Key institutions of the pre-modern Middle Eastern economy, all grounded in Islamic law, blocked the development of democratic institutions. This talk identifies three mechanisms that played critical roles. Islam's original tax system failed to produce lasting and credible constraints on governance. The waqfs (Islamic trusts) founded to provide social services to designated constituencies were p...

It has recently been argued that apparent peace between democracies may be the result of political similarity rather than joint democracy, and that there may exist an “autocratic peace” which is similar to the democratic peace. If political similarity generally is the cause of peace rather than joint democracy specifically, then the democratic peace is merely a statistical artifact that follows...

The Internet enables entirely new forms of interactive mass communication, which require novel ways of sociotechnological system design. It is argued that the e-democracy domain is an ideal field of application for what is here called ‘social intelligence design’. We suggest that the democratic and communicative potential of the Internet can be exploited in order to help strengthening the legit...

This paper reexamines the democratic peace in a longitudinal fashion. We extend the democratic peace proposition beyond isolated militarized disputes or wars to longer-term interstate rivalries. Rivalries of all types are rare among democratic dyads; there is only one case of enduring rivalry between consistently democratic states, and most conflictual relationships between democracies remain c...

At the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, the science and technology communities, along with other nonstate actors, were singled out as major partners in the quest for sustainability. This is in line with calls for refashioning scientiac expertise into a more transparent, accountable and democratic enterprise. Participatory, civil, citizen, civic, stakeholder and democratic s...