Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. Geoforum In Press 2 ABSTRACT Post-Marxist and poststructuralist ontologies of the political have been important reference points for recent discussions of ...

Challenges to post-conflict leadership in African states highlight the need for democratic capacity building, with clear participatory processes involving communities and the leadership as a necessary condition to mitigate new or resurrected conflicts. This article explores transformational leadership and how it relates to democratic capacity building in Rwanda. We argue that community capacity...

Three additions are suggested to the study of interest groups and their role in a democracy. First, different types of interest groups are recognized; in particular, special interest groups, which have a narrow social base, concentrate on limited issues, and benefit mainly their own members, are distinguished from constituencyrepresenting organizations. which have a broad social base, address a...

Conventional views of African politics imply that Africans’ political opinions are based either on enduring cultural values or their positions in the social structure. In contrast, we argue that Africans form attitudes to democracy based upon what they learn about what it is and does. This learning hypothesis is tested against competing cultural, institutional, and structural theories to explai...

Democracy is defined by two core tenets: voice and pluralism. Within these constraints, a wide variety of regime types can be designed. We show that the only new, untested form of democracy is when every citizen is governed by the political party of his/her choice. Multiple full-fledged governments would coexist in the same national territory at the same time, each one sovereign only over the p...

A central claim of democratic theory is that democracy induces governments to be responsive to the preferences of the people. Political parties organize politics in every modern democracy, and some observers claim that parties are what induce democracies to be responsive. Yet, according to others, parties give voice to extremists and reduce the responsiveness of governments to the citizenry. Th...