Deliberative democracy is a political theory that places deliberation at the heart of political decision making. In a deliberation, people justify their preferences to one another. They are confronted with new information and new perspectives, which might lead them to change their preferences. Therefore, deliberative democracy, unlike social choice theory, takes preferences to be secondary (der...

Since its inception and subsequent diffusion, the Internet has been lauded as a potent democratizing agent. Using macro-level panel data from 1994 to 2003, this study examined 152 countries and found that increased Internet diffusion was a meaningful predictor of more democratic regimes. This was shown to be most true in developed countries, where nonlinear fixed effects regression models showe...

Drawing on literature from Anthropology, Economics, Political Science and Sociology, an interdisciplinary theory is presented that links the rise of contractual forms of exchange within a society with the proliferation of liberal values, democratic legitimacy, and peace among democratic nations. The theory accommodates old facts and yields a large number of new and testable ones, including the ...

Through the use of a three-wave panel study of citizens of the former East German city of Leipzig, the article explores the changes in the relationship between socialist values and democratic support over time. It finds that the direct effect of socialist values on democratic satisfaction declines substantially from the 1993–96 portion of the panel study to the 1996–98 period. As individuals ac...

The author would like to thank Keith LaFoe for his excellent assistance in the elaboration of the figures in this paper. 2 Introduction In recent years, numerous scholarly analysts have sought to determine the trajectory of the third democratic wave in Latin America. 1 The onset of the third wave in the region is widely dated as 1978, when civilian leadership was elected in the Dominican Republ...

R apid growth in the reach and influence of global governance arrangements has triggered broad concern among citizens and scholars alike about the lack of democratic accountability in global politics. This important question bears directly on the legitimacy of global governance regimes and on the prospects for democratizing power in the supranational context (Nye 2001). Keohane (2006) sees the ...

This paper develops a model to analyze economic performance under different political regimes. An “oligarchic” society, where political power is in the hands of major producers, protects their property rights but also tends to erect significant entry barriers against new entrepreneurs. Democracy, where political power is more widely diffused, imposes redistributive taxes on producers, but tends...

We reexamine the democratic neutrino mixing ansatz, in which the mass matrices of charged leptons and Majorana neutrinos arise respectively from the explicit breaking of S(3)L×S(3)R and S(3) flavor symmetries. It is shown that a democracy term in the neutrino sector can naturally allow the ansatz to fit the solar neutrino mixing angle θsun ≈ 33. We predict sin 2θatm ≈ 0.95 for atmospheric neutr...

This paper analyzes an overlapping generation model of public good provision under repeated voting. The public good is financed through age-dependent taxation that distorts human capital investment. Taxes redistribute income both across different skill groups and across generations. We contrast the political equilibria with the Ramsey allocation, and analyze the sources of inefficiency. The pol...