Economic reports from international financial institutions suggest that Africa can harness globalization, achieve more rapid poverty reduction and faster growth. Such assumptions, however, ignore the fundamental role that democracy plays in the distribution of welfare, especially in this era of globalization. Based on the analysis of various social, political, and economic data on 44 African co...

The challenge towards e-democracy, through the electronic transformation of political systems, has become increasingly evident within developed economies. It is regarded as an approach for increased and better quality citizen participation in the democratic processes. E-democracy forms a component of overall e-government initiatives where technology adoption and diffusion, to enhance wider acce...

Empirical studies often use Freedom House ratings for Political Rights and/or Civil Liberties as institutional proxies for the degree of democracy. In this study, Granger-causality tests are used which reveal that Political Rights tend to precede Civil Liberties, but not the reverse, in a panel data set of former Soviet Republics. For transition nations, Freedom House also publishes a separate ...

The ethical, social and political dimensions of legislative regulations of issues concerning the citizens’ health are generally recognized to be of increasing significance in modern deliberative democracies. However, nanotechnologies in health have raised extra difficulties in deliberative democracies’ procedural justice arrangements. Could a deliberative model of democracy based on substantive...

The past decade has seen intensified calls for the reform of democratic political institutions in Canada, on the grounds that there is a “democracy deficit” at the level of federal politics. Some commentators have even begun to describe the country as a “banana republic,” or a “friendly dictatorship.” Yet any attempt to assess the state of democracy in Canada must naturally presuppose some theo...

Seyla Benhabib (ed.): Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996, 373 pp., hardback 535.00, paperback $16.95. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson: Democracy and Disagreement, Cambridge, Mass. and London, The Belknap Press, 1996, 422pp., hardback S18.50. James G. March and Johan P. Olsen: Democratic Governance, New York, Free...

This article presents a systematic content analysis of three religious-conservative and two pro-secular newspapers in 1996–2004 in Turkey, and discusses some findings and their implications regarding elite values and democratization: considerable internal pluralism within both religious-conservative and pro-secular elites; general consensus on democracy but not on democratic norms’ application ...

Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the rapid economic development of Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and other Asia-Pacific countries under restrictive political arrangements led to claims of the superiority of a so-called Asian model of democracy. Touting the strength of Asian culture and values in contrast to the perceived moral turpitude and social decay of the ...

I examine the mutual relation between political regimes and economic development. An analysis of regime dynamics shows that while the paths to democracy are varied, once established for whatever reasons, democracies survive in developed countries. Contrary to long-standing arguments, political regimes do not affect the rate of investment and of the growth of total income. But since population g...