This paper develops a positive theory of growth and redistribution in which agents care about both their absolute and relative levels of consumption. As in Alesina and Rodrik (1994), public goods are productive and are financed by a tax on capital. Equilibrium tax policy is chosen by a pivotal voter and is shown to reflect the strength of status preferences and the distributions of wealth and p...

The correlation between social ties and political participation has been evident for some time, though very little attention is devoted to examining the causal mechanisms producing this relationship. This paper moves the literature in this direction by examining how an important feature of social networks – levels of political expertise – affect the attitudes underlying involvement. After outli...

Democracy as a system of government has been restored in Nigeria for over a decade now, and for it to be stabilized and entrenched, all the stakeholders must be involved. Youths represent a very important stakeholder in any society. They are not only the future of Nigeria, but also a major stakeholder and useful resource in the nation building. For the youths to become useful resource in the Ni...

the aim of this paper is to explain the relationship between generation gap and democracy in iran in the last fifty years. to do so, the writers have used the results of the national polls conducted in 1974, 1995 and 2002 in their attempt to clarify the activeness or inactiveness of the generation gap by analyzing the differences between the attitudes, values and behaviors of the young and adul...

Civil society has been regard as a prerequisite for democracy, and social networks and interpersonal trust are two important elements of civil society. By using data from the Asian Barometer Survey, this study investigates the effects of social networks and interpersonal trust on public support for democracy in three East Asian democracies – Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The results of statis...

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...

This paper argues that a fundamental antagonism between democracy and nondemocracy organises lay thinking on global issues. We review key findings of a long-standing experimental research programme that examined the “Democracy-as-value” hypothesis across a variety of political and social contexts. This hypothesis contends that democracy is an ideological belief system that provides value to dem...

Does Democracy Foster Trust? The level of trust inherent in a society is important for a wide range of microeconomic and macroeconomic outcomes. This paper investigates how individuals’ attitudes toward social and institutional trust are shaped by the political regime in which they live. The German reunification is a unique natural experiment that allows us to conduct such a study. Using data f...

Computer systems, like other technologies, are socio-technical systems; they are networks of artifacts together with social practices, social relationships, social institutions and values. Viewing computer systems in this way helps to understand, at a deep level, how democracy can be affected by, and can affect, the design of computer systems. Li this paper I will revisit my earlier work on the...