This paper examines how three Dutch political parties employ the Internet as a tool to enhance ‘digital democracy’. The potential of digital democracy is considered to be strongest in the sphere of collective action outside the domain of political institutions. In this article, however, attention is given to how institutionalized channels might be supportive of digital democracy. Three componen...

Conventional wisdom holds that democracy endures in rich countries but is unstable in poor ones. Building on Ansell and Samuels (2014), we suggest that the sources of democratic stability lie not just with a country’s aggregate level of wealth, but also with its distribution. However, we conceive of inequality and its political impact differently from previous work, which has focused on the med...

On the 15th of September 2008, a power-sharing agreement was brokered between the major political parties in Zimbabwe, namely, the Tsvangirai-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T), the Mutambara-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-M) and the then ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). This Global Political Agreement (GPA) paved the way for the establishment o...

This article explores the influence of information overload on online democratic processes. The study of this question is motivated by the increasing importance of the doctrine of transparency, by the central role of the paradigm of informed citizenship in contemporary political thought, and by the empirical observation that the modern citizen is exposed to increasing amounts of political data....

The theoretical importance of Tocqueville’s writing about America can be summed up this phrase: Democracy depends on many things besides voting. In this way, he turned Aristotle’s merely political definition on its head, and provided a conceptual translation of what democratic activists, and republican political theorists, had long understood. It is a lesson, I believe, to which many contempora...

It has recently been argued that apparent peace between democracies may be the result of political similarity rather than joint democracy, and that there may exist an “autocratic peace” which is similar to the democratic peace. If political similarity generally is the cause of peace rather than joint democracy specifically, then the democratic peace is merely a statistical artifact that follows...

Democratic engagement is a multi-faceted phenomenon that embraces citizens’ involvement with electoral politics, their participation in ‘conventional’ extra-parliamentary political activity, their satisfaction with democracy and trust in state institutions, and their rejection of the use of violence for political ends. Evidence from the 2010 BES and EMBES shows that there are important variatio...

Since leadership plays a vital role in democratic movements, understanding the nature of democratic leadership is essential. However, the definition of democratic leadership is unclear (Gastil, 1994). Also, little research has defined democratic leadership in the context of democratic movements. The leadership literature has paid no attention to democratic leadership in such movements, focusing...

Political geography has long played a prominent role in conceptions of political realignments. In this paper, I apply a spatial analysis to examine the political geography of voting during one of the principal political realignments in American electoral history, the 1928-1936 Democratic realignment. The spatial analysis challenges some of our common conceptions of this realignment. For example...