The issue of justice figures prominently m various stages of democratization yet the topic is still understudied in the broad literature of democratization. The handling of transitional justice is crucial to the successful transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. However, the type of transition (e.g., transformation vs. replacement) also significantly shapes the approach toward transiti...

OBJECTIVES To study the aging self, that is, conceptions of one's own aging process, in relation to identity processes and self-esteem in the United States and the Netherlands. As the liberal American system has a stronger emphasis on individual responsibility and youthfulness than the social-democratic Dutch system, we expect that youthful and positive perceptions of one's own aging process ar...

Few, if any, would deny that political parties are integral to representative democracy as we know it. And yet since the 1960s it has become increasingly commonplace to encounter references in academic literature, journalistic comment, and polemical assertion alike to the `decline of party', a contention usually predicated on the view that parties are `failing' in a variety of respects. We have...

In her essay ‘Neoliberalism and the end of liberal democracy’, Wendy Brown suggests that critical political theory needs to ‘mourn liberal democracy’ in order to develop a transformative vision of ‘the good’. The problem, as Brown outlines it, is not only that – to varying extents and in different scales across democratic states – market rationality has hollowed out representative structures an...

Malapportionment of state legislatures before the mid-1960s gave urban and suburban voters much less representation than they deserved. This Essay documents that suburban and urban voters had markedly different policy preferences, party identifications, and partisan voting behaviors than voters in rural areas, who were overrepresented. However, the patterns were not uniform. In the Northeast an...

Adopting Marx's "Historical Materialism Theory", I will discuss the interaction between the Market Economic System and the Ideology of Mainland China, treating the former as the bottom structure and the latter as the upper structure. I used the concept of "a double head structure of ideology" by Seliger and split Mainland China's official ideology into a "core" concept and a "perimeter" concept...