Economically Benevolent Dictators: Lessons for Developing Democracies

Political leadership in democracies: some lessons for business?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that, with demands from a widening range of stakeholders for more democratic approaches to governance, there is an evident need to develop alternative models of organizing. In seeking to understand how to conceptualise this alternative, an analysis of the organizational and political institutional contexts for leadership is provided. Design/methodo...

Smallness of Invisible Dictators

Fishburn (1970) showed that in an infinite society Arrow’s axioms for a preference aggregation rule do not necessarily imply a dictator. Kirman and Sondermann (1972) showed that, in this case, nondictatorial rules imply an invisible dictator that, whenever the agent set is an atomless finite measure space, can be viewed as the limit of coalitions of arbitrarily small size. We show first that, w...

Benevolent Agents

A Case for Benevolent Viruses

We begin with some background on viruses and related topics in ‘life-like’ computational organisms. Next we examine some of the major problems facing the current global computing environment and how viruses have the potential for helping to solve these problems. We then consider several widely stated arguments against the application of computer viruses for useful purposes and provide counterpo...

The impact of adult civic education programmes in developing democracies

Can democracy be taught? Are individuals more likely to embrace democratic values, to learn basic knowledge about political processes, and to engage the political process more effectively as a result of their exposure to donor-sponsored civic education programmes in emerging democracies? After more than a decade of evaluations of civic education programmes, it is a good time to take stock of wh...