Ayatollah Khomeini and Ali Shariati are seen as twin pillars of revolutionary Islam in contemporary Iran. This article contextualizes and compares these radical discourses in three sections. It first problematizes the transformation of Khomeini as a quietist cleric into a revolutionary ayatollah. While Khomeini’s theory of velayat-e faqih was a radical departure from the dominant Shiite traditi...

We study dynamic selection of governments under different political institutions, with a special focus on institutional "flexibility" . A government consists of a subset of the individuals in the society. The competence level of the government in office determines collective utilities (e.g., by determining the amount and quality of public goods), and each individual derives additional utility f...

This article describes Electronic Democracy as an emergent statecraft model.Electronic Democracy is analyzed from a theoretical perspective that proposes edemocracy as the new millennium democratic system. In order to achieve thisgoal, an e-government concept was required. It is proposed that ElectronicGovernment is presented as the appropriate environment to originate a newrole...

Several studies have suggested the possibility of reverse causation in the ‘democratic peace’ relationship: that the well-known extreme rarity of wars between democratic nations may be partially or wholly explained by a negative impact of war on democracy. Three kinds of war-on-regime effects are discussed. Anterior effects are regime changes that occur in preparation for wars; concurrent effec...

Online debate tools for participatory democracy and crowdsourcing legislation are limited by different factors. One of them arises when discussion of proposals reaches a large number of contributions and therefore citizens encounter difficulties in mapping the arguments that constitute the dialectical debate. To address this issue, we present a visualization tool that shows the discussion of an...

We study the dynamic selection of governments. A government consists of a subset of the individuals in the society. The competence level of the government in o ce determines collective utilities (e.g., by determining the amount and quality of public goods), and each individual derives additional utility from being part of the government (e.g., corruption or rents from holding o ce). We characte...

In this paper I take up the question of the relationship between democracy and inclusion. I present the deliberative turn in democratic theory as an attempt to overcome ‘external exclusion’ and discuss Iris Young’s work as an attempt to overcome ‘internal exclusions.’ I argue that although attempts to make democracy more inclusive are laudable, they are ultimately based upon a colonial concepti...

Using a Santiago, Chile, health group as an ethnographic case study, I propose ‘‘accountable democracy’’ as an alternative normative project to the theory of deliberative democracy outlined by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms. Accountable democracy has at its center the impact of public-sphere opinion formation on decision making by officials in elected governments. [accountability, Chile, d...

democracy is a modern model that united nations, governments, nations, in the last decade of twenty century have started that to prevent war, violence and it was due to of creation of international peace and security. requirement to know different dimensions of the subject of tendency of current research, as consideration of globalization of democracy and its effects for international peace was...

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 ...