Representation is a key concept for parliamentary democracy. It is, however, a broader concept than is commonly believed. Representative democracy has a fourfold meaning. First, representative democracy is a depiction of the people’s will. Secondly, it is a process of deliberation and negotiation. Thirdly, representative democracy is the institutional linking mechanism between political power a...

We revisit one of the central empirical findings of the pohtical economy literature that higher hicome per capita causes democracy. Existing studies estabUsh a strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy, but do not tjqaically control for factors that simultaneously affect both variables. We show that controlling for such factors by including country fixed effects removes the ...

We seem to be in need of a new variety of politics, a politics which does not regard ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or regional assertiveness as so much irrationality, archaic and ingenerate, to be suppressed or transcended . . . . It depends on developing a less simplistically demonizing, blankly negative attitude toward it as a relic of some savage or some early stage of human existen...

This paper analyzes the impact of new technologies on a range of practices related to activism. The first section shows how the functioning of democratic institutions can be impaired by scarce political accountability connected with the emergence of moral hazard; the second section displays how cyberactivism can improve the transparency of political dynamics; in the last section the authors tur...

Modern science means that which has a solid conceptual framework, and which considers experimental results as the ultimate litmus test against which to validate any theoretical construct. Its birth can be traced back to the 16th and 17th Centuries. The work of people like Nicholaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, William Harvey, Vesalius, and others was seminal to this development...

It is almost generally acknowledged that the application of ICTs may represent a strong vehicle for social innovation and progress in the hands of governments, of political representatives and of citizens. So, when the focus is on e-Democracy, which nowadays represents one major strategic approach of ICT applications, it must be interpreted and explored in connection with the more general, trad...

A distinction in reasons and motives for choosing a particular political leader establishes the key difference between older and young democracy. The former is based on electoral history, while the latter is based on feelings and personal attitude. Besides, a comparatively abundant number of political figures (persons or parties and associations) is specific for young democracies. The problem o...

In his famous book " Democracy and its Critics " (1989), Robert A. Dahl argues that, historically speaking, there have been two transformations of democracy. These transformations have brought about different models of democratic governance and different interpretations of the concept of democracy. By the fi rst transformation Dahl refers to the the emergence of the classical model of democracy...