In their classic, The Civic Culture, Almond and Verba (1963) define the ideal democratic citizen as an allegiant, trustful, and modestly participatory person. This ideal has shaped how scholars think about consolidated democracies as well the process of democratic development. In contrast, we argue that a new model of assertive citizenship spreads as nations experience social modernization, and...

Modern information society depends upon an enormous variety of electronic devices in order to function on a day-to-day basis. Information and communication technology (ICT) devices are able to exchange information only if they adhere to common communication protocols, technical interfaces, and information formats. ICT standards are the blueprints enabling users to access, create, and exchange i...

Since 1999, left governments have taken power in ten Latin American countries: Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Paraguay, and El Salvador. By 2009, they governed more than two-thirds of the continent’s inhabitants, a state of affairs never before witnessed in the continent’s history (Levitsky and Roberts 2011a: 2). This ‘left turn’ (Castañeda 2006) has ...

1 of 16 15/12/2007 9:45 AM Increasingly, states are adopting practices aimed at regulating and controlling the Internet as it passes through their borders. Seeking to assert information sovereignty over their cyber–territory, governments are implementing Internet content filtering technology at the national level. The implementation of national filtering is most often conducted in secrecy and l...

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 ...

In much of the political economy literature, social democratic governments are assumed to defend the interests of labor. The main thrust of this article is that labor is divided into those with secure employment (insiders) and those without (outsiders). I argue that the goals of social democratic parties are often best served by pursuing policies that benefit insiders while ignoring the interes...

■ Abstract We review the use of macroeconomics in political science over the past 40 years. The field has been dominated by new classical theory, which leaves little room for economic policy and focuses attention on what democratic governments can do wrong in the short term. The resulting literatures on political business cycles and central bank independence are large and sophisticated, but the...

Social acceleration – the progressively faster rate of technological, social and life-pace change poses a dilemma for democratic problem solving: It increases amount new problems emerging on political agenda hence amplifies demand rapid effective policy solutions. Democratic politics is, however, slow. So either system speeds up decision making at cost democracy, or it holds to democracy solvin...

Governments worldwide realize the importance of strengthening active participation of citizens in the political process. By recognizing the need for engaging the social intelligence of citizens, governments will be able to govern more effectively and credibly. The field of public participation has been recently enhanced with the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) thus...

This contribution explores the importance of independent organizations in authoritarian regimes. While some authoritarian governments delegate policy tasks to (relatively) autonomous agencies simply in order to improve their domestic or international image as modern political leaders or to build up democratic facades to conceal the actual nature of their regime, other political leaders do so in...