How does presidentialism affect democratic representation, both in theory and in practice? In this paper, part of a larger book project, we build on our previous research (Samuels and Shugart 2003), which argued that all else equal, presidentialism impedes representation based on prospective government “mandates.” Inspired by and building on research on Latin America by Susan Stokes (2001), her...

This paper discusses political leadership and national security in the Nigerian fourth republic. The paper accentuates that the democratic process itself constitute a functional mechanism for interest articulation and aggregation thereby checking agent threat to national security that may arise from lack of input or participation in the political process. The paper through the use of leadership...

As Juan Linz has recently argued, many problem of democratic government would be difficult to understand without including the time dimension in our analysis of the democratic process. This is because government pro tempore is an essential and defining characteristic of democratic governance (Linz, 1995). The time limit inherent in the requirement of elections at regular intervals is a powerful...

How does civic education affect the development of democratic political culture in new democracies? Using a unique threewave panel data set from Kenya spanning the transitional democratic election of 2002, we posit a two-step process of the social transmission of democratic knowledge, norms, and values. Civic education first affected the knowledge, values, and participatory inclinations of indi...