The Internet revolution of democracy, which will transform earthly representative democracies by employing the communication and collaboration capabilities of the Internet, has yet to come. Here, we enlist the wisdom of our forefathers to lead the way. By consulting the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, we distill core values of democracy and derive from them requirement...

Reducing poverty by 50% through the use of information and communication technology (ICT), which is the primary objective of the millennium development goals (MDGs) requires a lot of innovations such as the implementation of e-Government, e-Democracy, e-Learning, e-Voting, eJudiciary, and e-Health to mention but a few. Participatory democracy is a major requiremer1t for achieving the MDGs, part...

It is widely thought that oil and democracy do not mix. Rentier states, it is argued, need not tax their citizens, thus breaking a crucial link between citizens and their governments, and dimming the prospects for democracy. In this paper I examine the link between rentierism and democracy using a cross-regional dataset. I pay particular attention to the possibility that there are both positive...

Democracy is a notion whose legitimacy is based on its moral foundations. The first part of the paper demonstrates the moral qualities of democracy. For this purpose structural and material similarities between the concept of responsibility and democracy are especially useful. In the second part of the paper the impact of information technology, especially the Internet, on the moral foundation ...

experience of double revolutionary upheavals in russia during the 20th century which produced a new socio-economic regularity on one hand and changed the political system from monarchial to democratic republic and then soviet state and finally presidential republic at the end of 20th century on the other hand are treated as democratic movements. in this regard, crumbling of ex-soviet regime and...

the purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between religiosity of iranians and their attitude toward democracy. the subjects of the study consisted of 383 students (both male and female) from shiraz university, and the data was collected through a questionnaire in spring 2004. to determine the relationship, the writers used max weber's theory. students' religiosity was measured...

Democracy is defined by two core tenets: voice and pluralism. Within these constraints, a wide variety of regime types can be designed. We show that the only new, untested form of democracy is when every citizen is governed by the political party of his/her choice. Multiple full-fledged governments would coexist in the same national territory at the same time, each one sovereign only over the p...

Political theory from its very onset has determined that democracy is inconceivable without a crisis. This applies to the ancient writings of Plato, Aristotle, Polybios to the modern era with writings of Tocqueville, Marx and Max Weber or since the 1970s the leftists Jürgen Habermas (1973) and Claus Offe (1972), the conservative Crozier, Huntington, Watanuki (1975), the leftist NeoSchmittian Ch...

17.267, Fall 2013 Is Direct Democracy a Perfect Panacea? INTRODUCTION Direct democracy is one of the United States’ oldest, most popular, yet most controversial political institutions. Praised by its proponents as democracy in its “purest” form, provisions that fall into this category give citizens the ability to vote directly on various policies. However, at the same time, many fear that direc...

Democracy is rule by the demos, but by what criteria is the demos constituted? Theorists of democracy have tended to assume that the demos is properly defined by national boundaries or by the territorial boundaries of the modern state. In a recent turn, many democratic theorists have advanced the principles of affected interests and coercion as the basis for defining the boundaries of democracy...