Thomas Christiano claims that one of the fundamental challenges democracy is faced with is the appropriate division of epistemic labor between citizens and experts. In this article I try to present and analyze Christiano’s solution from the perspective of social epistemology while utilizing the concepts and tools provided by this discipline. Despite fundamentally agreeing with his position, I a...

This article considers the path of social policy and democracy in Australia and the latest set of welfare reforms under Labor. The reforms can be seen to mark a reaction to the excesses of neoliberal government on the one hand, but they also represent continuity in neoliberal thought and policy on the other. As we shall see, engrained ideas about individualist wage-earning welfare, that were es...

____________________________________________________________________ ii Chapter 1_____________________________________________________________________1 1. Towards Improving Representative Democracy in Canada _____________________________ 1 1.1. Defining Democracy: A “Dynamic Balance” ______________________________________________1 1.2. The Contemporary Model: Representative Democracy __________...

There is increasing interest in promoting participatory democracy, in particular by allowing voting by mail or internet and through random-sample elections. A pernicious concern, though, is that of vote buying, which occurs when a bad actor seeks to buy ballots, paying someone to vote against their own intent. This becomes possible whenever a voter is able to sell evidence of which way she vote...

The Spirit of Democracy project began in the summer of 2000. The project aims to strengthen the commitment to democratic ideals and institutions in Russia. The objective of the project is to enhance the capacity of civic educators to develop and sustain a dynamic and vibrant program of citizenship education. This goal is being met through supporting teachers in Canada and Russia by providing on...

Based on survey data for Switzerland, new empirical findings on direct democracy are presented. In the first part, the authors 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 p...

As democracy goes through various crisis and citizens increasingly disengage with traditional party politics, extra-parliamentarian, alternative modes of democratic politics emerge on many fronts; manifesting a development towards what is called counter-democracy. Debates on the role of the internet in democracy have been with us since its inception; today the discussions focus on social media,...

Existing theories of coups against democracy emphasize that elites mount coups when democracy is particularly threatening to their interests. But holding interests constant, some potential plotters may have more influence over whether or not a coup succeeds. We develop a model where coups generate rents for elites and show that the likelihood of elite participation is increasing in their networ...

Alexis de Tocqueville’s notion of political and civic association is a recurrent theme in his work Democracy in America. There he argues that associations are a necessary correlational feature of democratization that should be promoted “at the same speed as the spread of the equality of social conditions” (600). This is because they correct the natural defects of democracy in that they (i) prot...