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...

In “Reactionary Democracy”, Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter frame modern liberal democracy as fundamentally exclusionary. Appeals to democratic principles that both institutionalize normalize political inequality have not only allowed but actively facilitated the rise of “alt-” far-right. book, authors expound “fuzzy” demarcation between “illiberal” “liberal” racism, latter encompassing an adh...

Democratic governments constantly need to make sense of their citizens’ needs to make appropriate decisions that reflect the overall wishes and needs of the population. However, except for mandatory voting scenarios, a low rate of citizen participation in government decisions through democratic processes is an aspect that defies democracy itself. Brazil’s participatory budget policy emphasizes ...

The debate on the impact of the information and communication technologies (ICT) on contemporary democracy has lasted in political science since the beginning of the information revolution. Two dominating and antagonistic standpoints present the electronic democracy as either the cure for democracy crisis, or the factor deepening major problems of democracy. The text questions such a simplified...

This essay turns to ancient sources in order to rethink the relationship between political apathy and democracy. If modern democratic theorists place political apathy entirely outside of democracy – either as a destructive limit upon the full realization of a democratic polity, or, more sanguinely, as a pragmatic necessity which tempers democracy so that it may function in a workable yet watere...

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Contents Acknowledgements page vii List of abbreviations ix Introduction 1 1 The question: is 'liberal democracy' good for economic development? 10 1.1 The context 13 1.2 The pro-'liberal democracy' and anti-'liberal democracy' camps: situating the democracy–development debate within the general debate about 'liberal democr...

This paper, commencing with the revision of classical concepts on democracy, puts forward that democracy is not only the aim but also a kind of means and method, based on which the paper further analyzes the shaping of democracy, and points out that elite democracy is an inevitable trend and that the role and function that elite democracy plays in the process of democratization is the exhibitio...

The Transmission of Democracy: From the Village to the Nation-State We provide evidence that a history of democracy at the local level is associated with contemporary democracy at the national level. Auxiliary estimates show that a tradition of local democracy is also associated with attitudes that favor democracy, with better quality institutions, and higher level of economic development. JEL ...

in the end of twentieth. century and •the .beginning of the third millennium, all political regimes' practically for acquiring legitimacy want to introduce themselves as a democratic system. today there is no question about the truth of the democracy, ;whether that is . fundamentally good or bad? but the question 'is a bout the most efficient and the best form of democracy. nowadays, ...

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...