Can democracy be taught? Are individuals more likely to embrace democratic values, to learn basic knowledge about political processes, and to engage the political process more effectively as a result of their exposure to donor-sponsored civic education programmes in emerging democracies? After more than a decade of evaluations of civic education programmes, it is a good time to take stock of wh...

Political ecology seeks to address notable weaknesses in the social sciences that consider how human societyand the environment shape each other over time. Considering questions of ideology and scientific discourse,power and knowledge, and issues of conservation and environmental history, political ecology offers analternative to technocratic approaches to policy prescriptions and e...

Set against previous attempts to grasp the work of British political economist David Ricardo on a theoretical and methodological level, this article explores the emergence of the ‘economy’ in Ricardo’s Principles of political economy and taxation (1817) from a Foucaultinspired perspective on the formation of objects of knowledge. Several distinctions (or ‘discursive demarcations’) are brought t...

Recent studies have found that individuals tend to see themselves as more central in a network than they really are. This body of work has generally been done among small groups of <30 actors. Additionally, settings have usually been in a well-bounded social context focusing on friendship or work relations. Other related research has found links between activity and influence in a network and a...

BACKGROUND There is increasing recognition that the development of evidence-informed health policy is not only a technical problem of knowledge exchange or translation, but also a political challenge. Yet, while political scientists have long considered the nature of political systems, the role of institutional structures, and the political contestation of policy issues as central to understand...

The concurrent development of political economy and the modern conception of medicine was reflected from the first decades of the seventeenth century by a degree of interdisciplinary borrowing based on analogy between the human body and the body politic. It seemed perfectly feasible that the growing knowledge of the human body and its diseases might inspire new concepts, and vindicate the use o...