women’s issues are among basic issues of contemporary society which have been offered different solutions. while the first- wave feminists would insist on the gender equality, the second wave would emphasize that women differ from men. the third wave tried to hold on to both sides of the conundrum: equality and difference. iris marion young is one of the theorists of the third wave of feminism ...

the concept of shoura (council), and the relationship between shoura and democracy, has a key role in development of religious modernist debates in muslim world. the “general theory of shoura” is one of these theories on islamic democracy that provided and developed by dr. towfiq mohammad al-shavi(birth, 1918/egypt). the three aspects of his theory are: 1) the religious basis of shoura that pro...

(UNRISD) is an autonomous agency engaging in multidisciplinary research on the social dimensions of contemporary development issues. Its work is guided by the conviction that, for effective development policies to be formulated, an understanding of the social and political context is crucial. The Institute attempts to provide governments, development agencies, grassroots organizations and schol...

this essay considers the implications of the demographic transition for the emergence of modern democracy. although the idea of representative democracy was present in europe and north america in the late eighteenth century, here i am concerned with its realization—and this occurs much later. i argue that consideration of the demographic transition in western countries sheds light on what is so...

This chapter explored a South African education policy. Specifically the author examined outcomes-based learning and the implications of this borrowed curriculum in South African schools. The author focused on curriculum as a platform for discussion of the unique approach that the South African government employed to modify their adoption of democracy and transformation. Unfortunately, many sch...

We construct a majority cellular automata based model to explain the power-law signatures in Indonesian general election results. The understanding of second-order phase transitions between two different conditions inspires the model. The democracy is assumed as critical point between the two extreme socio-political situations of totalitarian and anarchistic social system – where democracy can ...

Regimes controlled by a rich elite often collapse and make way for democracy amidst widespread social unrest. Such regime changes are often followed by redistribution to the poor at the expense of the former elite. We argue that the reason why the elite may have to resort to full-scale democratization, despite its apparent costs to themselves, may be that lesser concessions would be viewed as a...

We examine the effects of digital access on the prevalence of democracy and its diffusion via geographical and trade networks across 152 countries between 2000 and 2008. Although civil liberties and media freedom show a consistently positive relationship with different forms of digital access, our dynamic models that allow co-evolution of digital access, democracy and trade tie formation sugges...

With the intention of understanding the current academic discussions on e-democracy, a systematic literature review was carried out, in order to answer the following question: What has been said about e-democracy in the last five years? A theoretical classification scheme, known as Ideological Discourse Placements (IDP), was proposed for analyzing the article's approaches. The need for deep-roo...