The paper considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. This is shown by using the Gastil democracy index from Freedom House. First, the basic pattern of correlations reveals that a good ...

Should Lebanon abandon the consociational democratic system? This paper attempts to answer the question by examining the pathologies of the current system and then evaluating its strengths, weaknesses, and potential for reform. Theories of consociational democracy and of conflict regulation are used in this analysis. This paper concludes that there is potential for limited reforms that will mak...

This paper is based on a research aimed at investigating celebrity politics using the emerging theories on celebrity capital in the context of an emerging democracy or third wave democracy, Ghana. The research focuses on the role of celebrity endorsement in the 2008 and 2012 election campaigns in Ghana to explore the mechanism of celebrity politics and capital in Ghana. The main aim of this pap...

Online debate tools for participatory democracy and crowdsourcing legislation are limited by different factors. One of them arises when discussion of proposals reaches a large number of contributions and therefore citizens encounter difficulties in mapping the arguments that constitute the dialectical debate. To address this issue, we present a visualization tool that shows the discussion of an...

People often identify justice with impartiality. This reflects reality: many who experience injustice complain of biased treatment. But whether bias is objectionable depends on a prior commitment to an ideal of nondomination. I advance this claim by reference to impartiality arguments defended by Brian Barry and Amartya Sen. Then I sketch a historical account of impartialist ventures that shows...

This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of critical media literacy and analyzes four different approaches to teaching it. Combining cultural studies with critical pedagogy, we argue that critical media literacy aims to expand the notion of literacy to include different forms of media culture, information and communication technologies and new media, as well as deepen the potential o...

The establishment of irrevocable democracy, the rule of law, free market economic relations, and the protection of fundamental human rights have not yet assumed key significance in the South Caucasus countries. Consequently, all pressing problems of the region continue to intensify, keeping the region politically and economically unstable. Given contending geopolitical and geoeconomic interests...

In recent years, political parties have adopted Online Delegative Democracy platforms such as LiquidFeedback to organise themselves and their political agendas via a grassroots approach. A common objection against the use of these platforms is the delegation system, where a user can delegate his vote to another user, giving rise to so-called super-voters, i.e. powerful users who receive many de...