Research on ICT and the public discourse often focuses on how ICT can be used to increase citizen participation in political decision-making processes. The Italian Five Star Movement (5SM) represents a novel approach to using ICT to include citizens, and a big challenge for the traditional political actors. The 5SM was initiated outside the established political systems, with the use of Interne...

This article explores the kinds of institutional arrangements most likely to be able to address sustainability issues. The term “institutions” is taken to mean the wide array of social, political, legal, and economic arrangements, structures, and rules—not simply institutions of the state, but of community and society more broadly. Of particular interest here is the interconnection of people an...

We examine whether individual differences in needs for security and certainty predict conservative (vs. liberal) position on both cultural and economic political issues and whether these effects are conditional on nation-level characteristics and individual-level political engagement. Analyses with cross-national data from 51 nations reveal that valuing conformity, security, and tradition over ...

Article history: Received 7 August 2014 Received in revised form 20 June 2015 Accepted 29 June 2015 Available online 9 July 2015 This study investigates whether a firm with strong corporate governance (CG) requires political connections (PCs), that is, we examine whether CG and PC substitute for or complement each other. Using 71,069 individual bank loan contracts from Taiwan, we examine how lo...

Adrian Hearn Despite significant differences in economic and demographic scale, the governments of Cuba and China have confronted a comparable “dual” challenge as they open their economies to foreign investment. (UNCTAD, 2005; United Nations Population Information Network, 2005) The first part of this challenge has been to promote greater interdependence and collaboration between foreign multin...

a response to the problem of irans backwardness preoccupied the minds of intellectual and political forces. since irans failure from russia while different domestic and external factors caused to defeat, differend and even contending views concerning irans backwardness played a key role in these failures. these diverse and contending views which arised at first in compilation of laws and establ...