Significant developments are occurring in the domain of electronic government within the UK – the use of ICT to enable re-structuring of governmental processes. In this paper we look at that subset of e-Government known as electronic democracy. In particular, we describe how electronic consultation, an important facet of electronic democracy, is being used to procure ideas from partnership orga...

This paper examines the hypothesis that corporatist intermediation by party governments facilitates incomes policy formation and is effective in reaching agreements between employers and trade unions as well. A social democratic party in government would positively enhance this process. Investigating this for the Netherlands between –, two puzzles emerge. The first puzzle is that coalit...

Demand for renewable energy is booming. Scholars often attribute this success to feed-in tariffs (FITs), which mandate that energy utilities pay a premium to renewable electricity producers and guarantee grid access for them. Why have so many countries, including least developed ones, adopted these policies? We hypothesize that democratic governments have political incentives to adopt the FIT b...

As democracy goes through various crisis and citizens increasingly disengage with traditional party politics, extra-parliamentarian, alternative modes of democratic politics emerge on many fronts; manifesting a development towards what is called counter-democracy. Debates on the role of the internet in democracy have been with us since its inception; today the discussions focus on social media,...

Existing theories of coups against democracy emphasize that elites mount coups when democracy is particularly threatening to their interests. But holding interests constant, some potential plotters may have more influence over whether or not a coup succeeds. We develop a model where coups generate rents for elites and show that the likelihood of elite participation is increasing in their networ...

I define the concept of preventive war, distinguish it from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic, and examine numerous conceptual issues that confound theoretical and empirical analyses of prevention. I then consider the argument that democracies rarely if ever adopt preventive war strategies because such strategies are contrary to the preferences of democratic publics an...

The paper is concerned with democratisation in the Third World since the 1980s, a period when dozens of Third World countries underwent at least some measure of democratic change. The paper, both general and comparative, rather than specific and focused on one or several countries, aims to try to help locate discussions in the workshopÕs analytical framework: to assess the extent of democratic ...

Introduction Throughout the past three decades governments, international development agencies and various non-governmental organisations have increasingly reflected an interest in adopting, either in policy or rhetoric, the idea of community participation. One of the greatest polemics encountered both in discourse and practise involves the interpretation and subsequent meaning that different i...

Although there is no more iconic, stalwart, and eloquent defender of liberty and representative democracy than J. S. Mill, he sometimes endorses nondemocratic forms of governance. This article explains the reasons behind this seeming aberration and shows that Mill actually has complex and nuanced views of the transition from nondemocratic to democratic government, including the comprehensive an...

There exist several models to describe “progress” in eParticipation. Models are typically ladder type and share two assumptions; progress is equalled with more sophisticated use of technology, and direct democracy is seen as the most advanced democracy model. None of the assumptions are true, considering democratic theory, and neither is fruitful as the simplification disturbs analysis and henc...