1 Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium, 2 University of Kinshasa, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 3 Division of International and Humanitarian Medicine, Geneva University Hospitals & University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland, 4 Programme National de Lutte contre la Trypanosomiase Humaine Africaine, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 5 Médecins Sans Frontières Access...

The paper develops a very simple model explaining the process of devolution of an individual region in a politically asymmetric country, where a region and the central government bargain over the distribution of tax revenue given a particular tax rate, focusing on the impact of political regime on the decentralization outcome. It finds that under most political settings large regions, regions w...

Some studies find that democratic states are more amenable to third party forms of conflict management, while other studies indicate that democracies are able to resolve contentious issues on their own through bilateral negotiations. Using data from the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project, the authors investigate peaceful and militarized conflict management strategies that democratic states ...

The paper is concerned with democratisation in the Third World since the 1980s, a period when dozens of Third World countries underwent at least some measure of democratic change. The paper, both general and comparative, rather than specific and focused on one or several countries, aims to try to help locate discussions in the workshopÕs analytical framework: to assess the extent of democratic ...

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...

The metatheory on the democratic process poses a conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of democratic processes in liberal democracies. A model of democratic processes is being developed which proceeds from certain metatheoretical presuppositions. It distinguishes, inter alia, between three subsystems of the political system and defines their relevant collective actors. Moreover, a con...

The empirical evidence on voting behavior suggests that the individuals’ choice of the vote is explained, among other things, by policy issues and the voters’ partisan preferences over the party that rules the government. The evidence also indicates that the voters’ partisan preferences are the best predictor of the choice of the vote (Republican and Democratic voters tend to vote, respectively...

One key paradigmatic subtext of Naomi Klein’s argument runs in her The Shock Doctrine (London: Penguin, 2008) is how the supposed undemocratic, violent character of ‘‘totalitarian’’ Marxist movements serve to justify repressive measures by the neo-liberal state. In inviting such a repressive response from the state, ‘‘undemocratic’’ revolutionary left movements are presented as causing the eros...

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...

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...