Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the USSR’s successor states have not made the smooth transition to liberal democracy that many in Europe and the United States had once expected. The Baltic states and most eastern European countries have transitioned to the status of “sustainable democracies,” but the rest of the Soviet Union’s successor states sit more along a continuum of auto...

Gordon Tullock’s The Politics of Bureaucracy must be considered one of the most important works on bureaucracy ever written. In addition to discussing Tullock’s contribution to our understanding of bureaucracy, I contend that his insights on the topic remain relevant today. To support this claim, I focus on U.S.-led reconstruction efforts which attempt to export liberal democracy via military o...

Sociology, as conceived by Comte, was to put an end to the anarchy of opinions characteristic of liberal democracy by replacing opinion with the truths of sociology, imposed through indoctrination. Later sociologists backed away from this, making sociology acceptable to liberal democracy by being politically neutral.The critics of this solution asked ‘whose side are we on?’ Burawoy provides a n...

It is not every day that a scholar stoops to defend legislatures. Oh sure, lots of political theorists rush to the defense of democracy in the abstract, but they often have little to say about actual democratic practice. By contrast, empirical political scientists (and “positive political theorists”) have lavished attention on the institutions of democratic governance such as legislatures (part...

The concept of human rights, supposedly universal importance, is usually derived from the tradition referred to as ‘Western’. Although ‘classic approaches’ – Greek, Roman and Christian, refer norms natural law, making them basis or limits rights individuals, in modern approaches relation reserved, manner that become primary norms. liberals 17th 18th centuries consider law nature a tool for thei...