Joshua Cohen In this essay I explore the ideal of a 'deliberative democracy'.1 By a deliberative democracy I shall mean, roughly, an association whose affairs are governed by the public deliberation of its members. I propose an account of the value of such an association that treats democracy itself as a fundamental political ideal and not simply as a derivative ideal that can be explained in t...

With the emergence of collaborative knowledge goods such as Wikipedia, the demo­ cratic evolution of documents seems to be a minor step in the further evolution of democracy. However, a proper theory for the development and exploitation of democratic text information systems is missing. We propose the development of a framework for democratic text evolution that includes both techni cal and soc...

Inspired by the recent Democratic National Primary, we consider settings in which the members of a distributed population must balance their individual preferences over candidates with a requirement to quickly achieve collective unity. We formalize such settings as the “Democratic Primary Problem” (DPP) over an undirected graph, whose local structure models the social influences acting on

This study addressed the reforming of an online civic education tutorial at the Indonesia Open University or Universitas Terbuka (UT). Several contemporary literatures were reviewed to determine best practices, including social constructivism and a democratic form of teaching. Constructed from the review of literature, the paper proposed a new model of pedagogical approach to the existing pract...

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 prospect of water wars and conflict over water are ideas that are frequently dramatized in media and also studied by scholars. It is well-established that bona fide wars are not started over water resources, but conflict over water does exist and is not well understood. One would suppose, as scholars often do, that dyads composed of two democratic nations would be the best at mitigating con...

In this essay, Professor Balkin argues that digital technologies alter the social conditions of speech and therefore should change the focus of free speech theory, from a Meiklejohnian or republican concern with protecting democratic process and democratic deliberation, to a larger concern with protecting and promoting a democratic culture. A democratic culture is a culture in which individuals...

Increasing levels of democratic freedoms should, in theory, improve women’s access to political positions. Yet studies demonstrate that democracy does little to improve women’s legislative representation. To resolve this paradox, we investigate how variations in the democratization process—including pre-transition legacies, historical experiences with elections, the global context of transition...

of the report This report on the Russian democratic prospect in the contexte of civilization strugglespresents the cultural factors of the regime transformation in that country. It is generallyestimated that the democracy in Russia will fail, because there are too many obstacles to it. Tothem belong, first of all, the perplexity of many the Russians, being in an awkward position...

A central problem of democracy is the aggregation of divergent individual inputs into overall collective decisions. Social-choice-theoretic impossibility results famously demonstrate the intractability of a large class of such aggregation problems. This paper develops a taxonomy of two concepts of agreement, agreement at a substantive level and agreement at a meta-level, and discusses the escap...