How democracies prevail: democratic resilience as a two-stage process

Democratic Quality in Stable Democracies

The major predecessor to Ringen's and my own efforts to measure democratic quality in terms of the purpose of democracy is Robert Dahl's seminal book Polyarchy (1971). Measuring the quality of democracy requires two prior judgments: (1) making sure that, in terms of institutional characteristics, a country is sufficiently democratic, and that, as a minimum, it has universal suffrage, and (2) th...

Task switching as a two-stage decision process.

Saccades represent decisions, and the study of their latency has led to a neurally plausible model of the underlying mechanisms, LATER (Linear Approach to Threshold with Ergodic Rate), that can successfully predict reaction time behavior in simple decision tasks, with fixed instructions. However, if the instructions abruptly change, we have a more complex situation, known as task switching. Psy...

Vote Shifting and Democratic Consolidation in East Asian Democracies:

Drawing on survey data from Taiwan and South Korea, this essay examines the electoral sources and democratic implications of vote shifting in these two young East Asian democracies. First, I complement the conventional Asian identity voting literature by demonstrating that vote shifting is a form of rational voting involving critical evaluations of government performance and careful weighing of...

DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS AND REGIME SURVIVAL: Parliamentary and Presidential Democracies Reconsidered

We review arguments and empirical evidence found in the comparative literature that bear on the differences in the survival rates of parliamentary and presidential democracies. Most of these arguments focus on the fact that presidential democracies are based on the separation of executive and legislative powers, while parliamentary democracies are based on the fusion of these powers. From this ...

Identifying Sources of Democratic Legitimacy in Established and Emerging Democracies