The volume “Constitutional Courts and Electoral Integrity: Navigating Challenges, Shaping Prospects” edited by Rachele Bizzari and Angioletta Sperti, has been published in open access by Pisa University Press. It brings together the proceedings of the international workshop held in Pisa in September 2025 and organized within the framework of the Circle U. Alliance. The initiative was part of the Jean Monnet Module “Promoting and Strengthening EU Values,” coordinated by Professor Angioletta Sperti, Professor of Comparative Public Law at the University of Pisa.
The workshop brought together scholars to reflect on the role of justice systems—and in particular constitutional courts—in safeguarding electoral integrity and countering democratic backsliding. Among the workshop’s guests was Professor Dan Banik, Academic Director of the Circle U. Democracy Hub, who recalls last September’s experience and the publication of the volume as follows: “It was a genuine privilege for me to take part in the workshop as Visiting Professor for a few weeks. Collaborating with Prof. Angioletta Sperti and Dr. Rachele Bizzari proved to be an invigorating and deeply rewarding experience. Their scholarly rigour and warm collegiality made for an exceptionally productive working environment. The workshop itself generated rich and wide-ranging discussions, and it is a tremendous pleasure to see those conversations translated so swiftly into print in the form of the newly published edited volume. That a volume of this quality and scope could be brought to publication in such record time is a remarkable achievement, and a testament to the dedication of its editors. This is Circle U. at its very best. It is exactly the kind of vibrant and cross-border academic collaboration the Alliance was built to inspire.
The volume examines electoral justice as a multi-level field in which courts, parliaments, administrations, and independent authorities share responsibilities and competences, creating a complex architecture of accountability within European systems. The contributions address some of the major contemporary challenges, including disinformation, opaque digital campaigns, and new forms of technological manipulation, also in light of recent cases such as the annulment of the presidential elections in Romania.
Through comparative perspectives, the volume explores different national experiences—from Europe to Latin America and Africa—and delves into issues such as the role of courts as “arbiters” of democratic processes, the impact of digitalization and the platformization of the public sphere, and the conditions under which judicial intervention can strengthen trust in elections without undermining their stability.
As the initiative’s editors emphasize, the volume also represents an important opportunity for recognition and collaboration for early-career researchers: a dedicated session of the workshop in fact involved PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers from the universities of the Circle U. Alliance, whose work was selected for presentation at the workshop and for publication in this peer-reviewed, open-access collective volume through a call for papers.
Among them was Maximilian Grawunder, a PhD student at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin:
“Participating in the workshop in Pisa was an inspiring opportunity to engage in insightful dialogue with scholars from across Europe and from diverse academic backgrounds about the challenges facing courts and democratic institutions – said Grawunder – The discussions highlighted how constitutional courts may respond to attacks on electoral integrity and the rule of law in times of democratic backsliding. I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to contribute a chapter to the resulting volume, which examines how comparative reasoning may facilitate the transmission of different legal traditions within the EU and help safeguard the EU’s values against democratic backsliding. By focusing on the CJEU’s internal comparative law research division, the chapter allows for reflections both on the court’s internal decision-making process and on its output, namely a decision in a specific case directed towards manifold audiences.”
