Environmental assessment as an institution of liberal democracy

Subjective Measures of Liberal Democracy

Using democracy in empirical work requires accurate measurement. Yet, most policy and academic research presupposes the accuracy of available measures. This article explores judgespecific measurement errors in cross-national indicators of liberal democracy. The authors evaluate the magnitude of these errors in widely used measures of democracy and determine whether their results replicate durin...

Public Service and Liberal Democracy

The debate on television’s "public service"obligations can only make full sense if integrated in the broader context of the debate on the best political model for society. In fact, the classic "public service"rationale is based in a normative conception of good and in a suspicious view of the average citizen that is largely tributary of a Platonic or Elitist approach to the political organizati...

Environmental health, risk assessment, and democracy.

Liberal Environmental Citizenship

‘Environmental citizenship’ is, like other forms of ‘adjectival citizenship’, a recent invention. The environmental citizen’s life may be rather different from that of the ‘average’ citizen. For example, she will ‘turn off the tap when brushing [her] teeth or washing her face’; ‘walk, ride [her] bike, carpool or use public transport when possible’; ‘shop at second-hand stores and garage sales ....

Democracy as an equilibrium

Observation shows that while democracy is fragile in poor countries, it is impregnable in developed ones. To explain this pattern, I develop a model in which political parties propose redistributions of incomes, observe the result of an election, and decide whether to comply with the outcome or to launch a struggle for dictatorship. Democracy prevails in developed societies because too much is ...