The eclipse of legislatures: Direct democracy in the 21st century JOHN G. MATSUSAKA Marshall School of Business and Law School, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA 90089-1427 USA Abstract. Demographic, political, and technological trends are fueling an unprecedented growth in direct democracy worldwide. If the trends continue, direct democracy threatens to eclipse legislatures in ...

The conventional wisdom, since at least the writings of John Dewey (1916), views high levels of educational attainment as a prerequisite for democracy. Education is argued to promote democracy both because it enables a “culture of democracy” to develop and because it leads to greater prosperity, which is also thought to cause political development. The most celebrated version of this argument i...

The EU represents a new and complex political system which, according to numerous social scholars, suffers from the so-called democratic deficit. The basic argument behind this claim is that citizens lack control of the EU because, within its political system, national parliaments of member states possess only limited powers which have not been adequately compensated through steady empowerment ...

In practice, the most relevant question for direct democracy is not whether it could advantageously replace representative democracy, but whether it can be combined with it to improve political outcomes. We find that, by reallocating some political power to the population, direct democracy significantly affects the incentives, selection, and reelection prospects of politicians. When citizens ca...

This paper argues that energy democracy could manifest in terms of public engagement at the community level, free of state intervention, government fostering, and donor support, even in locations where governments have been in flux from a democracy to a non-democracy. In currently non-democratic Thailand, for example, public engagement on community energy transitions had occurred, were sustaine...

Deliberative democracy by the people themselves is a distinctive form of democratic practice. It can be distinguished from deliberative democracy practiced by elites or representatives as well as from other forms of democracy that do not emphasize deliberation. In this article I explore ways this kind of democracy can be realized and then inserted into our current democratic institutions. The i...

Democracy as a political form of social organization offers humanity its best prospect for freedom and peace. Today, it faces deliberate threats from totalitarian movements that rely on terrorist tactics. Democracy also faces threats from its own leaders because of the consequential nature of their judgment and decision making. This article examines how threats to democracy are perceived and ma...

This study examines the relationships between foreign aid, levels of schooling and democracy for Pakistan using the ARDL cointegration approach. The results of study provide strong evidence for fairly robust long run as well as short run relationships among these variables for the period 1973-2008. The results state that foreign aid and primary school enrollments have negative impact on democra...

The discussion focuses on three themes. One is the divergence between positions of business associations and concerns of individual entrepreneurs regarding several determinants of investment. Another issue is under what conditions economic growth can be achieved under democracy; why market reforms have generated little private investment in many cases, and which government policies and politica...