Religious engagement and citizen support for democratic accountability in contemporary democracies

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...

Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies

Parliamentary democracy has been widely embraced by politicians and especially by the scholarly community but remains less well understood. In this essay, I identify the institutional features that define parliamentary democracy and suggest how they can be understood as delegation relationships. I propose two definitions: one minimal and one maximal (or ideal-typical). In the latter sense, parl...

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...

Identifying Sources of Democratic Legitimacy in Established and Emerging Democracies

The Web of Governance and Democratic Accountability

Developments in e-government are resulting in fundamental reorganizations of the ways in which democratic governments operate as well as in the ways in which citizens relate to their own and other governments and to each other. Of special relevance here are the manners in which institutions and citizens are becoming interconnected into a complex ‘web of governance’ via largely uncoordinated inf...