The debate on the impact of the information and communication technologies (ICT) on contemporary democracy has lasted in political science since the beginning of the information revolution. Two dominating and antagonistic standpoints present the electronic democracy as either the cure for democracy crisis, or the factor deepening major problems of democracy. The text questions such a simplified...

Despite the large amount of private and public resources spent on foreign education, there is no systematic evidence that foreign educated individuals foster democracy in their home countries. Using a unique panel dataset on foreign students starting from 1950, I show that foreigneducated individuals promote democracy in their home country, but only if the foreign education is acquired in democ...

Conventional views of African politics imply that Africans’ political opinions are based either on enduring cultural values or their positions in the social structure. In contrast, we argue that Africans form attitudes to democracy based upon what they learn about what it is and does. This learning hypothesis is tested against competing cultural, institutional, and structural theories to explai...

ing from specificities, we can break down pendulum democracy at the local level into ten general characteristics as well:14 Practices

Virtues, or habituated excellences of character, have been understood as having important roles in political regimes since the very beginnings of Western political thought. Across remarkable variation in theorists’ contexts and perspectives, the virtues are considered central to the flourishing of regimes beyond otherwise abstract norms and formal institutions. In Greek thought, for example, et...

We build a model for predicting civil wars where the government bargains with an opposition group using concessions and repression. The equilibrium is either a state of perpetual peace where there are only concessions and no repression, or the equilibrium leads to civil wars, where the concessions are lower and repression higher as compared to the peace equilibrium. An initial movement towards ...

This paper considers the role of democracy in environmental quality and the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). Some studies in the EKC literature have examined the extent to which democratic nations are more or less apt to have improving environmental conditions, but they have drawn from static measures of a nation’s current regime. In this paper we examine panel data from 1960 to 2001 and anal...