The number of political parties and the type of electoral system may impact the level of democratic functioning within a government. Models are used to explore whether the number of political parties increases a country’s democracy score on the POLITY IV measure of democracy, and whether countries with proportional representation electoral systems have higher democracy scores than those without...

In this paper, we study representative democracy, one of the most popular classes of collective decision-making mechanisms, and contrast it with direct democracy. In a direct democracy, individuals have the opportunity to vote over the alternatives in every choice problem the population faces. In a representative democracy, the population commits to a candidate ex ante who will then make choice...

Over the past five decades, two successive waves of political reform have brought democracy to, first, Spain, Portugal and Greece, and, more recently, Central and Eastern European countries. We assessed whether democratization was associated with improvements in population health, as indicated by life expectancy and cause-specific mortality rates. Data on life expectancy at birth, age-standardi...

1. E-democracy is the key for the future action As for the term “E-democracy”, many definitions focus on the usage of ICT into political process and public decisions based on needs of citizens. As the idea of e-democracy is continuously improved, my approach to e-democracy as a phenomenon resulting from the usage of ICT as a tool is to enhance democratic system of governance. There is no doubt ...

We study a construction of the Mathieu group M12 using a game reminiscent of Loyd’s “15-puzzle”. The elements of M12 are realized as permutations on 12 of the 13 points of the finite projective plane of order 3. There is a natural extension to a “pseudogroup” M13 acting on all 13 points, which exhibits a limited form of sextuple transitivity. Another corollary of the construction is a metric, a...

A heuristic improvement technique referred to as multi-dimensional heuristics is presented. Instead of only applying the heuristic between two states X 1 and X 2 , when a distance esti­ mate of X 1 X 2 is needed, this technique uses a reference state R and applies the heuristic func­ tion to {X 1 ,R) and (X' 2 ,R) and compares the resulting values. If two states are close to each other, then th...