In my testimony today, I consider the relative potential advantages and disadvantages of voting systems that can be subjected to objective independent analysis. I emphasize that openness in the design, development, and operation of voting machines can significantly enhance the integrity, transparency, and accountability of the election process. However, openness by itself is not a cure for voti...

Internet voting, sometimes proposed as a means of enhancing democratic participation, is partly inspired by the democratic process of newsgroup creation on Usenet. To better understand how online voting might influence democratic participation more generally, we conducted an empirical investigation into the voting activity on newsgroups in the comp hierarchy of Usenet since 1989. Counter to exp...

Academics and researchers face a challenge of making sense of the role e-democracy plays in the democratic process and with what implications. This requires a deeper understanding of the objectives and assumptions that underpin e-democracy innovations, as well as institutional and technology structures that condition their role in democratic engagement. This paper interprets case study data col...

This study examines the issue of standards of freedom of the press in democracy. Freedom of the press should benefit citizens in democratic societies, yet historically, the press has mainly served dominant group interests that are based on capital and power. The problem of serving special interests and collusion exists globally. It examines how well the principle of press freedom operates in de...

Recent studies show that the democratic peace correlation is not significant once the potentially confounding variable that can cause both democracy and peace, contract-intensive economy, is considered; this pattern holds in analyses of wars, fatal militarized interstate conflicts (Mousseau 2009), and interstate crises (Mousseau et al. 2013). These studies rescind the primary evidence for democ...

While constitutions regulate political authority within a state, there is much we do not know about the interaction between political conditions and constitutional texts. Much of the literature relies upon hand-coded databases of constitutional texts. However, this approach raises both methodological and theoretical concerns. Advances in natural language processing, particularly latent text ana...

This article develops a general theory about how representative systems might best promote democratic legitimacy – one that recognizes the potential benefits of networked responsiveness between diverse kinds but is alert to threat fragmentation and value simplicity. Deliberative constructivist theorists representation tend agree more pluralistic are democratic. I will argue, however, can bias t...

Democratic parliamentary and presidential voting supported by election systems worldwide represents the essential idea behind any free society. In recent years, numerous challenges have been overcome to satisfy this fundamental principle. On one side we have low voter turnout and high electors migration, on the other, sometimes complex electoral systems such as preferential or transferable ball...