The relationship between the practice of democracy and the use of new information technologies is dependent upon the technologies of communication and information, rules regarding the use of those technologies, and the nature of the entity making rules regarding those technologies. Since today developments In all three of these areas are turbulent, this article looks to social theory that deals...

The recent Mexican presidential elections and the fiasco that followed demonstrate the difficulties involved in making a fledgling democracy successful. With its unique history of turmoil and bloodshed, corruption and autocracy, Mexico has a lot to prove to the world and itself if it is to create trust in its new political structure. Despite the government’s extensive preparations, the most rec...

Why do states commit to international human rights treaties that may limit state sovereignty? Existing arguments focus on either the fear of domestic democratic instability or on international norms. We focus instead on the variation in three kinds of costs that states must pay to commit: policy change, unintended consequences, and limited flexibility. We use a discrete time-duration model to t...

Information Technology, IT, may play an important part in any community as a supporting tool in the democratic process. The conditions for that to happen are primarily a genuine wish of the community members to take democratic action, having access to the technology and the skills to use it. The purpose of this paper is to establish the “Democratic Functions of IT” in what we call “The Swedish ...

The success of LPF, like the success of similar populist movements that preceded it in Austria, France, Switzerland and elsewhere, raises grave questions about the legitimacy of democratic inputs to public decision making and the efficacy of public action however decided. At the very least these successes signal an impaired responsiveness of the democratic state to its electorate: a democratic ...

Many of the elements that have traditionally supported state level normative self-organization, most notably territory, are being actively undermined by rising sea levels, flooding, desertification, amongst other climate change effects. As more and more states come to be redefined as “disappearing”, that is, states losing their territories to the natural environment through no specific fault of...

Democratic engagement is a multi-faceted phenomenon that embraces citizens’ involvement with electoral politics, their participation in ‘conventional’ extra-parliamentary political activity, their satisfaction with democracy and trust in state institutions, and their rejection of the use of violence for political ends. Evidence from the 2010 BES and EMBES shows that there are important variatio...