The British House of Lords is generally seen as an unimportant political actor. It is unelected and has a formal veto over only very limited forms of legislation. According to Lijphart this gives the UK a system of ‘weak bicameralism’, and contributes to its position as a majoritarian democracy. The alternative classification system offered by Tsebelis treats the UK as essentially unicameral, w...

Electronic democracy has been in use in many countries around the world with mixed success. With the power of the web 2.0 technologies, there are more opportunities to enhance the democratic process through the use of social networking tools. Social networks showed potential for facilitating democracy and democratic change during the Arab spring revolutions, suggesting that they could be utiliz...

Many commentators have noted the existence of a historical correlation between cities and democratization. This image of the city as an inherently civic space is linked to the notion that the spatial concentration intrinsic to urban contexts promotes a democracy of proximity. Seen from this perspective, it is perhaps not surprising that the most urbanized region of the global south, Latin Ameri...

Existing theories of coups against democracy emphasize that elites mount coups when democracy is particularly threatening to their interests. But holding interests constant, some potential plotters may have more influence over whether or not a coup succeeds. We develop a model where coups generate rents for elites and show that the likelihood of elite participation is increasing in their networ...

Democratic governments constantly need to make sense of their citizens’ needs to make appropriate decisions that reflect the overall wishes and needs of the population. However, except for mandatory voting scenarios, a low rate of citizen participation in government decisions through democratic processes is an aspect that defies democracy itself. Brazil’s participatory budget policy emphasizes ...

This essay turns to ancient sources in order to rethink the relationship between political apathy and democracy. If modern democratic theorists place political apathy entirely outside of democracy – either as a destructive limit upon the full realization of a democratic polity, or, more sanguinely, as a pragmatic necessity which tempers democracy so that it may function in a workable yet watere...

This paper creates democracy indicators for over 4000 municipalities in Brazil, and studies their impact on economic performance. Municipality-level growth regressions control for the effects of local crop production and their price movements, the sectoral composition of the local economy, income inequality, inflation, ethnic and religious composition of the population, and a conditional conver...

Electronic democracy has been in use in many countries around the world with mixed success. With the power of the web 2.0 technologies, there are more opportunities to enhance the democratic process through the use of social networking tools. Social networks showed potential for facilitating democracy and democratic change during the Arab spring revolutions, suggesti...

Since the overthrow of Portugal's dictatorial regime in April 1974, the number of democracies in the world has multiplied dramatically. Before the start of this global trend toward democracy, there were roughly 40 countries that could be classified as more or less democratic. The number increased moderately through the late 1970s and early 1980s as a number of states experienced transitions fro...

This paper addresses the important aspect of democracy at the local community level and the need for e-democracy tools. Communities require easy to use ways of accessing and sharing information and ideas, responding to consultations and participating in policy formulation. In this paper we focus on Community Councils which are the smallest local tier of the statutory framework of democracy in S...