In recent decades, many countries have adopted, to various degrees, the ideologies of commercial and republican liberalism. One salient aspect of the spread of commercial liberalism in the world has been the growth in international trade. The spread of republican liberalism has manifested itself by the rise in the level of democracy in countries over time. What are the implications of trade and...

In this study we explore the global effect of the Internet on democracy over the period of 1992 to 2002 by observing the relationships between measures related to democracy and Internet prevalence. Our results show a significant correlation between Internet penetration (measured as the estimated number of Internet users per 1,000 people) and a common indicator of a nation’s level of democratiza...

Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (Fs/QCA) is a social science me thod developed in order to combine case-oriented and variable-oriented quantitative analysis. It started with the creation of qualitative comparative analysis [1], with Fs/QCA later developed by applying fuzzy-set theory [2]. Although the fuzzy-set approach is still considered to be in the process of being developed [3-5...

There is an inherent tension between federalism and democracy. From the perspective of the constituent states that make up a federation, federalism constrains democracy because requirements of federal law may limit a state’s ability to adopt policies consistent with its citizens’ preferences. From the perspective of the federation as a whole, federalism constrains democracy because state govern...

The past decade has seen intensified calls for the reform of democratic political institutions in Canada, on the grounds that there is a “democracy deficit” at the level of federal politics. Some commentators have even begun to describe the country as a “banana republic,” or a “friendly dictatorship.” Yet any attempt to assess the state of democracy in Canada must naturally presuppose some theo...

article: Processes of globalization raise thorny issues of legitimacy as global governance institutions find themselves making policy decisions that have little grounding in popular consent. One solution would be to implement global democracy. Desirable as this might be, however, many scholars argue that global democracy is simply not feasible, for the social preconditions of democracy cannot b...

This study attempts to empirically examine the impact of democracy on agricultural productivity by estimating a cross-country agricultural production function. In the regressions, we control the education, economic freedom, climate and geographic variables, in order to see if democracy can still explain a significant portion of the heterogeneity of agricultural productivities across countries. ...

Although the influence of democracy in preventing famines has been reported, there have been no empirical studies on the relation between the extent of freedom allowed by political regimes and the effect on a nation’s health. We explored the effect of democracy on life expectancy and maternal and infant mortality in most countries, taking into account a country’s wealth, its level of inequality...