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...

the aim of this research is to scrutinize the effects of democratic regional organizations on democratization. we will scrutinize regional organizations regardless of their functional time and space. but attending the democratic feature that was regarded, we will concentrate mainly on the last three decades. after studying democratization process and represent subjects on democratic regional or...

Since leadership plays a vital role in democratic movements, understanding the nature of democratic leadership is essential. However, the definition of democratic leadership is unclear (Gastil, 1994). Also, little research has defined democratic leadership in the context of democratic movements. The leadership literature has paid no attention to democratic leadership in such movements, focusing...

This paper reexamines the democratic peace in a longitudinal fashion. We extend the democratic peace proposition beyond isolated militarized disputes or wars to longer-term interstate rivalries. Rivalries of all types are rare among democratic dyads; there is only one case of enduring rivalry between consistently democratic states, and most conflictual relationships between democracies remain c...

The “democratic peace” is not only a fancy idea of academia, most prominently advanced by the philosopher of Enlightenment Immanuel Kant in his famous essay on “Perpetual Peace” (1795), but two hundred years later, is established as a liberal research program in the U.S. International Relations discipline. The famous statement “democracies do not fight each other” seems so far to represent a re...

Purpose: Existing attempts to assess national development and processes of democratization suffer from conceptual and measurement challenges. This paper proposes a comprehensive concept of democratic development and develops a more inclusive concept of democracy to provide a common set of categories to evaluate its depth and quality. Design/methodology/approach: In order to measure the depth an...

The democratic critique of judicial review by constitutional courts has prompted its defenders to counter that courts have democratic qualities as good as, and in certain respects even stronger than, conventional democratic politics. This article offers a critical analysis of three arguments favouring this approach. The first argues that constitutional courts operate as exemplars of democratic ...