One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant about politics and government. Many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This creates a nation...

Examples from the breakup of Yugoslavia and state-building in the successor states are used to highlight the political and constitutional choices facing Ukraine. The main lesson is that legitimacy is needed for constitution-building, which is needed for long-term state stability. Ethnic and...

Alienation to politics weakens political competition and can undermine the acceptance and legitimacy of democracy as a political system. Governance and representation problems at the local level cause part of citizens' lack of power and political alienation. Citizens have local power if they can...

The rise of independent institutions, such as central banks, has generated an ongoing debate on their democratic credentials and legitimacy. The normative appraisal depends on the conception of democracy adopted. While critics frequently espouse a majoritarian conception, this paper argues that...

The paper compares decision-making on the centralisation of public goods provision in the presence of regional externalities under representative and direct democratic institutions. A model with two regions, two public goods and regional spillovers is developed in which uncertainty over the true...

Motivated by recent interest and initiatives taken by several governments and international organizations to come up with indicators of well-being to inform policy makers, we test if subjective well-being measures (SWB) can be employed to study voting behaviour. Controlling for financial and...

Democracy is explained by giving the power to the government, with the consent of citizens, expressing their will, directly or indirectly through voting. Promoting and respecting individual and collective rights and freedoms is the foundation of democracy. Citizen participation is remarkable on...

An American political scientist and a Russian geographer, specialists in postcommunist political reform and Russian regional politics, respectively, adopt a subnational approach to democratization, measuring democracy in a standard fashion across 57 regions of Russia. They rate levels of...

Purpose – Are there different determinants in the fight against corruption across African countries? Why are some countries more effective at battling corruption than others? To assess these concerns we examine the determinants of corruption-control throughout the conditional distribution of...