Adjunct Professor in Political Science at CUNY – Brookly & Hunter College, New York NY USA

November 2016 until July 2017

Research project title:
Democracy, Referendum and European Union

In collaboration with Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst

Funded by The Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt in cooperation with the Leibniz Research Group “Transnational Justice”

Professor Hacker-Cordón investigates questions of political philosophy. Trained in law and political science, he has taught at universities in the United States, Latin America and Europe. He believes that philosophical thought, conversation, and long walks are the primary components of a life welllived but his political philosophy counsels policies strongly prioritizing everyone’s most vital interests in water, food and shelter, and protection from physical violence over other political goals.
 

Research abstract: This project investigates the relationship between the idea of the democracy and the popular referendum method of decisionmaking. While the general question of how to conceptualize democracy looms large and is implicated throughout, the focus is on the practical question of how to remedy what is widely referred to as the European Union’s ‚democratic deficit‘. Starting from the observation that referenda have historically been used in the European Union at various national levels to resolve very important indeed fundamentalpolitical questions, the project proposes a role for Europe-wide referenda in which all European citizens participate qua European citizens. The proposed institutional figure is subject to a number of objections, philosophical, legal and politicalpractical all of these should be answerable with some thoroughness and significant clarity, given the intrinsic capacity of democracy’s values to compel and the nature of the argument explored.
 

Publications (selection):
Democracy’s Edges (co-editor and introduced with I. Shapiro). Cambridge University Press, 1999
Democracy’s Value (co-editor and introduced with I. Shapiro). Cambridge University Press, 1999
„An Antitrust Theory of Group Recognition“ (co-author with T.J. Miley). Centro de Investigaciones y Docencia de Trabajo, SDTEP #198 (December 2007)