Drawing on literature from Anthropology, Economics, Political Science and Sociology, an interdisciplinary theory is presented that links the rise of contractual forms of exchange within a society with the proliferation of liberal values, democratic legitimacy, and peace among democratic nations. The theory accommodates old facts and yields a large number of new and testable ones, including the ...

Through the use of a three-wave panel study of citizens of the former East German city of Leipzig, the article explores the changes in the relationship between socialist values and democratic support over time. It finds that the direct effect of socialist values on democratic satisfaction declines substantially from the 1993–96 portion of the panel study to the 1996–98 period. As individuals ac...

Resolving a controversy on the relationship of development to democratization, this article expands the time period under study with panel data running from the early nineteenth century (a time where hardly any country was democratic) to the end of the twentieth century, and shows a positive and significant effect of income on the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic consolidatio...

A doctorate in one—albeit particularly prestigious—of the institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences is an unlikely background for a democratic theorist. Yet, it is with this background that Andranik Tangian, now a resident of Germany, has taken up the task of writing a comprehensive treatise on the development of democratic thinking from its early beginnings ca. 500 BC to the modern days. Tang...

This paper argues that e-Government holds much potential for transforming government activity, and, in respect to representative government specifically, it focuses upon the development of e-Participation and e-Democracy to enhance the responsiveness of the relationship between government and the governed. Recent upheavals across the Middle East the 'Arab Spring' have highlighted the importance...

One of the obstacles to democratic development is the reluctance of political leaders to leave office. This paper argues that alongside democratic constraints and accountability, leaders’ career concerns — specifically, the possibility of post-tenure careers — is an important factor behind their rotation in office. While literature exists about leaders’ exit and fate, we lack a systematic under...

The end of the Cold War ushered the world into a new sphere of democratic governance. Citizens in developing countries began actively contributing to the democratic process by demanding probity and accountability within existing governance structures. The efforts by responding to the challenges of the new ‘wave’ of democratisation in the late 1980s by embracing democracy assistance as a core pr...

The concepts of electronic government and electronic democracy have common roots in that electronic government must rest on, and support, democratic principles. This article discusses how the components of a democratic society are treated as they are built into the emerging electronic infrastruc-tures, dealing with services and dialogues pertinent to the functioning of the public sector, and tr...

The institutional differences between presidential and parliamentary rule are well known, yet the practical effects of these divergent constitutional arrangements within democratic polities have received scant attention. This paper employs a global dataset to test the relationship between a historical measure of parliamentary rule and fourteen indicators ranging across three policy areas: polit...