At the intersection of behavioral and institutional studies of policy-making lie a series of questions about how elite choices affect mass public opinion. Scholars have considered how judicial decisions—especially US Supreme Court decisions—affect individuals’ support for specific policy positions. These studies yield a series of competing findings. Whereas past research uses opinion surveys to...

At the center of debates on deliberative democracy is the issue of how much deliberation citizens experience in their social networks. These “disagreements about disagreement” come in a variety of forms, with scholars advocating different empirical approaches (e.g., Huckfeldt, Johnson, and Sprague 2004; Mutz 2006) and coming to different substantive conclusions. We address these discrepancies b...

This paper argues that energy democracy could manifest in terms of public engagement at the community level, free of state intervention, government fostering, and donor support, even in locations where governments have been in flux from a democracy to a non-democracy. In currently non-democratic Thailand, for example, public engagement on community energy transitions had occurred, were sustaine...

Design choices can be clarified when group interaction software is directed at solving the interaction needs of particular groups that pre-date the groupware. We describe an example: the Deme platform for online deliberation. Traditional threaded conversation systems are insufficient for solving the problem at which Deme is aimed, namely, that the democratic process in grassroots community grou...

This paper focuses on the case study of “Puzzled by Policy: Helping you be part of EU”, a European eparticipation project, which studies the needs of concerned citizens, stakeholders and decision makers, and provides a unique platform for users to learn and discuss about policy at the EU and national level, while finding out what particular policies mean to them on the national level so that th...

The Internet as a mega-collection of smaller communication networks has provided each individual the means to voice their opinion across the world. This capability has enabled a significant number of individuals to be heard by politicians and governments. Functions such as social media, as well as personal publishing (e.g. blogging), have provided a profound ease with which individuals can comm...

Because the art of communication is central to the art of democracy, it is fundamental to economic development. Specifically, freedom and the ability to participate fully in economic governance, and in the corresponding democratic knowledge and learning processes, would reflect and be reflected by a parallel freedom and ability in communication. The issues are explored by comments on art, and o...

Novel technologies for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) will impact the way society views and deals with AD and ageing. However, such "sociocultural" impacts are hardly acknowledged in standard approaches of technology assessment. In this paper, we outline three steps to assess such broader impacts. First, conceptual analysis of the ideas underlying technological developments shows h...

Governments, international agencies and corporations are increasingly investing in traditional herbal medicine research. Yet little literature addresses ethical challenges in this research. In this paper, we apply concepts in a comprehensive ethical framework for clinical research to international traditional herbal medicine research. We examine in detail three key, underappreciated dimensions ...