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...

across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, scholars have begun to explore how democratic changes affect women. Like other analyses of gender and the state (Brush 2003; Eisenstein 1988; MacKinnon 1989; Orloff 1996; Pateman 1988), these studies examine how states create and govern gender relations among their citizens through institutions, laws, and legal discourses (Jaquette a...

This paper clarifi es some of the contested ideas put forward by John Stuart Mill by analyzing the reasons and arguments Mill used to support them and demonstrating how these ideas and arguments supporting them are connected into a coherent system. Mill’s theory is placed in wider explanatory framework of democratic legitimacy developed by Thomas Christiano, and is portrayed as a typical exampl...

Beyond direct damages, terrorism creates fear and insecurity, potentially reducing support for democratic institutions if these are deemed inadequate to tackle the threat, and increasing support for military governments. To investigate this possibility, we use data from Pakistan, a country that experienced an exponential rise in terrorism since 2001. Exploiting individual level data on democrat...

Democratic government is not the same as innovation in government. Government is an important component of democratic theory in the ways in which it relates to the polity as a whole and implements demands made by the people. However, government in classical democratic theory is not seen for its capacity to innovate. In this essay, the issue of innovation is approached through the idea of interf...

This paper describes a new breed of academic journals that use statistical machine learning techniques to make them more democratic. In particular, not only can anyone submit an article, but anyone can also become a reviewer. Machine learning is used to decide which reviewers accurately represent the views of the journal's readers and thus deserve to have their opinions carry more weight. The p...

A subtle, yet noticeable, shift is occurring in recent debates over the reform of public schooling. In response to the reform reports of 1983 which stressed the need for schools to prepare workers, more recent reports have instead focused upon the preparation of citizens—in particular, the preparation of democratic citizens.* This new wave of proposals echoes a traditional resistance against th...

In this article, I will try, first, to critically assess the approaches to liberatory ethics particularly those developed in early modernity, which aimed at deriving an “objectively” grounded liberatory ethics, second, to explore the reasons why today’s liberatory ethics should avoid both the Scylla of “objective” ethics as well as the Charybdis of irrationalist ethics or unbounded moral relati...

Cryptography is a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows secure electronic communications by legitimate users. On the other hand, it can be used by criminals to thwart law enforcement efforts and by foreign countries to prevent security agencies from gathering intelligence information about these countries. However, the widespread use of cryptography is critical to the establishment of th...

Programme outcome: The IFRC 2010 support strategy and plan for the Red Cross of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Red Cross of DRC) was based on the National Society’s (NS) 20092013 Strategic Development Plan and was designed to help the NS provide vulnerable communities with life-saving first aid, clean water and sanitation, health and hygiene promotion, HIV/AIDS support, sexual and gender bas...