This paper elucidates the manner in which users of an online decision support system respond to spatially distributed data when assessing the solution to environmental risks, specifically, nuclear waste disposal. It presents tests for revealing whether users are responding to geographical data and whether they are influenced by their home location (Not in My Back Yard – style behavior). The tes...

Although Michael Albert is well aware of the existence of the Inclusive Democracy (ID) project, still, in his new book Parecon, Life After Capitalism he prefers to ignore its existence and follows the trouble-free path to compare Parecon with the disastrous central planning system and the narrowly ecological bio-regionalism, (or, elsewhere, with social ecology’s libertarian municipalism, which,...

Over the last two decades, public confidence and trust in Government has declined visibly in several liberal democracies, giving way instead to disillusionment with current political institutions, actors, and practices; rendering obsolete or inappropriate much of traditional democratic politics. Simultaneously, digital technologies have created huge opportunities for public bodies and agencies....

Introduction. The interpretation that Arrow’s Condition I, independence of irrelevant alternatives, prohibits the use of individuals’ intensities of preference in the construction of social choices, is not precise. Rather, it is the social welfare function (as defined in Chapter 4), which demands both individual and social orderings, and thereby prohibits cardinal utility inputs. Condition I, a...

There are competing conceptions of democracy. In particular, the terms “democracy” and “democratic” have been defined by political philosophers and political scientists in many different ways. Which one is right? How should one choose among the proposed definitions? A democracy is perhaps always a State, but the adjective “democratic” is often applied to other entities as well; for example, org...

Deliberative democracy is a form of alternative dispute resolution. Consulting the public in a thoughtful and representative way can lead to consequential public policy outcomes that might otherwise have been difficult to achieve. However, some recent literature appears to treat deliberative democracy and alternative dispute resolution as rivals.! While there are differences in emphasis and in ...

Democracy: Marx’s theory of history (ex. Organization of the mode of production determines superstructure; unequal distribution of labor) explains the lack of actual democracy in capitalist societies; however, Marx’s thought concerning progression (also a theory of history) states that capitalist societies would eventually progress to a democratic state after a revolution of the proletariat. Ma...

The eclipse of legislatures: Direct democracy in the 21st century JOHN G. MATSUSAKA Marshall School of Business and Law School, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA 90089-1427 USA Abstract. Demographic, political, and technological trends are fueling an unprecedented growth in direct democracy worldwide. If the trends continue, direct democracy threatens to eclipse legislatures in ...

The conventional wisdom, since at least the writings of John Dewey (1916), views high levels of educational attainment as a prerequisite for democracy. Education is argued to promote democracy both because it enables a “culture of democracy” to develop and because it leads to greater prosperity, which is also thought to cause political development. The most celebrated version of this argument i...

The EU represents a new and complex political system which, according to numerous social scholars, suffers from the so-called democratic deficit. The basic argument behind this claim is that citizens lack control of the EU because, within its political system, national parliaments of member states possess only limited powers which have not been adequately compensated through steady empowerment ...