Otto Kirchheimer on the Juridification(s) of Democracy

The phenomenon of juridification - citizens' increasing reliance on legal frameworks and institutions to address political issues - is often portrayed in contemporary literature as a depoliticizing and de-democratizing shift, marked by the transfer of political authority to the courts and the expansion of formal law. The article offers a more nuanced account of the phenomenon by revisiting the early twentieth-century work of Frankfurt School jurist Otto Kirchheimer. Drawing on his writings from the 1920s and 1930s, the article reconstructs Kirchheimer's multifaceted theory of juridification as a process unfolding along three distinct trajectories: (1) toward formal democracy, (2) toward substantive democracy, and (3) toward executive democracy. Each trajectory embodies a different form of juridification - formal, material, and administrative - and entails divergent implications for democratic governance. By juxtaposing these models, the article argues that while Kirchheimer viewed the first and third trajectories as ultimately detrimental to the endurance of democratic institutions, he regarded the second, oriented toward a value-based substantive democracy, as a necessary development for sustaining democratic life. This reconstruction sheds light on the ambivalent relationship between juridification and democracy.