Abstract This paper examines the relationship between democracy and economic growth in 30 Sub-Saharan African countries. As our proxy for democracy we first use the democracy index constructed by Freedom House and then check the sensitivity of our findings using, as an alternative proxy for democracy, the Legislative Index of Electoral Competitiveness (LIEC). We find support for the Lipset hypo...

In this case study, an e-democracy approach called liquid democracy is applied for gathering feedback from a large group of software end-users. Liquid democracy aims to leverage the scalability of decision processes to a crowd of people. The outcomes gave an indication of the added value of liquid democracy techniques for gathering end-user requirements. Traditional requirements engineering app...

Academics and researchers face a challenge of making sense of the role e-democracy plays in the democratic process and with what implications. This requires a deeper understanding of the objectives and assumptions that underpin e-democracy innovations, as well as institutional and technology structures that condition their role in democratic engagement. This paper interprets case study data col...

Democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy. We argue that there are significant indirect effects of democracy on growth through public health and education. Where economists use life expectancy and education as proxies for human capital, we expect democracy will be an important determinant of the level of public services manifested in these indicators. In addition to w...

L democracy, and its promotion, are now facing a set of serious challenges.1 On the one hand, as the Arab Spring demonstrates, democratic aspirations are intensifying, which opens up significant new opportunities for democracy support. On the other hand, in the context of the financial crisis and austerity, levels of funding for democracy aid are being reconsidered, and the credibility and effe...

In this paper, I argue that many recent interpretations of John Dewey’s vision of democracy distort that vision by fi ltering it through the prism of contemporary deliberative democratic theories. An earlier attempt to defend Dewey’s theory of moral deliberation is instructive for understanding the nature and function of this fi lter. In James Gouinlock’s essay “Dewey’s Th eory of Moral Deliber...

Following the introduction of democratic institutions in the countries of central and eastern Europe, the question of the consolidation of these newly implemented democracies arises. One of the most important conditions for consolidation is support for democracy from the community of citizens in the respective countries. In the theoretical frame of reference of this analysis, it is postulated t...

The number of political parties and the type of electoral system may impact the level of democratic functioning within a government. Models are used to explore whether the number of political parties increases a country’s democracy score on the POLITY IV measure of democracy, and whether countries with proportional representation electoral systems have higher democracy scores than those without...

In this paper, we study representative democracy, one of the most popular classes of collective decision-making mechanisms, and contrast it with direct democracy. In a direct democracy, individuals have the opportunity to vote over the alternatives in every choice problem the population faces. In a representative democracy, the population commits to a candidate ex ante who will then make choice...