United States (2008) there has been exponential growth in the use of the Internet in candidates' strategies. In general, all the expectations concerning the potential of this new medium in election campaigns have been confirmed and everything suggests that we are immersed in a process of continually discovering new uses on the part of political parties and society at large. The characteristics ...

Democratization is a learning process. When citizens in new democracies still consider democracy as economic tool instead of a principle, domestic economic fluctuation steers democratic legitimacy. However, why do citizens attribute economic performance to regime type rather than incumbent party? This article proposes that people would compare the performance of different regimes in the same er...

This essay describes how a " democratic " voting can give a dictatorial outcome. In essence, choosing representatives in political systems could be understand as a coarse-graining process or decimation of opinions. Therefore, ideas and techniques from real-space renormalisation group can be used. This is a good example of the application of statistical physics to politics.

In many parts of the world there is a growing demand for participation in public policy decision making. This demand could be satisfied by the design and deployment of webbased group decision support systems to aid large groups of, possibly, non-sophisticated, users in participating in such decisions. After describing several mechanisms for participatory democracy, we provide a framework for de...

T o evaluate whether public involvement on a national forest district fairly represents the public's values, this article proposes four hypothesis tests. First, it is hypothesized that public-invo1l)ement programs operute according to a participatory democracy logic, in which broad cross sections o f the public participate in public involvement opportunities. A second hypothesis is tested that ...

The British House of Lords is generally seen as an unimportant political actor. It is unelected and has a formal veto over only very limited forms of legislation. According to Lijphart this gives the UK a system of ‘weak bicameralism’, and contributes to its position as a majoritarian democracy. The alternative classification system offered by Tsebelis treats the UK as essentially unicameral, w...

Democratic governments constantly need to make sense of their citizens’ needs to make appropriate decisions that reflect the overall wishes and needs of the population. However, except for mandatory voting scenarios, a low rate of citizen participation in government decisions through democratic processes is an aspect that defies democracy itself. Brazil’s participatory budget policy emphasizes ...

The debate on the impact of the information and communication technologies (ICT) on contemporary democracy has lasted in political science since the beginning of the information revolution. Two dominating and antagonistic standpoints present the electronic democracy as either the cure for democracy crisis, or the factor deepening major problems of democracy. The text questions such a simplified...