Conventional views of African politics imply that Africans’ political opinions are based either on enduring cultural values or their positions in the social structure. In contrast, we argue that Africans form attitudes to democracy based upon what they learn about what it is and does. This learning hypothesis is tested against competing cultural, institutional, and structural theories to explai...

The establishment of irrevocable democracy, the rule of law, free market economic relations, and the protection of fundamental human rights have not yet assumed key significance in the South Caucasus countries. Consequently, all pressing problems of the region continue to intensify, keeping the region politically and economically unstable. Given contending geopolitical and geoeconomic interests...

INTRODUCTION Mankind has been constantly exposed to radiation by natural radioactivity, nuclear tests, medical applications and nuclear energy activities. The natural radioactivity is the main component to human exposure and it is recognized that the most important contributors to the committed effective dose received by population due to natural sources are the short-lived decay products of ra...

In recent years, political parties have adopted Online Delegative Democracy platforms such as LiquidFeedback to organise themselves and their political agendas via a grassroots approach. A common objection against the use of these platforms is the delegation system, where a user can delegate his vote to another user, giving rise to so-called super-voters, i.e. powerful users who receive many de...

How should open agent societies be organized? Should they be democracies, and, if so, what types of democracy? We present three normative models of democracy from political philosophy and consider their relevance for the engineering of open multi-agent systems: democracy as wise rule by an elite; democracy as the exercise of rational consumer choices by voters; and democracy as deliberative dec...

Following the introduction of democratic institutions in the countries of central and eastern Europe, the question of the consolidation of these newly implemented democracies arises. One of the most important conditions for consolidation is support for democracy from the community of citizens in the respective countries. In the theoretical frame of reference of this analysis, it is postulated t...

The debate on the impact of the information and communication technologies (ICT) on contemporary democracy has lasted in political science since the beginning of the information revolution. Two dominating and antagonistic standpoints present the electronic democracy as either the cure for democracy crisis, or the factor deepening major problems of democracy. The text questions such a simplified...

This article reveals Ali Shariati's thoughts on methodological issues in studying Islam. The data used are the works of Shariati and relevant literature obtained from library sources analyzed by qualitative descriptive methods philosophical approaches. finds that views it as important necessary to understand Islam various ways. According him, method understanding is fundamental for socio-politi...

The field of e-Democracy has suffered from fuzzy conceptualizations about the actual role of ICT in the field. That is, the contribution of “e” in e-Democracy has been difficult to justify. To address the role of ICT in e-Democracy projects we contribute theoretically by combining knowledge on IT artefacts, genres and E-Democracy models to be able to explore ICT in its embedded surroundings. IT...