Electronic democracy has been in use in many countries around the world with mixed success. With the power of the web 2.0 technologies, there are more opportunities to enhance the democratic process through the use of social networking tools. Social networks showed potential for facilitating democracy and democratic change during the Arab spring revolutions, suggesting that they could be utiliz...

This paper examines the hypothesis that corporatist intermediation by party governments facilitates incomes policy formation and is effective in reaching agreements between employers and trade unions as well. A social democratic party in government would positively enhance this process. Investigating this for the Netherlands between –, two puzzles emerge. The first puzzle is that coalit...

Lijphart’s spectrum of democracies – recently expanded by Jack Nagel to a sub-majoritarian sphere of pluralitarian systems which use disproportional electoral systems in order to manufacture majority governments from minorities in the electorate – is based on only one dimension: inclusion of preferences. Political scientists in the Lijphartian tradition wrongly assume that inclusion of preferen...

Developments in e-government are resulting in fundamental reorganizations of the ways in which democratic governments operate as well as in the ways in which citizens relate to their own and other governments and to each other. Of special relevance here are the manners in which institutions and citizens are becoming interconnected into a complex ‘web of governance’ via largely uncoordinated inf...

The Chilean health care system has been intensively reformed in the past 20 years. Reforms under the Pinochet government (1973-1990) aimed mainly at the decentralization of the system and the development of a private sector. Decentralization involved both a deconcentration process and the devolution of primary health care to municipalities. The democratic governments after 1990 chose to preserv...

The foundation of a strong democracy is an informed and engaged citizenry. And what better way to both inform and engage citizens than through the power of today's information and communication technologies? Citizens around the world recognize and embrace the benefits of e-Government services such as online tax filing, license renewal, and benefits claims. Now governments are initiating strateg...

Electronic democracy has been in use in many countries around the world with mixed success. With the power of the web 2.0 technologies, there are more opportunities to enhance the democratic process through the use of social networking tools. Social networks showed potential for facilitating democracy and democratic change during the Arab spring revolutions, suggesti...

We demonstrate that territorial size is intimately linked to the structure of political authority within states. We take an evolutionary approach, arguing that there are certain stable, long-term equilibrium combinations of size and political institutions. Building on a general theory of public goods provision and rentseeking, we predict that, ceteris paribus, democracies will tend to be smalle...