Many cross-national surveys examine the extent to which citizens of new democracies believe that democracy is always preferable to any other form of government. There is little evidence, however, regarding how such attitudes affect citizen behavior. This article examines the case of Bolivia, asking whether and how Bolivians’ attitudes toward democracy affect participation, including contacts wi...

This article critically examines Jürgen Habermas’s theory of democracy as developed in Between Facts and Norms. In particular, it focuses on the concept of communicative power and argues that there is a crucial ambiguity in Habermas’s use of this concept. Since communicative power is the key normative resource that is supposed to counter the norm-free steering media of money and administrative ...

Estimating Self-Reported News Exposure Across and Within Typical Days: Should Surveys Use More Refined Measures? David Tewksbury a , Scott L. Althaus b & Matthew V. Hibbing c a Cline Center for Democracy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign b Department of Political Science, Department of Communication, and the Cline Center for Democracy, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign c Schoo...

This paper studies the endogenous emergence of political regimes, in particular democracy or oligarchy, in heterogeneous societies in which institutions do not ensure political commitments. Democracy emerges if the ruling coalition that makes political decisions represents the majority of individuals of the population, while oligarchy emerges when the political decisions are made by a minority ...

Two game-theoretic arguments for the potential rationality of voting are presented. The first argument suggests that people make choices that allow the most favorable forecasts. People choose to vote inasmuch as they project their own choices between voting and abstaining more strongly onto members of their own political group than onto members of other political groups. Relevant evidence is re...

When applying argumentation theory for purposes of what to believe or what to do, the idea is to follow a three-step process. In the first step, one starts with a particular knowledge base and determines what are the possible defeasible derivations (called arguments) one can make using this knowledge base. These derivations then become the nodes of a directed graph called an argumentation frame...

In this thesis, I outline the normative relevance of religious political parties as carriers of values in the context of contemporary political theory. The central argument of my thesis is that religious political parties are, in ideal terms, vital institutional tools for channelling religious claims into the public political realm of liberal democratic polities, in a way that favours democracy...

nowdays, democracy is become an universal value so that all intellectual tendencies should put it into their concerns. whether it accepts or not? the central value is caused a change in many political theories to democracy. it seems that one of most important these endeavors is concerned to practitioners of political philosophy that have attempted to revise negative attitudes of it. this articl...

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...