In this article, the authors investigate the effects of economic conditions on support for an incumbent regime in a newAfrican democracy. Drawing on two unique data sources fromZambia—the results of a 1,200-respondent postelection survey and a pair of 10,000-household poverty surveys conducted in the same years as that country’s first two posttransition general elections—the authors find eviden...

The paper considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. This is shown by using the Gastil democracy index from Freedom House. First, the basic pattern of correlations reveals that a good ...

Should Lebanon abandon the consociational democratic system? This paper attempts to answer the question by examining the pathologies of the current system and then evaluating its strengths, weaknesses, and potential for reform. Theories of consociational democracy and of conflict regulation are used in this analysis. This paper concludes that there is potential for limited reforms that will mak...

This paper is based on a research aimed at investigating celebrity politics using the emerging theories on celebrity capital in the context of an emerging democracy or third wave democracy, Ghana. The research focuses on the role of celebrity endorsement in the 2008 and 2012 election campaigns in Ghana to explore the mechanism of celebrity politics and capital in Ghana. The main aim of this pap...

A number of years ago, one of Robert Putnam’s critics made the catchy observation that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bowled together. In so doing, they created the network upon which McVeigh was later able to capitalize for help in making the bomb he set off in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Putnam incorporated the point into Bowling Alone, writing that “Ne...

OBJECTIVE To compare inequalities in self-perceived health in the population older than 50 years, in 2004, using Wright's social class dimensions, in nine European countries grouped in three political traditions (Social democracy, Christian democracy and Late democracies). METHODS Cross-sectional design, including data of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (Sweden, Denmark,...

Online debate tools for participatory democracy and crowdsourcing legislation are limited by different factors. One of them arises when discussion of proposals reaches a large number of contributions and therefore citizens encounter difficulties in mapping the arguments that constitute the dialectical debate. To address this issue, we present a visualization tool that shows the discussion of an...

Our large theme is failure and success in constitution making, or the limits of constitutional democracy. The convergence of recent scholarly work in political science and law and political events throughout the world make this a timely project inside and outside of the academy. The number of new constitutional texts written in support of regime formation in the past thirty years is astonishing...

Using a Santiago, Chile, health group as an ethnographic case study, I propose ‘‘accountable democracy’’ as an alternative normative project to the theory of deliberative democracy outlined by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms. Accountable democracy has at its center the impact of public-sphere opinion formation on decision making by officials in elected governments. [accountability, Chile, d...

At the time of writing, the United Kingdom is grabbling with its decision to abandon its European Union membership. As the country is divided and hate incidents are increased by almost 50%, this think-piece presents a critical analysis of Europe’s missed opportunity for social justice. The paper presents evidence by analysing the civil and political rights jurisprudence of the European Court of...