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...

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...

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...

Beyond direct damages, terrorism creates fear and insecurity, potentially reducing support for democratic institutions if these are deemed inadequate to tackle the threat, and increasing support for military governments. To investigate this possibility, we use data from Pakistan, a country that experienced an exponential rise in terrorism since 2001. Exploiting individual level data on democrat...

Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies has a tradition of about 25 years. The basic technologies and ideas were found until 1995 while the last decade was dominated by the utilisation of such technologies. The question arises if there is a market for Privacy Enhanced Technology. The answer is yes, however Privacy Enhancing Technology may not have been broadly known yet in order to make it p...

STUDY OBJECTIVE Australia has had a two party parliamentary political system for most of the period since its Federation in 1901, dominated either by a social democratic (Labor) or a conservative ideological perspective. This paper investigates whether such political differences at Federal and State levels have influenced suicide rates in the state of New South Wales (NSW) for the period 1901-1...

The paper develops a very simple model explaining the process of devolution of an individual region in a politically asymmetric country, where a region and the central government bargain over the distribution of tax revenue given a particular tax rate, focusing on the impact of political regime on the decentralization outcome. It finds that under most political settings large regions, regions w...

The emergence of left governments in Latin America is associated with voters’ dissatisfaction with neoliberal policy outcomes after democratic transitions. Although I believe this argument to be true, the explanations for why leftist governments behave differently are still incomplete. The main question this paper addresses is why some governments are social democratic whereas others are new-po...