This article discusses the 'associational democratic' model of relationship between state and civil society organizations, which recommends devolution of as many regulatory functions as possible to local groups and associations with detailed knowledge of problems and possible solutions,...

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...

In normative political theory, it is widely accepted that democratic decision making cannot be reduced to voting alone, but that it requires reasoned and well-informed discussion by those involved in and/or subject to the decisions in question, under conditions of equality and respect. In short,...

Our main contention is that two different re-conceptualizations of liberal democracy took place among Chicago economists in the postwar period. The first emerged out of Frank H. Knight's ruminations in the 1930s on the failures of liberalism. By the 1940s, Knight devoted most of his attention to...

In traditional cost-benefit analyses of public projects, every citizen's willingness to pay for a project is given an equal weight. This is sometimes taken to imply that cost-benefit analysis is a democratic method for making public decisions, as opposed to, for example, political processes...

We introduce a democratic procedure with voting-based proposals called "Pendular Voting". It works as follows: An agenda-setter chooses a proposal meant to replace a given status quo. In the first stage, a random sample of the population votes on the proposal. The result is made public, which...

"Pendular Voting" presents a novel two-stage voting procedure: A randomly chosen citizen group votes on a proposal replacing the status quo. Depending on the outcome, a "counterproposal" ensues, that is closer to/further away from the status quo than the original proposal. All citizens vote...

This study evaluates the influence of natural resource rents and foreign aid on democracy using panel data from 45 SSA countries from 1980 to 2021. Using five different democracy indices, six different foreign aid variables and six different natural resource rent variables, our...

In traditional cost-benefit analyses of public projects, every citizen’s willingness to pay for a project is given an equal weight. This is sometimes taken to imply that cost-benefit analysis is a democratic method for making public decisions, as opposed to, for example, political processes...