The disintegration of the state socialist regimes in Eastern Europe cannot be seen as an isolated phenomenon, for it is only the final and most dramatic manifestation of a process which has been unfolding over the past two decades throughout the world. The popular rejection of centralist bureaucratic and authoritarian regimes has been a common feature of political developments in both East and ...

Power, rule, and legitimacy have always been core concerns of political science. In the 1970s, when governability appeared to be problematic, legitimacy was discussed both in the context of policy research and by critics of the capitalist state. More recently interest turned to governance beyond the nation-state. The legitimacy of transnational (i.e., European and international) organizations, ...

The institutional differences between presidential and parliamentary rule are well known, yet the practical effects of these divergent constitutional arrangements within democratic polities have received scant attention. This paper employs a global dataset to test the relationship between a historical measure of parliamentary rule and fourteen indicators ranging across three policy areas: polit...

The Liquid State Machine (LSM) is a relatively new recurrent neural network architecture, in which a static recurrent spiking neural network referred to as a ‘liquid’ and a trainable read-out network are combined to tackle time-series data. In this paper we describe the Democratic Liquid State Machine (DLSM) that uses an ensemble of single LSMs. We investigated the feasibility of the two LSM ar...