Despite the fact that democracy promotion is a major part of liberal foreign policies, the discipline of International Relations has not paid much systematic attention to it. Conversely, the study of democracy promotion is dominated by comparative politics and pays hardly any attention to the international system. This mutual neglect signifies a core weakness in the theory and practice of democ...

As part of the self-reflective movement in which green politics has been engaged for the last decade, the construction of green democracy has been submitted to increasing scrutiny. Relationship between democracy and environmentalism has traditionally been problematic, but once green committment to democracy has proven to be firm enough, the search for that model of democracy more suitable for t...

The challenge towards e-democracy, through the electronic transformation of political systems, has become increasingly evident within developed economies. It is regarded as an approach for increased and better quality citizen participation in the democratic processes. E-democracy forms a component of overall e-government initiatives where technology adoption and diffusion, to enhance wider acce...

Canada may be about to create a publicly-funded Centre for Advancing Democracy. However, at the present time there is international speculation that autocracy promotion is increasing, now that the global wave of democratisation has stalled or gone into retreat. Some prominent authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes have gained in confidence; their potential to influence politics in other c...

[1] It has long been believed that there is a relationship between a society‟s culture and its ability to produce and sustain democratic forms of government. The ancient Athenians maintained that their democracy depended, in part, on the fostering of “civic virtue” or democratic culture. Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and J. S. Mill also maintained that culture and democracy were related, ...

I BEGIN WITH A QUANDARY that is very familiar to Martin Ostwald: Classical Athens saw the invention of both democracy and political theory, yet while we have a number of examples of criticism of democracy, no systematic defense of democracy-no democratic theory-survives from an Athenian pen. I propose that the conundrum is best explained by assuming that from the late fifth through the late fou...

article: Processes of globalization raise thorny issues of legitimacy as global governance institutions find themselves making policy decisions that have little grounding in popular consent. One solution would be to implement global democracy. Desirable as this might be, however, many scholars argue that global democracy is simply not feasible, for the social preconditions of democracy cannot b...

This article looks at the effect of politics on food security in thirty-eight SubSaharan African nations since 1990. In so doing, it helps clarify the causal mechanisms through which democracy impacts hunger. In contrast to previous empirical research where democracy is often treated as one-dimensional, this study incorporates multiple measures of democracy and freedom. The cross-national stati...

In spite of the inexorable march of democracy around the globe, just how democratic institutions a¤ect human well-being is open to debate. The evidence that democracy promotes prosperity is neither strong nor robust. Moreover which aspects of policy making and human well-being are promoted by democracies is still a subject of debate.1 Even if correlations between democracy and outcome measures ...

This study attempts to empirically examine the impact of democracy on agricultural productivity by estimating a cross-country agricultural production function. In the regressions, we control the education, economic freedom, climate and geographic variables, in order to see if democracy can still explain a significant portion of the heterogeneity of agricultural productivities across countries. ...