Democratic Participation

DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION IN PERU Final Report

Democratic Innovation and Social Participation in Brazil

Democratic government is not the same as innovation in government. Government is an important component of democratic theory in the ways in which it relates to the polity as a whole and implements demands made by the people. However, government in classical democratic theory is not seen for its capacity to innovate. In this essay, the issue of innovation is approached through the idea of interf...

The Racial Rules of Democratic Participation

The right to vote is one of the central and most basic components of a democracy, and the expansion of the franchise has been one of the most consistent themes in U.S. political history. In fact, more than half of the constitutional amendments ratified after the Bill of Rights have dealt with voting rights.1 The suffrage struggle has been central to demands of African Americans and women to be ...

The Economic Effects of Democratic Participation

Considerable concern has been expressed in recent years about declines in voter participation rates in the United States and in several other major democratic countries. Some feel low participation rates introduce a “class bias” into the political process and thereby worsen the outcomes from it. Little empirical work exists, however, that measures the effects of lower participation on the welfa...

Democratic Participation in the Discursive Management of Usenet

Internet voting, sometimes proposed as a means of enhancing democratic participation, is partly inspired by the democratic process of newsgroup creation on Usenet. To better understand how online voting might influence democratic participation more generally, we conducted an empirical investigation into the voting activity on newsgroups in the comp hierarchy of Usenet since 1989. Counter to exp...