Food democracy is an important issue for human security globally. This paper seeks to address the effects of historical relationships like colonial and trading partnerships, to see their effect on present human relations. Natural resources are a scarce and food, along with its politics, has...

This article seeks to explain recent patterns of corruption in the City of Bell, CA. After reviewing the literature on municipal corruption and reform, political participation, and democracy in immigrant communities, the paper examines the Bell case study. It is argued that the city's primary...

The issues surrounding the contested terrain of Latino unity and solidarity resonate at both a theoretical and political level with the challenges to the differential levels of political membership of Latinos represented by not only the immigrant rights movement, but by a range of political...

The problem of American prisons has become one of the most pressing political problems of our time. This paper reconsiders the 1831 travels of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in order to situate the prison as institution born of American democracy. While most studies isolate and...

The standard long-used to evaluate contemporary democratic institutions – congruence between the people's preferences and policy outcomes – has been challenged by both empirical and normative scholarship. Appealing to contemporary democratic theory and the institutional “case” of direct...

No study to date has addressed the potential of deliberative democracy in post-conflict societies. Merging basic insights from deliberative democratic theory with observations of empirical reality in post-conflict societies, I advance a model of deliberation in post-conflict societies based on...

Scarcely mentioned in the debate over NYC's proposed Park 51 Mosque is the earlier controversy that surrounded the building that would replace the Twin Towers. Yet underlying both debates are questions about the proper constitution of the democratic community as well as its appropriate...

Why turn to populism as a resource for understanding the challenges and possibilities of democracy, when we live amidst social, economic, and political constellations that pervert both the populist foundations of democracy and the democratic aspirations of populism? Contemporary theories of...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of military aid and arms transfers on Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID). The “democratic peace� literature has found empirical evidence for the claim that democracies rarely, if ever, engage each other in militarized disputes....

The aim of this paper is to examine the links between certain processes and forms of decentralization and the emergence of participatory arrangements. More specifically, the paper will address the question: under what conditions are certain forms of decentralization conducive to a genuinely more...