Democracy as an overall model for how societies should be governed has been a remarkable success over the last forty years. More countries than ever are now considered to be democratic or at least on their way to becoming democracies (Diamond 2007, Teorell 2010). Various international organizations that have democracy promotion on their agenda should nowadays be very content since there are cer...

To most theorists of democracy in the West, India is an embarrassing anomaly and hence largely avoided. By most theoretical stipulations India should not have survived as a democracy: ƒ it's too poor ƒ its citizens largely rural and uneducated ƒ its civic institutions rather weak. ƒ It is a paradox even for those who believe in a positive relationship between economic equality or social homogen...

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...

Does Democracy Foster Trust? The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals’ attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime in which they live. The German reunification is a unique natural experiment that allows us to conduct such a study. Using data f...

This article explores the attitudes of trade union organizations to restructuring and privatization of their enterprises to strategic foreign investors in Central and Eastern Europe’s biggest steel producers: Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia. Contra advocates of insulating technocratic decision-makers from social partners, this article argues that higher quality of democracy and co...

democracy: an intergenerational perspective Introduction With a population of 250 million people there has been significant academic interest in Indonesia’s transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. The driving force toward democratic transition was the ‘1998 reform’, which changed the election system from indirect to direct elections. However, critics of the New Order regime claimed it ...

This article argues that the local government capacities and local government performance in Europe clearly rank this continent to the most developed world areas from the point of local democracy. The background factors explaining this situation have a multidimensional character and one can identify as core positive factors the relative economic wealth, high human development, the long historic...

The correlation between social ties and political participation has been evident for some time, though very little attention is devoted to examining the causal mechanisms producing this relationship. This paper moves the literature in this direction by examining how an important feature of social networks – levels of political expertise – affect the attitudes underlying involvement. After outli...

In many parts of the world there is a growing demand for participation in public policy decision making. This demand could be satisfied by the design and deployment of webbased group decision support systems to aid large groups of, possibly, non-sophisticated, users in participating in such decisions. After describing several mechanisms for participatory democracy, we provide a framework for de...

T o evaluate whether public involvement on a national forest district fairly represents the public's values, this article proposes four hypothesis tests. First, it is hypothesized that public-invo1l)ement programs operute according to a participatory democracy logic, in which broad cross sections o f the public participate in public involvement opportunities. A second hypothesis is tested that ...