Between liberalism and democracy

Democracy and women in Turkey: in defense of liberalism.

This article examines how different groups of women, including feminists and Islamists, contributed to the process of democratization since the 1980s in Turkey. It is argued that as women sought their rights, they liberalized the polity. To the extent that liberalization protects democracies from degenerating into mere formalism, women expanded the parameters of "substantive" democracy. In the ...

In Defense of Legislatures

It is not every day that a scholar stoops to defend legislatures. Oh sure, lots of political theorists rush to the defense of democracy in the abstract, but they often have little to say about actual democratic practice. By contrast, empirical political scientists (and “positive political theorists”) have lavished attention on the institutions of democratic governance such as legislatures (part...

The Effects of Liberalism on the Terrestrial Environment

In recent decades, many countries have adopted, to various degrees, the ideologies of commercial and republican liberalism. One salient aspect of the spread of commercial liberalism in the world has been the growth in international trade. The spread of republican liberalism has manifested itself by the rise in the level of democracy in countries over time. What are the implications of trade and...

Political liberalism and religious claims

This article gives an overview of 4 important lacunae in political liberalism and identifies, in a preliminary fashion, some trends in the literature that can come in for support in filling these blind spots, which prevent political liberalism from a correct assessment of the diverse nature of religious claims. Political liberalism operates with implicit assumptions about religious actors being...

Electoral Democracy or Electoral Clanism? Russian Democratization and Theories of Transition

t seems clear that Russia’s attempts at democratization and Westernization will not meet the expectations of Russia’s democratic reformers. As happened in previous eras of Westernization, only some elements of Western liberal democracy have taken root in Russian soil, the most important of them being competitive elections. Other fundamental elements of liberalism have not only failed to flouris...

Liberalism, Republicanism and the Public Philosophy of American Democracy