’t reject democracy. It weaponizes it. As scholars have pointed out, it turns democratic institutions, procedures and core concepts (tolerance, equality, solidarity, freedom and democracy itself) against the pluralist and universalist substance they were meant to protect. The words stay the same, but their content is replaced. So far, though, this literature has judged the radical right almost entirely against participatory or procedural-liberal ideas of democracy, asking whether it is a corrective or a threat. This lecture argues that this framing is important but misses the socio-economic component. Research shows that a significant part of the European and American public defines democracy as including material security and social rights (e.g. Davis, Gaddie and Goidel 2022). Taking this public view seriously means that labor-market protection, welfare chauvinism and immigration aren’t just policy issues. They’re contested parts of what democracy is represented, and this is where actors of radical right achieve better support.

Bio

Oscar Mazzoleni is a professor in political science at the University of Lausanne. His current interests are devoted on political parties, populism, nationalism, regionalism, electoral studies, and Swiss politics in comparative perspective. His last book is “The radical right and demographic populism” (ed. with K. Koxha), Manchester University Press, 2026.