I define the concept of preventive war, distinguish it from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic, and examine numerous conceptual issues that confound theoretical and empirical analyses of prevention. I then consider the argument that democracies rarely if ever adopt preventive war strategies because such strategies are contrary to the preferences of democratic publics an...

Democratic decentralisation is often presented as the sine qua non of rural poverty reduction. But there is little evidence that either democracy or decentralisation is necessary for poverty reduction in rural or urban areas, and indeed some evidence that they are counter-productive. There are success stories to report, however. They are cases where three conditions have been met: an appropriat...

carried out under the NATO programme of "Democratic Institutions Fellowship" Social stucture of the population as a social dimension of the democratic system

Internet voting, sometimes proposed as a means of enhancing democratic participation, is partly inspired by the democratic process of newsgroup creation on Usenet. To better understand how online voting might influence democratic participation more generally, we conducted an empirical investigation into the voting activity on newsgroups in the comp hierarchy of Usenet since 1989. Counter to exp...

The major predecessor to Ringen's and my own efforts to measure democratic quality in terms of the purpose of democracy is Robert Dahl's seminal book Polyarchy (1971). Measuring the quality of democracy requires two prior judgments: (1) making sure that, in terms of institutional characteristics, a country is sufficiently democratic, and that, as a minimum, it has universal suffrage, and (2) th...

More than five years down the line Venezuela had been slipping into an economic cri-sis. An economy wholly dependent on the sale of oil and no diversification of economic production is sure to face such a crisis. The fluctuation in oil prices is sure to hurt the market and the economy. To make matters worse, Venezuela now faces a political crisis with two individuals claiming themselves to be P...

How does presidentialism affect democratic representation, both in theory and in practice? In this paper, part of a larger book project, we build on our previous research (Samuels and Shugart 2003), which argued that all else equal, presidentialism impedes representation based on prospective government “mandates.” Inspired by and building on research on Latin America by Susan Stokes (2001), her...

Corruption and good governance have been a widely debated topic in the study of emerging democracies worldwide. The importance of considering corruption in new democracies is highlighted by studies showing that corruption is associated with, among others, low trust in political institutions, economic costs and inefficiencies, and low interpersonal trust. This is particularly important for new d...

Using a disaggregated measure that allows us to examine the distribution of state and local tax burdens between high and low income groups better, this research finds that in many models, Democratic control is positively associated with a lower relative tax burden on the poor. The results are stronger for average Democratic strength in the state government than for unified Democratic strength. ...