The paper considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. This is shown by using the Gastil democracy index from Freedom House. First, the basic pattern of correlations reveals that a good ...

Should Lebanon abandon the consociational democratic system? This paper attempts to answer the question by examining the pathologies of the current system and then evaluating its strengths, weaknesses, and potential for reform. Theories of consociational democracy and of conflict regulation are used in this analysis. This paper concludes that there is potential for limited reforms that will mak...

This paper is based on a research aimed at investigating celebrity politics using the emerging theories on celebrity capital in the context of an emerging democracy or third wave democracy, Ghana. The research focuses on the role of celebrity endorsement in the 2008 and 2012 election campaigns in Ghana to explore the mechanism of celebrity politics and capital in Ghana. The main aim of this pap...

Good health is crucial for human and economic development. In particular poor health in childhood seems to be of utmost concern since it causes irreversible damage and have implications later in life. Recent research suggests globalization is a strong force affecting adult and child health outcomes. Yet, there is much unexplained variation with respect to the globalization effect on child healt...

1 Democracy assistance may contribute to democratisation in a number of ways. It can channel support for elections, it can strengthen legislatures and judiciaries by creating checks and balances on the executive and other bodies, and it can promote democratic participation by strengthening civil society organisations, among others. Against a background of growing concern for democracy worldwide...

Typical democracy measures rely upon categorical classi cation or continuous indices to indicate the level of democracy in a study’s nations. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis techniques, we demonstrate an alternative method for measuring democracy that retains – in the measure itself – the full-range of included components, which previous measures use in their construction, but conceal i...

Taken as a model for how groups should make collective judgments and decisions, the ideal of deliberative democracy is inherently ambiguous. Consider the idealised case where it is agreed on all sides that a certain conclusion should be endorsed if and only if certain premises are admitted. Does deliberative democracy recommend that members of the group debate the premises and then individually...

Online debate tools for participatory democracy and crowdsourcing legislation are limited by different factors. One of them arises when discussion of proposals reaches a large number of contributions and therefore citizens encounter difficulties in mapping the arguments that constitute the dialectical debate. To address this issue, we present a visualization tool that shows the discussion of an...

Democracies depend on the support of the general population, but little is known about the determinants of this support. We investigated whether support for democracy increases with the length of time spent under the system and whether preferences are thus affected by the political system. Relying on 380,000 individual-level observations from 104 countries over the years 1994 to 2013, and explo...

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence on the nexus between corruption and democracy. We establish a political economy model where the effect of democracy on corruption is conditional on income distribution and property rights protection. Our empirical analysis with cross-national panel data provides evidence that is consistent with the theoretical prediction. Moreover, the effe...