A global ‘associational revolution’ appears to be underway in many parts of the world and the rise of private voluntary organizations is beginning to have significant impacts on many nations’ democratic governance (Salamon, 1993; Kim, 2003). The rise of third sector organizations (TSOs) or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the decline of nationstates are changing not only the way societ...

To better understand why Middle Eastern states continue to languish at the bottom of world rankings on gender equality, this study presents critical discourse analysis of state and civil society organizations’ implementation of the Participative Democratic Model of gender mainstreaming. A requirement of the 1995 United Nations Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the Participative Democ...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first task is to develop a conceptual framework for thinking about local democratic governance. Once that framework is developed, specific indicators will be proposed to monitor the quality of key features or characteristics of a process of local democratic governance. The indicators will be “actionable” and can be used to guide CDD operations and track...

Introduction Can individuals in emerging democracies learn democratic values and skills through participation in civic education programs? Certainly the U.S. government expects the answer to be yes. The State Department's Agency for International Development (USAID) and other governmental organizations spend tens of millions of dollars annually on civic education programs as part of their effor...