Many commentators have noted the existence of a historical correlation between cities and democratization. This image of the city as an inherently civic space is linked to the notion that the spatial concentration intrinsic to urban contexts promotes a democracy of proximity. Seen from this perspective, it is perhaps not surprising that the most urbanized region of the global south, Latin Ameri...

Using a new dataset of Swiss cantons from 1890 to 2000, we estimate the causal effect of direct democracy on government spending. Our analysis is novel in two ways: first, we use fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity; second, we combine a new instrument with fixed effects to address the potential endogeneity of institutional reform. We find that direct democracy has a constraini...

In recent years, several case studies have appeared on howmobile telephones, SMS and the Internet had an impact on political activities. It has been widely argued that information and communication technology (ICT) is influencing democracy all over the world. However, few studies provide any analysis of how ICT expansion correlates with measures of democracy. In this paper, we investigate the r...

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Contents Acknowledgements page vii List of abbreviations ix Introduction 1 1 The question: is 'liberal democracy' good for economic development? 10 1.1 The context 13 1.2 The pro-'liberal democracy' and anti-'liberal democracy' camps: situating the democracy–development debate within the general debate about 'liberal democr...

This paper, commencing with the revision of classical concepts on democracy, puts forward that democracy is not only the aim but also a kind of means and method, based on which the paper further analyzes the shaping of democracy, and points out that elite democracy is an inevitable trend and that the role and function that elite democracy plays in the process of democratization is the exhibitio...

Abstract This article analyzes the interplay between national identity and democracy. Multilevel models were tested using European Value Survey ( EVS 2017), which includes 30 countries in total. On individual level, emphasis on non-voluntary features of identity, where membership depends accident origin, relates to lower support for At country level actual democracy was taken account (Varieties...

in the end of twentieth. century and •the .beginning of the third millennium, all political regimes' practically for acquiring legitimacy want to introduce themselves as a democratic system. today there is no question about the truth of the democracy, ;whether that is . fundamentally good or bad? but the question 'is a bout the most efficient and the best form of democracy. nowadays, ...

It is well-known in the literature that income per capita is strongly correlated with the level of democracy across countries. In an influential paper, Acemoglu et al. (2008) find that this linear correlation disappears once they control for country-specific effects focusing on within-country variation. In this paper, we find evidence of a non-linear effect from income to democracy even after c...

This article offers a critical assessment of Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of democracy. It suggests that the main thrust of a discursive account of legitimacy is the attempt to show how the demands of maximal democratic inclusion might be reconciled with a politics of reasoned agreements. While this aim is endorsed, the thrust of the argument is that a critical theory of democracy require...