Methods of argument representation can be exploited in systems for edemocracy. In this paper we discuss a particular method of argument representation, known as an argumentation scheme, and some issues concerning the relations between arguments represented using such schemes. We show how this method of argument representation has been implemented in a practical system designed for the public to...

Decades ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, " We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. " We now live in what has been christened a " new gilded age. " Wealth in the United States is indeed concentrated in the hands of a few— more so than at any time since the 1920s. In this book I examine the rela...

A central claim of democratic theory is that democracy induces governments to be responsive to the preferences of the people. Political parties organize politics in every modern democracy, and some observers claim that parties are what induce democracies to be responsive. Yet, according to others, parties give voice to extremists and reduce the responsiveness of governments to the citizenry. Th...

The stability and functioning of any kind of political regime—including democratic or representative ones—relies on the combination of the capacity of rulers and government officials to use coercion and the development of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy can be described as people's recognition and acceptance of the validity of the rules of their entire political system and the decisi...

The paper provides an analysis of the voting method known as delegable proxy voting, or liquid democracy. The analysis first positions liquid democracy within the theory of binary aggregation. It then focuses on two issues of the system: the occurrence of delegation cycles; and the effect of delegations on individual rationality when voting on logically interdependent propositions. It finally p...

In his famous book " Democracy and its Critics " (1989), Robert A. Dahl argues that, historically speaking, there have been two transformations of democracy. These transformations have brought about different models of democratic governance and different interpretations of the concept of democracy. By the fi rst transformation Dahl refers to the the emergence of the classical model of democracy...

This article argues that the difference between poor countries and rich countries has to do with governance rather than resources, emphasizing the importance of public administration in explaining economic success and failure. Political elasticity (PE) theory is introduced for the analysis presented here, including the following terminology: (1) political elasticity, (2) political inelasticity,...

If democracy implies political equality, in the sense that everyone has roughly the same opportunity to influence political decisions, we may ask: ”Who are included among ‘everyone’?” In other words, if ”democracy” is government “by the people”, who are included among “the people”? This may be called ”the boundary problem in democratic theory”. The problem is not what actually existing peoples ...