John Rawls characterizes political rationality as narrowly self-regarding and therefore incapable of motivating other-regard, self-moderation, or cooperative behavior. He ascribes these properties solely to reasonable, principled, reasoning. This article evaluates Rawls’s account by investigating his characterization the democratic modus vivendi, which builds upon this account: asserts that viv...

The paper proposes an analysis of liquid democracy (or, delegable proxy voting) from the perspective of binary aggregation and of binary diffusion models. We show how liquid democracy on binary issues can be embedded into the framework of binary aggregation with abstentions, enabling the transfer of known results about the latter—such as impossibility theorems—to the former. This embedding also...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an institution besieged. It has endeavored to be democratic but its attempts to do so have been disastrous. The typical explanation for this is that the problem is with ICANN: it fails to meet its democratic obligations. My view is that the problem is with our understanding of "democracy." Democracy is an empty concept that fail...

This essay turns to ancient sources in order to rethink the relationship between political apathy and democracy. If modern democratic theorists place political apathy entirely outside of democracy – either as a destructive limit upon the full realization of a democratic polity, or, more sanguinely, as a pragmatic necessity which tempers democracy so that it may function in a workable yet watere...

one of the basic subjects in political sociology of every society is the nature of stat in that society. the states have different economical social culture and political nature. the essay studies the political nature of the state in studies the political nature of the state in iran during pahlavi period , from the view point of transition to democracy. the aim of study the political nature of ...

Brazil is going through an institutional transition in the provision of public services, which had historically been supplied by State monopolies. A core element in this process is been the creation of a new form of public sector institutions – regulatory agencies with operational and financial autonomy. In this paper we identify their most important decisions and provide detailed analysis of t...

RATIONALE Public health policies are often dependent on political decision-making, but little is known of the impact of different forms of government on countries' health policies. In this exploratory study we studied the association between a wide range of process and outcome indicators of health policy and four groups of political factors (levels of democracy, e.g. voice and accountability; p...

In this paper, I argue that many recent interpretations of John Dewey’s vision of democracy distort that vision by fi ltering it through the prism of contemporary deliberative democratic theories. An earlier attempt to defend Dewey’s theory of moral deliberation is instructive for understanding the nature and function of this fi lter. In James Gouinlock’s essay “Dewey’s Th eory of Moral Deliber...

The success of the Internet has launched McLuhan’s idea of the global village. Over the years, the Internet has become a real political medium which has inspired the emergence of the concept of e-democracy. Despite some successful applications, many limitations prevent its wide expansion. Some of these limitations can be solved with social software, in particular with the emerging Web 2.0 appli...