The proponents of cyberspace promise that online discourse will increase political participation and pave the road for a democratic utopia. This article explores the potential for civil discourse in cyberspace by examining the level of civility in 287 discussion threads in political newsgroups. While scholars often use civility and politeness interchangeably, this study argues that this conflat...

“As we prepare to enter the twenty-first century, the world faces two important challenges to both its political stability and its potential for sustainable growth. The first is the growing gap between the science-rich countries of the North and the science-poor countries of the South in the production and use of scientific and technological knowledge. The second is the increasing complexity of...

This thesis will argue that graffiti and street art increase the democratic self-expression values that Christian Welzel’s (2008) democratization theory argues are integral to the process of democratization. In countries where a repressive authoritarian regime allows little room for the population to express themselves, graffiti and street art offer a venue for the voicing of selfexpression val...

Democratization is a learning process. When citizens in new democracies still consider democracy as economic tool instead of a principle, domestic economic fluctuation steers democratic legitimacy. However, why do citizens attribute economic performance to regime type rather than incumbent party? This article proposes that people would compare the performance of different regimes in the same er...

social capital has received considerable attention in all branches of social sciences, and has recently been the focus in the field to explain about procreator elements. trust is one of the social capital elements and plays an important role in specifying consequences incidental to social capital. nearly two decades ago, robert putnam proposed an explanation of trust relying on associational li...

Political Parties in Confl ictProne Societies: Encouraging Inclusive Politics and Democratic Development P parties are an essential component of representative democracy. Th ey organize voters, aggregate and articulate interests, craft policy alternatives, recruit and socialize new candidates for offi ce, set policy-making agendas, integrate disparate groups and individuals into the democratic ...

Conventional wisdom holds that democracy endures in rich countries but is unstable in poor ones. Building on Ansell and Samuels (2014), we suggest that the sources of democratic stability lie not just with a country’s aggregate level of wealth, but also with its distribution. However, we conceive of inequality and its political impact differently from previous work, which has focused on the med...

This essay turns to ancient sources in order to rethink the relationship between political apathy and democracy. If modern democratic theorists place political apathy entirely outside of democracy – either as a destructive limit upon the full realization of a democratic polity, or, more sanguinely, as a pragmatic necessity which tempers democracy so that it may function in a workable yet watere...

1 In the liberal concept of a " democratic civil peace " , an idealistic understanding of democratic stabilization and pacification prevails: Democracy is seen to guarantee political stability and social peace by offering comprehensive representation and participation in political decisions while producing outcomes broadly in accordance with the common interest of society. This contrasts with t...

Malaria is a major public health problem in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite progress achieved over the past decade in the fight against malaria, further efforts have to be done such as in the surveillance and the containment of Plasmodium falciparum resistant strains. We investigated resistance to artemisinin-based combination therapies currently in use in Democratic Republic of Congo...