Thucydides is an important author for any discussion of the possibilities for an ancient Greek democratic peace. Though democratic peace did not, in fact, seem to function in classical Greece, a number of passages in Thucydides show that an affinity did exist among democratic factions and city-states in the context of hostile competition between democratic and oligarchic regimes. Thucydides rem...

In this study we explore the global effect of the Internet on democracy over the period of 1992 to 2002 by observing the relationships between measures related to democracy and Internet prevalence. Our results show a significant correlation between Internet penetration (measured as the estimated number of Internet users per 1,000 people) and a common indicator of a nation’s level of democratiza...

Electronic petition systems support participation in the democratic decision-making process. However, current petition systems often have serious drawbacks in reliability and anonymity. This paper presents PetAnon, a privacy-preserving petition system that tries to tackle the shortcomings of existing systems. A proof-ofconcept implementation is presented that uses the Belgian eID card in a boot...

In recent years rising quantities of electricity generated from new variable renewable energy sources (VRES) have influenced the structure markets in many countries. The major aim this work is to investigate conditions required head towards a sustainable and more democratic supply system by using even higher amounts VRES for example Austria. most important result investigation that an approach ...

This paper examines the impact of the form of government—–presidential or parliamentary—–on fiscal outcomes in democratic systems. Based on data for democracies in 98 countries between 1970 and 2002, it shows that the gross domestic product ratio of the central government budget balance is higher in presidential than in parliamentary democracies. It also shows that this impact is not due to the...