In this article, the authors investigate the effects of economic conditions on support for an incumbent regime in a newAfrican democracy. Drawing on two unique data sources fromZambia—the results of a 1,200-respondent postelection survey and a pair of 10,000-household poverty surveys conducted in the same years as that country’s first two posttransition general elections—the authors find eviden...

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...

the concepts of democracy have been around for centuries in different fields of human sciences. however, in most of these fields the idealistic and far-fetched features attributed to democracy have not been manipulated yet. it should be mentioned that there have been only a few serious attempts to find proper go-between elements, which could make such a concept as comprehensible and tangible as...

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...

Web 2.0 tools, while mobilising citizens to make informed choices, may also manipulated public opinion. This hypothesis forms the central theme of this research investigation through the historiography lens. Based on concurrent research from decade, the authors take a closer look at citizen-to-citizen engagement, so as to trace the role of web 2.0 tools, in perhaps manipulating public opinion o...