Design, Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism

Libraries, democracy, information literacy, and citizenship: An agonistic reading of central library and information studies' concepts

Purpose The aim of this paper is to advocate and contribute to a more nuanced and discerning argument when ascribing a democratic role to libraries and activities related to information literacy. Design/methodology/approach The connections between democracy and libraries as well as between citizenship and information literacy are analysed by using Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism. One example is pr...

Democracy without Ethnic Conflict: Embedded Parties, Transcendent Social Capital & Non-violent Pluralism in Senegal and Indonesia

Forum Reform Pluralism as Political Theology and Democratic Technology

Robert LaFollette, the great progressive Senator and presidential candidate, famously argued that, ‘‘The cure for what ails democracy is more democracy.’’ One might aptly characterize Bruce Cain’s book, Democracy More or Less, as an extended rebuttal to LaFollette’s populist prescription for healing the body politic. Cain mounts a sustained assault on what he sees as the naı̈vely Whiggish optimi...

1 The Logical Space of Democracy

Abstract: Can we design a perfect democratic decision procedure? Condorcet famously observed that majority rule, our paradigmatic democratic procedure, has some desirable properties, but sometimes produces inconsistent outcomes. Revisiting Condorcet’s insights in light of recent work on the aggregation of judgments, I show that there is a conflict between three initially plausible requirements ...

Shari’ah, Democracy, and the Modern Nation-State: Some Reflections on Islam, Popular Rule, and Pluralism

In this article, the author examines two considerations that are critical to a full and meaningful assessment of the degree to which Islam, and Islamic law in particular, can find authentic expressions of themselves under what may reasonably be considered a democratic form of government. The first of these has to do with the scope of Islamic law, or more properly, the scope of the interpretive ...