Governments, even the most liberal and enlightened, all consider it necessary to suppress at least some information and comment. Indeed, the key statements on intellectual freedom recognise that this may happen and that it can in certain types of case be considered legitimate. For instance, the European Convention on Human Rights, after setting out the essential rights to information and commun...

Since leadership plays a vital role in democratic movements, understanding the nature of democratic leadership is essential. However, the definition of democratic leadership is unclear (Gastil, 1994). Also, little research has defined democratic leadership in the context of democratic movements. The leadership literature has paid no attention to democratic leadership in such movements, focusing...

Recent research builds on the observation that democracies have more durable alliances to argue that democracies make more reliable allies. This need not be the case. Alliances serve as commitment devices, adding ex ante credibility to states’ claims about ex post behavior. Variation in alliance durability must reflect differences in the desirability of formalizing alignments. Put simply, democ...

We provide the first comprehensive study of lobbying across venues by studying interest group registrations in both the legislative and administrative branches. We present four major findings based on Federal and state data. First, groups engage in substantial administrative lobbying relative to legislative lobbying. Second, the vast majority of groups lobby the legislature, but a large proport...

— Historically, local rural governments in India have enjoyed very limited powers and citizens have been afforded very few opportunities to shape local development. In 1996, the state government of Kerala initiated the ‘‘People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning’’ devolving new authority and resources to panchayats and mandating structures and processes designed to maximize the direct involv...

It is becoming increasingly important to European democratic governments to increase public participation. We argue that more effective tools are required to clearly display local planning proposals and their consequences in web based interactive 3D, free at the point of access. Initial workshops have shown that such tools are only likely to be used if those so doing can influence the outcome. ...

In the last decade or so, civil society space in India has witnessed the proliferation of organizations engaged in budget analysis. Budget analysis can be defined as the process through which state budgets are scrutinized from the perspective of the poor and marginalized. Its focus is on critically evaluating budgetary allocations made by governments at the beginning of the fiscal year and trac...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the extent to which new Labour, on entering office in 1997, continued the policies put in place by previous Thatcherite governments. In economic policy, significant coherence is evident between the Thatcherite and new Labour approaches but this is less so within the welfare sphere, where subtle yet evident social democratic shifts returned the party back to t...

The present difficulties of democratic welfare states in Europe are often ascribed to economic "globalization", that is to the world-wide integration of markets for capital, goods and services which has eliminated national control over boundary-crossing economic transactions, and which therefore exposes national producers to world-wide competition. In fact, however, globalization in the strict ...

The motivations of the Arab Spring that have marked the history of humanity over the last few months have left political economists, researchers, governments and international policymakers pondering over how the quality of political institutions affect consumer welfare in terms of commodity prices. This paper investigates the effects of political establishments on consumer prices in the African...