The debate on the impact of the information and communication technologies (ICT) on contemporary democracy has lasted in political science since the beginning of the information revolution. Two dominating and antagonistic standpoints present the electronic democracy as either the cure for democracy crisis, or the factor deepening major problems of democracy. The text questions such a simplified...

We present a theory of the state based on political leadership and reputational equilibria. A political leader first needs a reputation for reliably rewarding loyal supporters. Reputational expectations between political leaders and their supporters become the fundamental political laws on which the enforcement of all other constitutional laws may be based. Successful democratic development req...

The stability and functioning of any kind of political regime—including democratic or representative ones—relies on the combination of the capacity of rulers and government officials to use coercion and the development of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy can be described as people's recognition and acceptance of the validity of the rules of their entire political system and the decisi...

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...

After the disintegration of former Soviet Union in 1989, debate started among the intellectuals as well as policy makers in USA about the future shape of world politics and role of the US in it. In this regard, early voice was Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” which focused on political ideologies as the main unit of analysis. To him, after the end of cold war, western liberal democracy h...

If democracy implies political equality, in the sense that everyone has roughly the same opportunity to influence political decisions, we may ask: ”Who are included among ‘everyone’?” In other words, if ”democracy” is government “by the people”, who are included among “the people”? This may be called ”the boundary problem in democratic theory”. The problem is not what actually existing peoples ...

After the ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s and the ‘Republican War on Science’ of the 2000s in the United States, the fraught relationship between science and politics continues to make headlines. In conflicts over issues ranging from global warming to stem cell research, complaints about ‘politicized science’ remain familiar refrains. However, such complaints presuppose a rigid boundary that has be...