This review article analyses the merits and shortcomings of three recent works by Matthew Rose, Peter Turchin, Krishnan Nayar about crisis in Western liberal democracies liberalism. By exploring intellectual economic causes crisis, these authors are trying to establish a historical model that would explain current through comprehensive account development societies. In doing so, they identify d...

Resolving a controversy on the relationship of development to democratization, this article expands the time period under study with panel data running from the early nineteenth century (a time where hardly any country was democratic) to the end of the twentieth century, and shows a positive and significant effect of income on the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic consolidatio...

The acceleration of technological innovation in Western liberal societies has in recent years offered the prospect of applications with crucial impact on social and economic life. For instance, in the area of new life sciences, the successful decoding of human genome and subsequent advances of genomics-based technologies (including biotechnology) have enabled the development of cheaper and safe...

Two recent and related social developments of note for libraries are an upsurge in cultural participation enabled by Web 2.0 media and calls in government policy for enhanced innovation through education. Ironically, these have occurred at the same time that increasingly stringent copyright laws have restricted access to cultural content. Concepts of governmentality are used here to examine the...

In spite of the critical role that women play in sustaining the family, and the contributions they make to economic and other development of African societies, they have largely been excluded from participation in the decision-making processes and mainstream activities of most facets of life, including politics. This paper examines the factors that hinder women’s participation in democratic pol...

In seeking to understand the root causes of the events of 9/11 many accounts have turned to Samuel P. Huntington’s provocative and controversial thesis of a ‘clash of civilizations’, arousing strong debate. Evidence from the 1995-2001 waves of the World Values Study allows us, for the first time, to examine an extensive body of empirical evidence relating to this debate. Comparative analysis of...

What Feldman’s students thought was that “while they had their own beliefs, the others had reasonable beliefs as well.” (p. 200) And Feldman rightly points out that this view is “widespread” in the contemporary world. This liberal epistemological view, in other words, is a piece of contemporary common sense, at least in societies where political liberalism holds sway. Here is a sympathetic form...

Among affluent countries, those with market-liberal welfare regimes (which are also English-speaking) tend to have the highest prevalence of obesity. The impact of cheap, accessible high-energy food is often invoked in explanation. An alternative approach is that overeating is a response to stress, and that competition, uncertainty, and inequality make market-liberal societies more stressful. T...

This paper first traces the historical and cultural roots of liberal learning in East Asian (Confucian) and Western traditions to show how they resemble each other and where they depart. It argues that despite the strikingly different legacies, liberal arts education in both East Asia and the West faces increasingly the same challenges as a result of globalization. In a context of new social fo...

L democracy, and its promotion, are now facing a set of serious challenges.1 On the one hand, as the Arab Spring demonstrates, democratic aspirations are intensifying, which opens up significant new opportunities for democracy support. On the other hand, in the context of the financial crisis and austerity, levels of funding for democracy aid are being reconsidered, and the credibility and effe...