Strengthening Local Democracy or Neo-Liberal Conversions? New Local Governmental Legislation in Turkey

Local Democracy Revisited

The reform of institutional arrangements at the local level, especially the personalisation of executive power and the implementation of new options to participate, was expected to reinforce local democracy. However, there were doubts from the start as to whether this goal could be achieved, because institutional reforms were combined with the implementation of New Public Management. After more...

Public Service and Liberal Democracy

The debate on television’s "public service"obligations can only make full sense if integrated in the broader context of the debate on the best political model for society. In fact, the classic "public service"rationale is based in a normative conception of good and in a suspicious view of the average citizen that is largely tributary of a Platonic or Elitist approach to the political organizati...

Democracy in Non-governmental Organizations in Israel

Although political participation can take many different forms within a democratic regime, there is no doubt that in one way or another the notion is central to the very idea of a democracy. It is difficult to find a piece of research reported in contemporary journals of political science that does not purport to describe some form of political participation: studies of the voter, the party act...

Subjective Measures of Liberal Democracy

Using democracy in empirical work requires accurate measurement. Yet, most policy and academic research presupposes the accuracy of available measures. This article explores judgespecific measurement errors in cross-national indicators of liberal democracy. The authors evaluate the magnitude of these errors in widely used measures of democracy and determine whether their results replicate durin...

Human Rights in the Neo-liberal Imagination