Constitutional Democracy in India and the EU: Framing the inquiry

This paper introduces and frames the project on constitutional democracy in India and the European Union. The project is the first to compare the structures and challenges of democratic constitutionalism in India and the EU in a systematic way, pursuing three larger aims: to start a comparative conversation about Indian and European structures of constitutionalism and open up a new field of comparative studies more generally; to showcase a different kind of comparative approach that we call ‘slow comparison’; and finally to deepen our understanding of democratic constitutionalism and the law of democracy in multinational and socio-culturally diverse polities. Surely, Indian and EU constitutional structures and contexts are very different and we do not intent to flatten those differences. Rather, we aim to understand better their particularities and differences but also convergent developments and insightful conceptions of representation and democracy.