Academics and researchers face a challenge of making sense of the role e-democracy plays in the democratic process and with what implications. This requires a deeper understanding of the objectives and assumptions that underpin e-democracy innovations, as well as institutional and technology structures that condition their role in democratic engagement. This paper interprets case study data col...

What kinds of electoral systems can help democracy survive in countries split by deep cleavages of race, religion, language, or ethnicity? As is well-known, politicians in such “divided societies” often have strong incentives to “play the ethnic card” at election time, using communal appeals to mobilize voters. “Outbidding”—increasingly extreme rhetoric and demands—can offer rewards greater tha...

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...

Race, Reform, and the Regulation of the Electoral Process: Recurring Puzzles in American Democracy is the first volume in Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge Studies in Election Law and Democracy series. It offers a critical reevaluation of three fundamental and interlocking themes in American democracy: the relationship between race and politics; the performance and reform of election syste...

People often identify justice with impartiality. This reflects reality: many who experience injustice complain of biased treatment. But whether bias is objectionable depends on a prior commitment to an ideal of nondomination. I advance this claim by reference to impartiality arguments defended by Brian Barry and Amartya Sen. Then I sketch a historical account of impartialist ventures that shows...

This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of critical media literacy and analyzes four different approaches to teaching it. Combining cultural studies with critical pedagogy, we argue that critical media literacy aims to expand the notion of literacy to include different forms of media culture, information and communication technologies and new media, as well as deepen the potential o...

In this case study, an e-democracy approach called liquid democracy is applied for gathering feedback from a large group of software end-users. Liquid democracy aims to leverage the scalability of decision processes to a crowd of people. The outcomes gave an indication of the added value of liquid democracy techniques for gathering end-user requirements. Traditional requirements engineering app...

Democracy as an overall model for how societies should be governed has been a remarkable success over the last forty years. More countries than ever are now considered to be democratic or at least on their way to becoming democracies (Diamond 2007, Teorell 2010). Various international organizations that have democracy promotion on their agenda should nowadays be very content since there are cer...