Answers to the most frequently asked questions about the journal, its editorial line, the core concepts it addresses, and how to participate.
Revista Conciencia Democrática is an independent editorial journal of humanist, liberal-democratic and republican thought. It defends human dignity, liberal democracy, Montesquieu's republican principles, and the rule of law. Open access, no paywall, published in six languages: Spanish, English, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Polish.
Liberal democracy is the political system that combines majority rule with respect for individual rights and civil liberties, within a constitutional framework. Its core elements are: representative institutions, separation of powers, rule of law, free and competitive elections, press freedom, and protection of minorities from majority will. It combines the democratic (popular power) with the liberal (individual liberties).
Democracy refers to the source of authority (the people) and the mechanism for selecting rulers (elections). Republic refers to the form of government: a res publica — public thing — characterized by institutions that limit power, separation of functions, civic virtue of citizens, and freedom as absence of domination. They can coexist (republican democracy) or tense (non-republican democracies, non-democratic republics). The journal works in their virtuous intersection.
Republicanism is the political tradition that defines freedom as the absence of arbitrary domination, and the republic as a public thing sustained by institutions that limit power, civic virtue of citizens, and shared public responsibility. Its historical references include Cicero, Machiavelli, Harrington, Montesquieu, and Madison; its contemporary voices, Pettit, Skinner, and Viroli.
The rule of law is the principle by which power is exercised within known, predictable legal limits that apply equally to all. Its elements are: clear and public laws, independent courts, separation of powers, equality before the law, and effective mechanisms of control over those who govern. Without rule of law, democracy collapses into arbitrariness.
You can subscribe to the email newsletter, follow the RSS/Atom/JSON feeds per language, follow the official accounts on Bluesky, Mastodon, X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, and join the Telegram channels (one per language). All subscription channels are listed on /suscribirse.
Yes. The journal welcomes community submissions: any reader can submit an analysis, opinion column, reader's letter, or literary writing for editorial review. The form is at /enviar and detailed instructions at /principios.
All articles are published under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license (Attribution — Non Commercial — Share Alike). You can cite, reproduce, and translate them attributing Revista Conciencia Democrática and the original author, provided the use is not commercial and derivative works keep the same license.
The journal publishes in six languages: Spanish (canonical), English, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Polish. The interface, the RSS/Atom/JSON feeds, the newsletter, and the articles are available in all six. When an article has no stored translation, on-demand auto-translation is offered.
No. The editorial line is humanist, liberal-democratic, and republican, not partisan. It defends principles — human dignity, freedom, institutions — that can be shared by people with diverse political identities within the democratic tradition. It rejects authoritarianism of any kind.
Juan Tomás Jara Masson founded Revista Conciencia Democrática in 2026, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The founding inspiration is the White Rose — the student resistance group led by Hans and Sophie Scholl in Munich (1942-1943) — as a symbol of the defense of human dignity against authoritarianism.
The White Rose (Die Weiße Rose) was a university resistance group against Nazism, active in Munich between 1942 and 1943, led by Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Willi Graf, and professor Kurt Huber. They distributed six pamphlets calling for non-violent rejection of the regime and were executed by the dictatorship. Their gesture — civic courage through public speech — is the founding inspiration of Revista Conciencia Democrática.
The journal is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is an entirely digital publication: it has no physical office. Its authors are geographically distributed, publishing from various Ibero-American and European countries. Editorial contact is redaccion.concienciadem@gmail.com.
The journal is independent: it receives no funding from political parties, governments, or corporations. It is sustained by voluntary donations from readers (/donar page). It publishes no advertising. It charges no subscription nor APC (article processing charges). This preserves editorial independence from commercial or political pressure.
The journal is a hybrid editorial publication: it combines public essayism with intellectual rigor. It adopts academic standards in discoverability (OAI-PMH, Highwire Press citation tags, BibTeX/RIS/CSL-JSON, submission to DOAJ and Latindex) but its reading form is that of the rigorous public essay, accessible to non-specialist readers. It is not strictly peer-reviewed: review is editorial.
Each article exposes complete academic metadata. To cite, you can export the citation in BibTeX (/articulos/<slug>/cite.bib), RIS (/articulos/<slug>/cite.ris), or CSL-JSON (/articulos/<slug>/cite.json) — Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, and Pandoc import these formats directly. Free-form citation (APA-7): Last name, N. (Year). Article title. Revista Conciencia Democrática. URL.
Civic humanism is the Renaissance tradition — recovered in the 20th century by Hans Baron and J.G.A. Pocock — that links human dignity, classical education, and active virtue to service of the republic. It holds that human fulfillment is achieved in civic participation, not only in contemplative life. It is one of the historical roots of modern republicanism and of the editorial program of Revista Conciencia Democrática.
The separation of powers is the division of state power into three branches — executive, legislative, and judicial — each with its own functions and mechanisms to restrain the others (checks and balances). Formulated by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) and applied in the U.S. Constitution (1787), it is the fundamental institutional architecture of modern constitutionalism and the best guarantee against tyrannical concentration of power.
Human dignity is the intrinsic, inalienable, and equal value of each person, regardless of merit, utility, race, gender, or origin. Formulated philosophically by Kant — who maintains that the person must always be treated as an end in themselves, never only as means — and consecrated legally in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and in subsequent constitutions. It is the ethical-legal foundation of contemporary democratic order.
The open society is the political ideal formulated by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945): a society whose institutions, decisions, and beliefs are permanently exposed to rational critique and the possibility of peaceful change. It is opposed to closed societies governed by dogma, where no revision is possible. Popper's defense of the open society is one of the founding texts of 20th-century democratic liberalism.
Political pluralism is the recognition of the diversity of opinions, interests, values, and ways of life within the political community as the very condition of democracy. Without pluralism there is no genuine choice or meaningful representation. Defended by Isaiah Berlin, Norberto Bobbio, Giovanni Sartori, and John Rawls, pluralism is the antidote to dogmatism and the basis of republican coexistence.
Constitutionalism is the political doctrine and practice that subjects power to a fundamental norm — the Constitution — that defines competences, guarantees individual rights, and establishes procedures of change. From the English Magna Carta (1215), the American (1787) and French (1791) constitutions, to the post-war constitutions (German 1949, Italian 1948), constitutionalism is the legal armor of the rule of law.
The journal's authors are intellectuals, academics, professionals, and readers committed to humanist, liberal-democratic, and republican thought. Each author has their own profile (slug, bio, role, headshot) in /autores. Some texts come from the editorial team; others, from reader submissions approved by editorial review. Co-authorships are technically supported. The full listing is at /autores and the public API at /api/public/authors.
Yes. The journal is sustained entirely by voluntary donations from readers. The /donar page has the available channels (Cafecito and similar). Donations are the sole source of funding — no advertising, paid subscriptions, APC, or institutional sponsorships. This preserves editorial independence.
Yes, in six languages. RSS 2.0: /feed.xml (Spanish), /feed-en.xml, /feed-it.xml, /feed-de.xml, /feed-pt.xml, /feed-pl.xml. Plus: Atom 1.0 at /atom.xml (and variants /atom-{en,it,de,pt,pl}.xml), JSON Feed 1.1 at /feed.json (and per-language variants). Any modern reader (Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire, Reeder, Feedbin) detects them automatically from the HTML HEAD.
The journal plans a Telegram channel per language — @ConcienciaDemES, @ConcienciaDemEN, @ConcienciaDemIT, @ConcienciaDemDE, @ConcienciaDemPT, @ConcienciaDemPL — where each new article is auto-posted. Current channel status and all other subscription channels are listed at /suscribirse.
Yes. The journal has institutional accounts on Bluesky (@concienciadem.bsky.social) and Mastodon (@concienciadem@mastodon.social), and its own ActivityPub Actor at /actor discoverable via WebFinger as @concienciadem@<host>. It is also connected via Bridgy Fed (@<host>@fed.brid.gy) for native bridging between ActivityPub and Bluesky. It publishes automated daily reflections on both networks.
Populism is a political and rhetorical strategy that opposes a 'virtuous unified people' against a 'corrupt elite', delegitimizes institutional mediation (parties, parliament, press, judiciary) and concentrates authority in a leader presented as direct embodiment of the people. Müller, Urbinati and Mounk have mapped its consequences for liberal democracy. Exists in left-wing and right-wing variants.
Post-truth describes the contemporary communicative regime where factual truth loses weight to emotion and tribal affinity. Oxford 'word of the year 2016'. McIntyre, Frankfurt, Volkov analyze it as systematic indifference to verification. Consequences: erosion of rational public debate, affective polarization, vulnerability to organized disinformation.
Parliamentary democracy is the form of government in which the executive emerges from the parliamentary majority and depends on its confidence. Variants: UK, Germany (constructive vote of no confidence), Spain, Italy, most of Western Europe. Advantages: flexibility in crises. Disadvantages: instability under fragmentation.
Deliberative democracy is a normative theory by Habermas, Cohen, Fishkin, Gutmann/Thompson. Political legitimacy requires INFORMED PUBLIC DEBATE preceding decision. Implementations: citizens' juries, constitutional assemblies (Iceland 2010-2013), deliberative polls.
The welfare state guarantees universal social rights (health, education, pensions, unemployment) financed by progressive taxation. Origin: Bismarck (1880s); consolidation: Beveridge Plan (1942); generalization: post-1945 Western Europe. Esping-Andersen distinguished three models: liberal (UK, US), conservative (DE, FR), social-democratic (Sweden, Norway).
Democratic backsliding is the process by which a democracy loses institutional quality without formally collapsing. Theorized by Levitsky/Ziblatt (How Democracies Die, 2018), Bermeo, Grzymała-Busse, Mounk. Examples: Hungary under Orbán, Poland under PiS (2015-2023), Turkey, Venezuela.
Civil society is the realm of voluntary collective organization between family, state, and market. Hegel theorized it, Tocqueville described it as vital for republican liberty, Habermas linked it to public opinion, Putnam (Bowling Alone) showed its decline correlates with democratic erosion. One of the non-state brakes against power concentration.
Press freedom is the right to publish and disseminate information without prior state censorship. Defended from Milton's Areopagitica (1644), inscribed in U.S. First Amendment (1791) and Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 19). Without press freedom there is no democratic deliberation or control over those exercising power. Today pressured by media concentration, state harassment, economic capture, self-censorship. Reporters Without Borders publishes an annual ranking.
Universal suffrage is the right of ALL adult citizens to vote without restriction by sex, race, property, literacy, or income. New Zealand first granted it to women (1893); US extended to women 1920 and African Americans effectively in 1965 (Voting Rights Act); Argentina to women 1947 (Evita Law); Switzerland only in 1971. Today minimum age is debated (16 in Argentina and Brazil since 1994).
Patriotism is attachment to one's own political community, compatible with respect for other nations. Nationalism affirms superiority or absolute priority of one's nation, generally with ethnic-cultural bias. Charles de Gaulle: 'Patriotism is loving your country; nationalism, hating others'. Habermas and Sternberger developed constitutional patriotism as civic variant compatible with democratic pluralism.
Separation of powers (Montesquieu, 1748) matters because it prevents tyrannical concentration of power through checks and balances. When executive, legislative, and judicial are separated, each controls the others. If any absorbs the others (executive capturing courts, parliament becoming mere ratification), republican liberty vanishes. Fundamental institutional safeguard against authoritarianism.
Being a citizen is not just having a passport: it is being full member of a political community with civil rights (liberties), political (vote, representation), and social (education, health, pensions), per T.H. Marshall's classical classification (1950). Also active exercise: informing, deliberating, voting, participating, demanding accountability. Aristotle: 'one who takes part in judging and governing'. Status and practice.
Political opposition is the set of actors not part of the government competing to replace it. INDISPENSABLE because: (1) controls government; (2) offers real programmatic alternative; (3) represents minorities; (4) guarantees alternation. Legal, free, recognized opposition is a defining marker of democracy versus authoritarianism (Robert Dahl: 'polyarchy').
