Did Southern whites leave the Democratic Party over Civil Rights or because economic development and other secular changes in the region made the party’s platform increasingly unattractive to them? Answering this central question in American political economy has been hampered by lack of micro-data on racial attitudes from both before and after the Civil Rights era. Our contribution is to uncov...

The institution of online public consultations was adopted in Greece in 2009 (www.opengov.gr.) Participation or non-participation of citizens in this institution constitutes part of the digital divide, referred to as democratic divide. This paper attempts to disclose components of the democratic gap in the Greek agricultural sector, with particular reference to farmers. This disclosure is attem...

Inspired by Habermasian critiques of liberalism, supporters of deliberative democracy seek an extension of social democratic institutions to further a reinvigorated communicative rationality against the ‘atomism’ of market processes. This paper offers a critique of deliberative democratic theory from a Hayekian perspective. For Hayek, the case against the social democratic state rests with the ...

This article explores the idea of the democratic public sphere, and it is grounded in the work of Jurgen Habermas. Libraries help make possible the democratic public sphere ideal in the form of rational organization of human cultural production and they embody an essential element of democracy: a place where the ideal of unfettered communication and investigation exists in rudimentary form, hos...

The proponents of cyberspace promise that online discourse will increase political participation and pave the road for a democratic utopia. This article explores the potential for civil discourse in cyberspace by examining the level of civility in 287 discussion threads in political newsgroups. While scholars often use civility and politeness interchangeably, this study argues that this conflat...

We employ Lessig’s framework of regulation to conceptualize the relationship between the Internet and democracy. Lessig defines four classes of regulators, forces that control and define systems such as the Internet. They are markets, architectures, norms, and laws. We propose that a “democratic regulator” is a force that serves to enhance civil or political liberties. And we argue by example t...

“As we prepare to enter the twenty-first century, the world faces two important challenges to both its political stability and its potential for sustainable growth. The first is the growing gap between the science-rich countries of the North and the science-poor countries of the South in the production and use of scientific and technological knowledge. The second is the increasing complexity of...