I BEGIN WITH A QUANDARY that is very familiar to Martin Ostwald: Classical Athens saw the invention of both democracy and political theory, yet while we have a number of examples of criticism of democracy, no systematic defense of democracy-no democratic theory-survives from an Athenian pen. I propose that the conundrum is best explained by assuming that from the late fifth through the late fou...

What allocation strategy do hegemonic party regimes use in order to increase their level of electoral support? Although the literature has established that targeting resources to marginally supportive districts is the most effective distributive strategy for competitive democracies, it is not possible to make a clear prediction about the best strategy for hegemonic party regimes due to the lack...

This paper engages the theme of “decolonizing psychological science” in the context of a perspective on psychological theory and research—namely, feminist psychology—that shares an emphasis on broad liberation. Although conceived as a universal theory and practice of liberation, scholars across diverse sites have suggested that feminism—perhaps especially as it manifests in psychological scienc...

Sexual education plays an essential role in preventing unplanned pregnancy and the transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). School-based sexual education programs, in particular, may be well positioned to address social factors that are empirically linked to negative sexual health outcomes, such as traditional social norms surrounding gender and sexuality. However, youth are seld...

Linking the health profession to the normalization of citizenship, scholars influenced by Michel Foucault claim that while biomedicine attends to the health of bodies, it is also constitutive of the social and bureaucratic practices that socialize subjects of the modern welfare state. Yet, we seldom learn about how patients themselves draw the medical gaze, nor how their resistances to biomedic...

This paper reports research into the application of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety to assist with identifying optimal choices of design solutions at the pre-design stage of designing digital ecosystems. This study of the application of Ashby’s Law is a component of a larger research program investigating the application of classical systems analysis tools in pre-design optimisation processes ...