In the first decades of the twentieth century, a heterogeneous assortment of groups and individuals articulated scientific, political, and philosophical objections to vaccination. They engaged in an ongoing battle for public opinion with medical and scientific elites, who responded with their own counterpropaganda. These ideological struggles reflected fear that scientific advances were being p...

the present study aims at investigating how the formation of civil society in iran is affected by these characteristics of states: applying hegemony over private institutions, being dependent on tribal systems, adopting a particular political philosophy, and preventing the formation of a stable aristocratic institution in iran. in this investigation, the relationship between the state and priva...

The use of eParticipation by civil society actors is rapidly evolving. New socio-technical tools, devices, applications, services, networks enable a revitalization or foster new forms of social and political actions. Currently the civil society movements adopt and shape them to better organize, inform, communicate, and disseminate their (counter-) public and the traditional political system and...

Unlike all other autocracies, authoritarian regimes are, as the ultimate form of authoritarianism, a distinct phenomenon of the modern era. Caused by the crisis of liberal democracy and industrial capitalism of the early twentieth century, and led by radical populist political movements/parties and their leaders, they established themselves as the regimes which marked one of the greatest degree...

Empirical studies often use Freedom House ratings for Political Rights and/or Civil Liberties as institutional proxies for the degree of democracy. In this study, Granger-causality tests are used which reveal that Political Rights tend to precede Civil Liberties, but not the reverse, in a panel data set of former Soviet Republics. For transition nations, Freedom House also publishes a separate ...