Representative argumentation, electoral justice and deliberative democracy: on the constitutional legitimacy of electoral justice

The purpose of this essay is to explain the relation between representative argumentation, understood as the rational and democratic justification of authoritative decisions in the field of law, with the legitimacy of electoral justice, understood as the legal ways that guarantee the validity of the elections and, thus, to safeguard the individuals' political rights, in order to justify the rationality of electoral justice as a criterion of legitimacy of modern constitutional democracies. Thereby, in the first section I explain the relation between argumentation and deliberative democracy, while in the second section I make a reconstruction of the idea of electoral justice as an argumentative representation; later, in the third section, I develop the dual dimension of electoral justice and, finally, in the last section, I carry out some considerations on judicial activism regarding electoral justice.