This paper discusses political leadership and national security in the Nigerian fourth republic. The paper accentuates that the democratic process itself constitute a functional mechanism for interest articulation and aggregation thereby checking agent threat to national security that may arise from lack of input or participation in the political process. The paper through the use of leadership...

As Juan Linz has recently argued, many problem of democratic government would be difficult to understand without including the time dimension in our analysis of the democratic process. This is because government pro tempore is an essential and defining characteristic of democratic governance (Linz, 1995). The time limit inherent in the requirement of elections at regular intervals is a powerful...

How does civic education affect the development of democratic political culture in new democracies? Using a unique threewave panel data set from Kenya spanning the transitional democratic election of 2002, we posit a two-step process of the social transmission of democratic knowledge, norms, and values. Civic education first affected the knowledge, values, and participatory inclinations of indi...

Present research on minor party performance consists largely of singlecountry studies or pooled studies including a raft of widely varying electoral systems. This study examines the topic from a cross-national perspective, but is limited to democratic polities with single-member districts and first-past-the-post rules. An original dataset is compiled including 217 elections drawn from 37 countr...

All legal transplants are problematic, constitutional transplants especially so. And constitutional transplants for federal systems are among the most problematic of all. Still, especially in light of the apparent derailing of the EU’s Draft Constitutional Treaty, the question of the relevance of EU constitution-making for constitution-making in federal-style systems elsewhere seems nothing les...

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 914 I. A TYPOLOGY OF DYSFUNCTION .......................................................... 916 A. Constitutional Dysfunction .......................................................... 916 B. Political Dysfunction ................................................................... 919 C....

Increasing European co-operation must take place in many areas, including medical ethics. Against the background of common cultural norms and pluralistic variation within political traditions, religion and lifestyles, Europe will have to converge towards unity within the field of medical ethics. This article examines how such convergence might develop with respect to four major areas: European ...

Based on the Banzhaf-Coleman approach to the analysis of political power, this article presents a new analysis of government coalitions. The party systems and types of government formation in Germany and Austria can be compared over time in a new systematic way from 1920. The findings support the theory of democratic stability that emphasizes the power balance between the major rightand left-wi...

A major problem for all metaphysical systems and their corresponding epistemologies, including methods, mediations, and pretensions at being certain, inextricably presume the issues of reliability and validity. For the perspectival modern mentality reliability and validity, or intersubjective agreement among experts, constitutes objective knowledge. Scientific discourse, which is the most power...

The aim of this article is to examine trends democratic backsliding associated with the long standing reform work on regional institutions and policies in Sweden. To end, conceptualized a different manner compared conventional understandings. By doing so, highlights missing aspect research that concerns how well-intended reforms designed strengthen can also harbor non-democratic consequences. I...