Democracy is defined by two core tenets: voice and pluralism. Within these constraints, a wide variety of regime types can be designed. We show that the only new, untested form of democracy is when every citizen is governed by the political party of his/her choice. Multiple full-fledged governments would coexist in the same national territory at the same time, each one sovereign only over the p...

For some time the notion ‘technocracy’ has been, for better or for worse, associated with the functioning of the European Union (EU). But what role do technocratic assumptions play in the EU’s new ‘symbolic’ policy agenda of democracy promotion, if any? Some authors have suggested that ‘depoliticising’ technocratic biases exist in the EU democracy promotion framework, despite its ‘normative’ rh...

Conventional views of African politics imply that Africans’ political opinions are based either on enduring cultural values or their positions in the social structure. In contrast, we argue that Africans form attitudes to democracy based upon what they learn about what it is and does. This learning hypothesis is tested against competing cultural, institutional, and structural theories to explai...

Introduction In a recent essay Christiano (2004) coined a distinction between 'mainstream' and 'revisionist' rational choice political theory, and cast us in the role of revisionist theorists 1. While we disagree with some aspects of Christiano's argument 2 , we broadly accept our designated role as revisionist public choice theorists. The major purposes of this brief paper are to provide a sum...

In this paper we discuss how a computational version of argumentation involving practical reasoning can be applied to the domain of e-democracy. We begin with a discussion of practical reasoning in general and we draw attention to differences between practical reasoning and reasoning about beliefs. We suggest that practical arguments should be treated as a species of presumptive reasoning, best...

Inspired by Habermasian critiques of liberalism, supporters of deliberative democracy seek an extension of social democratic institutions to further a reinvigorated communicative rationality against the ‘atomism’ of market processes. This paper offers a critique of deliberative democratic theory from a Hayekian perspective. For Hayek, the case against the social democratic state rests with the ...

In many instances, both voters and politicians are imperfectly informed about which policies are optimal. We analyze politicians’ policy choice in such situations. A distinctive element of our analysis is that we investigate how the strategic sophistication of voters’ beliefs about politicians’ behavior affects policy choice. This provides a novel approach in political economy that leads to a n...

Democratic Authority is a tour de force. Among its considerable virtues, David Estlund’s book manages to introduce genuinely new and plainly important ideas on well-worn topics right at the heart of modern political philosophy. Indeed, it does so not once, but several times. In this discussion, I shall concentrate on just one of those ideas, the idea of ‘normative consent’. Estlund offers his i...

It is not every day that a scholar stoops to defend legislatures. Oh sure, lots of political theorists rush to the defense of democracy in the abstract, but they often have little to say about actual democratic practice. By contrast, empirical political scientists (and “positive political theorists”) have lavished attention on the institutions of democratic governance such as legislatures (part...

the aim of this paper is to explain the relationship between generation gap and democracy in iran in the last fifty years. to do so, the writers have used the results of the national polls conducted in 1974, 1995 and 2002 in their attempt to clarify the activeness or inactiveness of the generation gap by analyzing the differences between the attitudes, values and behaviors of the young and adul...