In the early 1990s most African countries carried out extensive reforms of their electoral regimes. Adopting a historical institutionalist approach, this paper critically examines the role of institutional path dependence in accounting for the setup of six African electoral regimes. For this...

We find a U-shaped relation between happiness and religiosity in cross-country panel data after controlling for income levels. At a given level of income, the same level of happiness can be reached with high and low levels of religiosity, but not with intermediate levels. A rise in income causes...

By using a game theoretical approach and the notion of 'forum' or 'regime shifting' this paper examines the multiple interfaces of the multinational pharmaceutical corporations (MNPCs) with their major counterparts at home and abroad, including the governments of the North and South, the...

Resource curse theory claims that resource abundance encourages violent conflict. A study of 37 oil-producing developing countries, however, reveals that oil states with very high levels of oil revenue are remarkably stable. An analysis of the ways in which governments spend oil revenues...

The concept of global governance has emerged as a key theoretical approach since the 1990s. Applied to the transformation of international security, it has suggested a shift from the state-dominated bipolar system of the Cold War era to a new multipolar and multilateral security architecture in...

This working paper introduces the concept of legal personality of non-state actors as an indicator of the democratic legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Globalization has led to changes in statehood which are reflected in new democratic forms of participation and new expectations...

This paper deals with the ways in which the interconnectedness of multiple political levels in increaingly internationalized structures of governance impacts on these levels' democratic legitimation. Focusing on the European Union (EU), it argues that in the EU's multi-level system, the...

Civil society participation has become a buzzword in the debate about the legitimacy and accountability of international governance. Many organizations, prominently among them the World Trade Organization (WTO), have come under considerable pressure to open up their policy-making process towards...

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was held by the United Nations in 2003 to draft a programmatic declaration for the information age. The involvement of civil society organisations (CSOs) in the drafting process was innovative and led to WSIS becoming an especially instructive...

This article examines American conceptions of sovereignty — as they appear in the writings of US scholars of international law, and those US international relations scholars who deal with international law. At first glance, the US literature is dominated by two distinct conceptions of...