alph's Pretty Good Grocery, for those like me who miss popular culture allusions, is a fictional shop in the imaginary Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon, a place invented by the humorist Garrison Keilor. Its slogan is 'If you can't get it at Ralph's, you can probably get along without it'. For political scientist John Mueller, this slogan sums up capitalism and democracy. They may not supply every...

For quite a long time it was considered that is the easiest to build democracy through exclusion of religion and all religious content from public sphere. This separation resulted in crisis we experience nowadays degra­dation democracy. The article an attempt rethink these relationships. It pointed out such postulated separation, formation sphere participation democracy, leads this area subordi...

It is shown how two tools developed in argumentation theory are useful for AI systems for electronic democracy [2,3] and more generally for formal dialogue systems representing deliberation. The novel part of this analysis is that it represents the speech of proposing as a small dialogue exchange in which one party practically reasons with another, based on premises that both are committed to, ...

The nascent democracy in Nigeria is plagued with myriad of intrigues, discordant opinions of the political class. The reason is not farfetched. Every political party sees its manifesto and plans of action as the best for the citizenry. They elbow each other in the process of garnering political recognition and vibrancy. Their unhealthy rivalry only heat up the polity. How be it some Nigerians s...

Democracy is possible because of an increase in the complexity society, but that same seems to threaten democracy. There a clear imbalance between people’s actual competence and th...

Abstract. We perform a Why-Because Analysis (WBA) starting from the information in the Executive Summary of the U.S. DoD Aircraft Accident Investigation Board report on the shootdown of two U.S. Army Black Hawk transport helicopters by U.S.A.F. F-15 fighter aircraft over Northern Iraq on 14 April 1994, during Operation Provide Comfort. We compare with the effort of Snook to perform a similar an...

L democracy, and its promotion, are now facing a set of serious challenges.1 On the one hand, as the Arab Spring demonstrates, democratic aspirations are intensifying, which opens up significant new opportunities for democracy support. On the other hand, in the context of the financial crisis and austerity, levels of funding for democracy aid are being reconsidered, and the credibility and effe...

lebanon enjoyed the constitution in 1924. in other words, this is the second country in middle east after iran which has enjoyed the constitution. lebanon is considered as the pattern of the islam world and west world which enjoys both rich culture of islam and culture and rules of west. lebanon has the distinguished status in comparison with islamic and arabic countries and the whole countries...

For some time the notion ‘technocracy’ has been, for better or for worse, associated with the functioning of the European Union (EU). But what role do technocratic assumptions play in the EU’s new ‘symbolic’ policy agenda of democracy promotion, if any? Some authors have suggested that ‘depoliticising’ technocratic biases exist in the EU democracy promotion framework, despite its ‘normative’ rh...