Democracy is an area of study that has belonged to political sociology since its classical authors and raises research questions that are still largely unexplored, both in terms of theoretical elaboration and empirical research. Democracy, its transformations, its crises, its values, its institutions, are the privileged terrain for a socio-political analysis capable of understanding the social and political relations that make up its fabric, especially by studying the visible and invisible dynamics of the conflicts of power and for power that redefine its forms. In its vocation as a science of connections, political sociology repeatedly emphasises that, in studying the relationship between society and politics, one cannot identify politics as an autonomous variable of interpretation, nor, at the same time, diminish the role of politics by focusing on social dynamics alone. Political sociology is not resolved in the mere identification of the social factors that condition the political order, since institutions are themselves social structures, and it is often these that are the independent variables that influence the non-political social structure. Social change and political change thus become the key concepts with which to read the processes of transformation of democracy, in the specificity of a perspective that is not content with describing the forms that have emerged from its crisis, understood as the overcoming of the processes of political representation experienced in liberal democracies. Democracy is a field in constant flux, whose aporias make its study a privileged field for the fundamental questions of social research: how can the individual, society and collective political action be reconciled? How have the structures of inequality changed? What is the relationship between politics and the economy, politics and culture, politics and new forms of religion? What are the forms of social and political relations in advanced modernisation processes? What role does the relationship between society and development, between environment and progress, play in political phenomena? Finally, is democracy still the political project of modernity?

In the process of reconfiguration of global society, whose trajectory coincides with the thirty-year period after 1989, through 9/11, the 2008 crisis, the shock of the Sars-Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we are faced with a scenario in which the capacity of politics, national, supranational and international, is not only weakened in its primacy over the other spheres of society, but also de-synchronised with respect to the ‘facts of society’. The time of democratic politics is slower than the time of social change, just as the space of politics dimensioned at the level of the nation-state is desynchronised with respect to the space of social phenomena. Moreover, we are faced with challenges that place democracy itself in the mirror of its own founding values, not only in the area of choices that affect individual freedom, but also in how it positions itself in the system of international political regulation.

In the public and academic debate, the scenario of the crisis of democracy is recurring more and more often. Post-democracy, defective democracy, post-representative democracy, populist democracy, illiberal democracy: these are the many and varied definitions used to identify the overcoming of the ‘traditional’ paradigm of representative democracy. Similarly, the widespread attempts to conceptualise phenomena that challenge democracies by highlighting a ‘regressive’ profile, as well as the existence of social phenomena that define a ‘cultural backlash’, ‘retrogression’ or ‘retrotopia’, need to be considered in the light of a new political sociology of democracy.

The crisis of legitimacy of traditional political subjects occurs when the balance that holds together the sense of pursuing a common project, the strengthening of the power of the political class, the attainment of ideal or socio-economic interests by citizens/voters, depending on the structure of community action whose influence they seek, breaks down. The perception of a loss of status, the feeling of relative deprivation, the fear of the loss of social guarantees and protection, the perception of a reduction in opportunities for upward social mobility, insecurity as a sense of socio-economic precariousness, the questioning of one’s own life model, create the conditions for a crisis of legitimacy for the institutional actors of democratic representation. However, it is not only a question of identifying anti-establishment and populist challenges to liberal democracy, but also of shedding light on all the pervasive forms of manipulation of power. On the one hand, the processes of depoliticisation that fuel the crisis of legitimacy of democracy need to be analysed in the context of the impact of neoliberalism on advanced democracies, from the TINA (There is No Alternative) paradigm of political regulation in the 1980s to analyses of authoritarian managerialism and forms of technocratic populism (which reverses representation and legitimacy, not just replacing politicians with technicians). On the other hand, political sociology needs to re-thematise the forms of democratic innovation, from the contribution of the reflexive citizen, the paradigms of sub-politics and life-politics, the perspective of participatory and deliberative democracy, to the new forms of mobilisation emerging from the environmental and feminist movements. What opportunities, what risks, what processes of redefining not only the forms of democratic political conflict, but also the regeneration of the democratic project itself, emerge from these processes? What processes of repoliticisation of democracies are possible in societies of advanced modernity?

Finally, political sociology cannot fail to consider that democracies are also actors that operate as states within the complex web of the international political scenario. As such, democracies themselves participate in the dynamics of the exercise and manipulation of power, just as they become the object of analysis in the behaviour they adopt in relation to the political, economic and military conflicts in which they participate.

The conference will therefore focus on areas closely related to the nature, forms, challenges and developments of democracy.

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