Based on survey data for Switzerland, new empirical findings on direct democracy are presented. In the first part, we show that, on average, public employees receive lower financial compensation under more direct democratic institutions. However, top bureaucrats are more constrained in direct democracies and have to be compensated by higher wages for that loss of power. In the second part, we d...

News and blog websites often have political bias (such as Republican, Democratic) in their articles. Automatic detection of the bias will improve personalized feed and categorization of news and blog articles. Our project aims to predict Republican vs. Democratic bias of news websites and political blogs using the phrases (a.k.a. memes) they quote in their text. We form a bipartite graph of web...

The Internet enables entirely new forms of interactive mass communication, which require novel ways of sociotechnological system design. It is argued that the e-democracy domain is an ideal field of application for what is here called ‘social intelligence design’. We suggest that the democratic and communicative potential of the Internet can be exploited in order to help strengthening the legit...

We show that democratic change may be triggered by transitory economic shocks. Our approach uses within-country variation in rainfall as a source of transitory shocks to sub-Saharan African economies. We find that negative rainfall shocks are followed by significant improvement in democratic institutions. This result is consistent with the economic approach to political transitions, where trans...

Arguably, liberal democratic societies are seeing the emergence of a ‘Fifth Estate’ that is being enabled by the Internet. This new organizational form is comparable to, but potentially more powerful than, the Fourth Estate, which developed as a significant force in an earlier period with an independent press and other mass media. While the significance of the press and the Internet to democrat...

rawls’ theory of justice is expressed in a constructivist procedure. he holds that his constructivist procedure is free of metaphysical presuppositions. his constructivist procedure is here pursued in three stages: (1) in a theory of justice, rawls intends to come to moral principles regarding the original position which could even result in other moral principles as well. he also asserts some ...

It is common knowledge that the Democratic Russia Movement has become the first political organization able to unite the democratic forces in Russia, and thus challenge in an efficient way the political monopoly of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). However, the political and economic crises in the country have affected the success of this large organization. Cracks in its unity ha...

How does the domestic political climate within democratic states affect the duration of their foreign military engagements? To answer this question we combine a rationalist model of war termination with a theory about how partisan politics affects the policy preferences of national leaders to predict the duration of democratic military interventions. Specifically, we examine how changes in a ch...