Despite widespread disagreement about democratic deficits in the European Union (EU), most critics begin by conceiving democracy as a problem for the EU. Seeing the EU as undemocratic or insufficiently democratic, they devise institutional innovations to democratize it. These innovations seem to require breaking the traditional link between democracy and the nation-state, which in this context ...

This article offers a critical assessment of Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of democracy. It suggests that the main thrust of a discursive account of legitimacy is the attempt to show how the demands of maximal democratic inclusion might be reconciled with a politics of reasoned agreements. While this aim is endorsed, the thrust of the argument is that a critical theory of democracy require...

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...

the growth in the number and quality of businesses caused many positive results for societies. but it can potentially bring some unfavorable effects to their environment. although there issued many different definitions of social responsibility, there is lack of consensus among scholars about its definition. aside from its different and sometimes paradoxical definitions, corporate social capita...

Lipset's 'Democracy in Private Government' was a remarkable publication for three reasons. It was his first attempt to challenge Michels' 'iron law of oligarchy' and would lead to a programme of research that that would culminate with the publication of the widely admired classic study Union Democracy. Second, the inspiration for this work came from Lipset's student days when he was a socialist...

Decision-making in a democracy must respect democratic values, while advancing citizens’ interests. Decisions made in an epistemic democracy must also take into account relevant knowledge about the world. Neither aggregation of independent guesses nor deliberation, the standard approaches to epistemic democracy, offers a satisfactory theory of decision-making that is at once time-sensitive and ...

The correlation between social ties and political participation has been evident for some time, though very little attention is devoted to examining the causal mechanisms producing this relationship. This paper moves the literature in this direction by examining how an important feature of social networks – levels of political expertise – affect the attitudes underlying involvement. After outli...

In many parts of the world there is a growing demand for participation in public policy decision making. This demand could be satisfied by the design and deployment of webbased group decision support systems to aid large groups of, possibly, non-sophisticated, users in participating in such decisions. After describing several mechanisms for participatory democracy, we provide a framework for de...

T o evaluate whether public involvement on a national forest district fairly represents the public's values, this article proposes four hypothesis tests. First, it is hypothesized that public-invo1l)ement programs operute according to a participatory democracy logic, in which broad cross sections o f the public participate in public involvement opportunities. A second hypothesis is tested that ...

The British House of Lords is generally seen as an unimportant political actor. It is unelected and has a formal veto over only very limited forms of legislation. According to Lijphart this gives the UK a system of ‘weak bicameralism’, and contributes to its position as a majoritarian democracy. The alternative classification system offered by Tsebelis treats the UK as essentially unicameral, w...