This article intends to clarify views regarding important challenges that have originated from the political, social, cultural and geopolitical structures in the elections systems of Persian Gulf Arab countries. Challenges that determine the compatibility levels of elections systems of these countries with the world’s democratic systems. An efficient elections system is the prerequisite for the...

This article considers the elite in Brazilian society as a core feature of political culture and examines its involvement in the development of democracy in post authoritarian Brazil from a socio-political and institutional point of view. Brazil’s elite have been criticized as having an ambiguous attitude towards democracy. Some scholars have suggested that Brazil’s elite exhibit no discernible...

SILENT DEMOCRACY, NOISY MEDIA The aim of my research in Silent Democracy, Noisy Media is to study representative democracy and the public sphere as a domain of democracy through four specific decision-making processes. According to Habermas, the public sphere is an analytical category between the state and civil society, and embraces more than just the media, serving as a common theatre for cit...

Conventional models of ‘transitions to democracy’ are incomplete and insufficient for the analysis of the regime changes in Russia and other post-Soviet societies, which go beyond the usual textbook cases. This article reconsiders conceptual frameworks for the analysis of democracy and democratization in the light of the experience of postSoviet political developments. The distinction between t...

Although political participation can take many different forms within a democratic regime, there is no doubt that in one way or another the notion is central to the very idea of a democracy. It is difficult to find a piece of research reported in contemporary journals of political science that does not purport to describe some form of political participation: studies of the voter, the party act...

The paper presents a brief analysis of the procedural approach towards constructing liberal political conceptions justice and democracy. Treatment J. Rawls’s evolution shows negative consequences abandoning external substantive criteria for theory evaluation, including efficiency, justification, truth. It also offers justification “epistemic turn” in contemporary theory. return classical episte...

DECONSTRUCTING RADICAL DEMOCRACY Articulation, representation, and being-with-others This paper is concerned with assessing the contribution of deconstruction to democratic theory. It critically considers the usefulness of the conceptual distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ as a means of interpreting deconstruction’s relation to political questions. In particular, it critically en...

This essay argues that neoliberalism has strengthened the sustainability of democracy in Latin America but limited its quality. Drastic market reform seems to have abetted the survival of competitive civilian rule through its external and internal repercussions. By opening up Latin American countries to the world economy, neoliberalism has exposed them to more of the international pressures for...