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In this paper, I will examine the comparison of Athens and America. I will argue that the project of spreading democracy has always been seriously flawed, but the chauvinism of the West has reached new and dangerous heights under the leadership of the American Empire that make the project even more perilous. Contrary to their illusions, the neoconservatives are not the heirs of the Greeks. What they elicit from the Greeks is a dark legacy that has not only contributed to the decline of American power and prestige, but threatens world order, peace, and prosperity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I demonstrate that citizens in different democracies differ markedly in the extent to which they can successfully order parties on a left-right scale. Further, I show that this variance is not explained by any of the differences across countries that one might initially suppose explain the difference (e.g., the salience of the left-right dimension of politics, the complexity of the party system, levels of education or political interest, etc.) Instead, I propose a theory which suggests that these differences occur because of the very different ways in which executives get selected in different parliamentary democracies. I test the theory with data on over 100 voter surveys conducted in 21 democracies over the last two decades. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we set out a theoretical framework to explain socioeconomic inequalities in health. Our approach emphasizes the toll taken on health by variations in the wear and tear of daily life arising from imbalances between life challenges and people’s capabilities for coping with them. Capabilities, in turn, depend on individuals’ position in both the economic and social structure. This capabilities approach outlines a set of causal pathways from class relations to population health with the potential to explain a substantial portion of the health gradient. Using the World Values Survey, we find preliminary support for this explanation of health outcomes, and our analysis suggests that population health depends as much on the social structures of the developed democracies as on their economic structure. We also lays the groundwork for better explanations of cross-national differences in the shape of the gradient linking social class to health, as systematic differences in economic relations and in policy areas not usually directly linked to health result in differences in the joint distributions of economic and social resources among individuals. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze transitions to democracy (and semi-democracy) and democratic breakdowns in 20 Latin American countries between 1945 and 2005. We argue that domestic conditions cannot explain the region-wide wave of democratization that took place in 1978-95. Our transition models control for standard socio-economic predictors as well as for domestic institutional conditions (including the nature of the authoritarian regime in transition models, and the type of party system in breakdown models). We include a battery of additional predictors to capture the impact of international factors, including measures of diffusion (using spatial lags, and distinguishing short-term and long-term effects) and an original indicator of US support for democracy. Our results indicate that political leaders tend to emulate transitions in neighboring countries in the short-run, even though there is no evidence of a long-term equilibrium effect at the regional level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that democratization (suffrage expansion, multiparty competition and the secret ballot) is neither sufficient nor necessary for generating fiscal redistribution (tax burden, progressivity of the tax structure, redistributive government spending). I offer a simple model of democratization as the result of intra-elite conflict that explains why this might be the case. I provide empirical evidence consistent with the model using detailed national and subnational data for the case of Argentina (1880-1950), which I collected during 10 months of archival research. Despite the fact that Argentina enjoyed per capita wealth on par with Canada, was ethnically more homogeneous that the United States, and did not suffer from the landlord-peasant social structure typical of other Latin American countries, the period of democratic rule (1912-1930) did not usher in redistributive taxation and spending as predicted by the workhorse median-voter models. Democratization caused horizontal redistribution across provinces rather than from rich to poor citizens. Strangely, taxation became more progressive and redistributive spending increased with the military coup of 1931. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the gaze and practice of leading Western intellectuals and policy makers, democratic governance is purported to be attainable by any given polity; however, whether a state or society is considered a democracy is many times simply a statement about a people or state's perceived proximity to a Western, often Protestant, identity. Dominant visions of democratic theory often locate working democracies in the geo-temporal space of 'Westerness,' which has meant that democracy has become a legitimating discourse of neo-colonialism. This paper argues that conventional claims about a state's level of democracy do not actually address the foundational values, governmental institutions, or norms that constitute a polity's citizenry/subjects, governing structures, or civil society. Rather, these claims reflect the way the discourse of Western elites create and respond to Otherness by naming those closest to home 'democratic' and those perceived farthest the inverse-'autocratic'. Preliminary evidence for these claims is provided through a close reading of Dahl and Whitehead's texts: while theoretically disparate, these texts are ultimately congruent in the empirical referents they employ in deducing their notions of democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April and May, 2007, our research team conducted a public engagement focussed on the issue of biobanks. This event (The BC Biobank Deliberation) was informed by political theory on deliberative democracy with the aim of informing biobank policies in British Columbia. The data generated by the event include presentations made by small breakaway groups, pre and post surveys of participants about their position on a range of biobanking issues, and audio recordings and transcripts of all deliberations. Identifying specific conclusions to be delivered to policy makers from this large amount of data is not a self evident process. The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for the identification of such conclusions. We thus provide a critical analysis of how the “deliberative product” of a public engagement can be conceptualised given the context of a large data set and an imperative to provide useful information to policy makers, while honouring the mandate under which deliberants were recruited. In particular, we make the case for distinguishing between the deliberative outputs of public engagement and the analytical outputs that are the product of social scientific analyses of such engagements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I test whether treatment group subjects' political awareness, partisanship, and media trust moderates the persuasive impact of positive news about the UN, and different media sources reporting that information, on subjects' UN policy preferences. Of particular interest is whether subjects' level of trust in the news media moderates the impact of the treatments on subjects' stated UN policy preferences. Building on the Reception-Acceptance-Sample model's theoretical axioms (Zaller 1992), this paper hypothesizes that media trust plays a central role in moderating the persuasive impact of political messages shaping political opinions. OLS regression results suggest that treatment group subjects' policy preferences were generally more positive compared to the control group, taking into consideration the relevant moderators. The strongest positive policy preferences were associated with strong Democratic treatment group subjects with high political awareness and high general media trust. OLS regression analysis did not indicate any statistically significant interaction effect among treatment group subjects' political awareness, partisanship, and trust in specific media sources that they were exposed to in the experiment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I propose an intuitive concept of effectiveness in interstate war: the ability to achieve consistent battlefield victory. An effective belligerent rapidly locks in future battle victories and curbs the opposite effort of its enemy. This paper has three goals: (i) to validate the concept by establishing that a well understood cause of military effectiveness (relative advantage in material resources) associates with effectiveness, (ii) to advance the debate over the impact of regime type on battlefield effectiveness, and (iii) to explain why past studies concluded that democracies fight more effectively. I analyze a new data set of battlefield outcomes in interstate war dyads from 1914 to 2001. I find that relative advantage associates with effectiveness as expected, but regime type does not. Democracies are not more effective belligerents, but they appear to be more effective because they negotiate peace after winning series of battles. The analysis also reveals the costliness of unlimited war aims, including foreign imposed regime change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How stable are the party systems of Eastern European democracies, which are member-states of the European Union? In this paper, I apply the criteria and framework for identifying institutionalized party systems first employed by Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully (1995) in Latin American democracies and later modified by Michelle Kuenzi and Gina Lambright (2001) to examine African democracies. I utilize two of the four components of the original framework that are applicable to the selected cases, party competition and party roots in society, with party competition (volatility) first divided similarly in the manner of Allan Sikk (2005) and Eleanor Powell and Joshua Tucker (2008) and then considered as a single value. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the increasing importance placed on the promotion of Democracy to developing nations as well as the increased occurrence of failing and struggling Democracies, gaining a better understanding of the weaknesses of American democracy promotion is needed This analysis will examine the cases of Haiti, Afghanistan, and Georgia in order to analyze the relationship between the promotion of political development and the success or failure of democratic consolidation in an attempt to test the prospects for a new, business-model of American democracy promotion. The primary objective of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of democratic transitions and consolidation in nations at various stages of democratization and the effect that they have on the overall success of Democracy promotion. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal or “parchment” guarantees of government restraint and respect for human rights seldom ensure that such restraint will be observed in practice. One persistent and widespread example of such lack of restraint is that of official impunity, or the failure of governments to ensure that their agents are bound by the same laws that apply to the rest of the population. For this paper I have created a measure of impunity based on data from U.S. State Department Human Rights Country Reports for more than 155 countries; this indicator provides an additional dimension to other measures of “rule of law” and official respect for human rights. Preliminary analysis of this data suggests that official impunity is worse in polities facing domestic insurgencies and high levels of corruption, and that the prevalence of impunity decreases dramatically with press freedom. In fact, press freedom may be a more effective tool in curbing official impunity than formal democracy, which results in episodic rather than constant pressure on recalcitrant military and police forces. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the “third wave of democratization” expectations regarding democratic strength and electoral dynamism were high among scholars. Particularly, in Latin America by 2000 most of the countries in the region were under democratic rule. Yet, enthusiasm quickly vanished as trust in government eroded and electoral participation started declining..x000d.Some have argued that trust in government is a key ingredient of a healthy democracy. Nonetheless, the relationship between democracy and trust is complex and even paradoxical. The legitimacy of political actors and institutions relies heavily on trust. Yet an intrinsic feature of any democratic regime is a “healthy distrust” or skepticism towards those who detain power on their behalf..x000d.The goal of this paper is to examine the impact that declining trust in government and public institutions has had on turnout throughout Latin America. Using the Latinobarometer 2005 survey we found that interpersonal trust does not influence people’s decision to vote. Trust in government and the institutional setting positively affects turnout. Interestingly, whenever voters have a pessimistic assessment of current political and economic events, the likelihood of voting also increases. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few scholars have used a clear systematic analysis to examine the relationship between regional integration and foreign direct investment in Europe and Latin America. Debate remains on the direction of the causal relationship between foreign direct investment and regional integration. In an effort to resolve this debate, this study will analyze regional integration in Europe and Latin America and each state’s respective level of foreign direct investment for the time period 1990-2004. Event history analysis is employed to test the hypothesis that those countries with high levels of foreign direct investment will integrate into regional economic agreements at a faster pace. Forty-one Central/Eastern European and Latin American countries are included in this study. All countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, which have complete data available, are used for study in this paper. Because of the potential for an endogeneity problem, it is necessary to control for the following variables: gross domestic product per capita, trade openness, and the level of democracy for each state. A Cox regression shows that we should expect Latin American countries to integrate at a faster pace. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal executives implement a vast array of public policies, and as a consequence, the supply of labor to the bureaucracy is directly connected to the way democratic governance works. What qualifications and education are expected of these civil servants? Modern graduate level public administration programs have implemented a problem-solving pedagogy, but does it match the needs of government? Through the Survey on the Future of Government Service (Bertelli, Lewis & Nixon, 2008), federal executives reported on the qualifications desired in civil servants. By analyzing their responses, this paper examines two primary questions. In the field of public service, what qualifications, education and experience do executives in the bureaucracy look for? Are graduate level public administration programs appropriately marketing their curriculum or should programs readjust their curriculum to provide the types of civil servants bureaucratic executives are seeking? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since the idea of democracy became an aspiration rather than a fear or threat, political actors have argued that citizens must be knowledgeable for it to function well. Without challenging that aspiration, we question the degree to which the United States is serious about trying to create or maintain a knowledgeable citizenry. We first make a speculative argument cutting through a broad swath of American history, pointing to the paradox that every expansion of the franchise both has been understood to enhance democracy and has arguably reduced the politically-relevant knowledge of the median voter. That paradox sets us up for a more focused empirical examination of the degree to which elected officials seek to provide voters with factual knowledge relevant to their (re)election and actions in office. By examining members of Congress' constituent newsletters, we show that, while factual information about the society or polity is not irrelevant, it does not rank high on their list of priorities for what they want to communicate to voters. We also consider variation in the degree to which members of Congress convey factual information to voters in their newsletters, and suggest reasons for this variation. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of why citizens' factual knowledge should matter in a democratic polity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dominionism is an authoritarian ideology that combines political hegemony with metaphysical certitude. A key impediment to any authoritarian leadership is the capacity of subjects to question and counter its claims to power. Human reason and critical analysis provide the inspiration to subvert an authoritarian regime. This paper examines an American political movement that works within the confines of liberal democracy to supplant liberal democracy. Critical to its agenda is the undermining of institutions that cultivate reason in citizens. The underlying difference in the conflict between dominionism and reason is best understood as a competition of epistemologies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does democracy influence social spending? Previous research has generated mixed results on this question. In this study, the author argues that these inconsistent results are due to a lack of attention to the role of societal pressures, specifically, the effect of democracy is conditional on the existence of social groups (predominantly labor) that pressure the government for policy changes. If there is a strong labor force, then democracy does have a positive effect on social spending in comparison to nondemocracies. However, if the country has a weak labor force, then democracy has a negative effect on social spending in comparison to nondemocracies. Using fixed effects models on 14 Latin American countries, this paper demonstrates that democracy results in higher social security and welfare, education and health expenditure when there is a strong labor presence that is pressuring the government for greater social protection. The author also demonstrates that democracy is negatively associated with all types of social spending when there is either no or very little labor pressure. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dictatorships vary: some autocracies fully respect their citizen's physical integrity; others almost resemble democracies regarding their institutions and human rights records; and again others are run by repressive rulers. The paper addresses this institutional and behavioral variance, using a formal model, in which a small group of rich hold power and may face a revolutionary threat from a large group of poor excluded from power. The rich can prevent being swept from power by offering credible policy concessions within an institutional framework that limits their executive power, or use repression. I show that at low levels of inequality, the rich make no concessions and use no repression since no revolutionary threat exists. At medium levels, making credible policy concessions is cheaper than repression, so the rich opt for concessions. At high levels, the cost of concessions that please the poor outweigh those of repression, so they choose the latter. Hence, peaceful autocracies occur at low, semi-autocracies at medium, and repressive autocracies at high levels of inequality. Using data on 96 dictatorships between 1950 and 1996, I test the models predictions using various statistical models and find considerable empirical support. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic and legal theorists currently disagree about whether the judiciary should be conceived as a democratic, representative institution. While normative political theorists do not tend to view the Court as representative, scholars of regime politics have situated the Court in a larger democratic process: if we collect the Court's democratic impulses as excavated by the regimes literature, we have a picture of an institution that fits within normative models of representation. Turning to recent methodological work in political development, I argue the regimes literature has employed an "off the shelf" method of periodization that has the potential to obscure developmental processes and incorrectly locate agency, contingency, and constraint. In order to study the Court as a democratic, representative institution, I suggest eschewing the regime literature's temporal framework. This paper's intent is twofold: to demonstrate the potential for the conceptualization of the Court as a democratic, representative institution, and to problematize "off the shelf" approaches to periodization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controlling corruption is one of difficult tasks for new democracies. Statistical studies show that only mature and stable democracies that are 40 or more years old are significantly less corrupt than autocracies. New democracies, on the other hand, are on average no less corrupt than authoritarian regimes. This paper attempts to document the trend of decreasing corruption in South Korea during the last decade, a new democracy that has been known for its high level of corruption in spite of splendid economic growth..x000d.Examination of various available data from surveys of perceptions and experience of corruption reveals that the incidence of petty corruption in public administration and election campaigns has substantially decreased over the last decade in South Korea. Also, there is evidence that high-level political corruption has been decreasing. This study illustrates the unreliability of perceived measures of corruption such as CPI and Control of Corruption for the purpose of trend analysis and the usefulness of data from surveys of experience of corruption. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to recent research, we find an "anti-political" budget cycle in a panel of fifteen Latin American democracies from 1973 to 2000. During the period in which Latin America underwent the most lasting and widespread wave of democratization, elections worked to limit the degree to which incumbents manipulate fiscal policies for electoral advantage. We show that governments undertook fiscal adjustment by reducing spending in the election year and in the inaugural year of the newly elected government. Though the capacity to enact austerity is moderated by the transition to democracy, new Latin American democracies also adhere to fiscal restraint. This paper shows that, at most, the period of democratic transition in Latin America may postpone bitter fiscal adjustments to periods when democratic regimes are stable. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Latin America is experiencing a region-wide violent crime epidemic, the political consequences of which are largely unknown. Many commentators imply that the crime wave bodes ill for democracy in the region, causing disillusionment with government, reducing mass political participation, and increasing popular support for authoritarianism. This paper questions the micro-foundations of that conventional wisdom. Analysis of survey data indicates that crime victimization may cause increased political participation at the individual level. Rather than becoming cynical, disenchanted, or disempowered, Latin American crime victims are actually more politically active than their non-victimized peers. Crime victimization has an ambiguous impact on opinions about democracy and dictatorship; further research will be needed before firm conclusions about this relationship can be drawn. The results are robust to specification checks and multiple different quantitative methods, and they are based on data from multiple years of the LAPOP and Latinobaómetro surveys. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Certainly, one way for the will of the people to be expressed, in this modern world, is through voting. More recently, a place has been made in the democratic arena for public opinion polling data as well. How does public opinion fit within the literature of democratic theory? How is it used in practice? Does public opinion data reflect the will of the people better than voting? What are the limitations of survey research and of equating its results with the voice of the people? This paper seeks to propose answers to these questions and unite all of these perspectives into an initial examination and evaluation of the possibilities presented by public opinion data in both the American and generally democratic context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civility is thought to be the way that agents treat non-intimates with whom they come into some kind of contact in the public sphere. The norms of civility point to a type of mutually recognized and acknowledged equality that govern how agents engage and interact one another. It also means that they deal with one another with good faith and with respect to serving the common good despite their differences. However, some theorists have argued that civility is counter productive to democracy or not very important since it is only a process value. This paper challenges these assumptions and critically develops an account of civility based on modern republican ideals and values. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 2006 all of the post-communist states of East and Central Europe (ECE) had adopted laws on Freedom of Information (FOI). This is intriguing considering that it took most “traditional” democracies much longer to pass such laws. The paper asks why the laws were adopted so quickly in ECE and if they are truly effective. The study identifies three mechanisms that contributed to the adoption of FOI laws: a) pressure from civil society; b) unexpected consequences of membership in transparent international organizations; c) direct involvement by international actors. It argues that the differences in the processes leading to FOI law adoption in these countries have translated into differences in their effectiveness. I generate a series of hypotheses and test them by developing two gauges of effectiveness of FOI laws: 1) the public’s use of laws (based on the number of FOI requests received), 2) the implementation of laws by officials (based on the proportion of requests receiving answers). The research looks at developments in Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blackwater Worldwide’s contemporary rise to infamy and its misdeeds in the Iraq War have historical precedents. That is, it is not unheard of for a state to employ non-state actors as means to achieve a goal. In this paper, we build a game theoretic model that determines the prospects for using extra-state actors in combat on behalf of the state. From this model, we hypothesize that despite the risk of agency loss by these private combatants, certain conditions increases the likelihood of their use. Specifically, democracy and non-territoriality of the conflict are predicted to have a positive influence on the decision to employ of extra-state combatants. We test these hypotheses using a censored probit model for all wars from 1816-2002. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borderline democracies are political systems in transition, which have made tremendous progress in their democratic development, experienced some reversals on the way, and have arrived at an important historical juncture that will determine the future path of democratization. A borderline stage of democracy means that a democratic regime is still fragile and vacillating. To maintain a steady democratic advancement, such regimes may benefit from political science theories and the practices of other democratic regimes. This paper builds upon the relevant Western literature on democracy and applies it to the case of Russia. Russia represents a nascent democracy with unique cultural attributes and an adequate legislature and democratic institutions (the constitution, elections, and the constituency base). These institutions and written laws, however, lack full practical implementation and need further strengthening by grassroots movements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Latin America democratizes, ordinary citizens appear less enthusiastic about democracy. What explains this paradox? This paper attempts to fill in the gap between disparate literatures on corruption, urban violence, and democratic orientations by presenting a causal relationship between victimization, corruption, and democratic values. I argue that the increase in criminal activity and perceptions of corruption throughout Latin America may explain part of the variation in democratic orientations and that victims of crime express negative feelings toward democracy and are often have less confidence in political institutions. Using survey data from the 2005 Latinobarometro, I find that victims are indeed less likely to support both democracy as an ideal as well as the political institutions in place while respondents who perceive high levels of corruption are more likely to support democracy but are significantly less likely to support political institutions. Analyses from ordered logit models demonstrate that these results hold across Latin America. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the Patriot Act share one thing in common: they represent the culmination of events that led to the creation of an American police state. In all of the research and publications that have been written about the government response to 9/11, there is a surprising historical disconnect when discussing the oppressive measures that were put into place during the Bush administration, as if measures taken during prior administrations had not happened. In this paper, I propose to examine in detail how the post-9/11 police state was linked to the overall historical trend in post-Revolutionary War America to expand state power at the expense of democracy. It was political movements, which delayed and resisted the expansion of state power during the 19th and 20th centuries. The United States government was able to undermine democratic movements and in so doing, set the stage for the police state, which has appeared in post-9/11 America. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract:We argue that there is a similar situation between today Russia and Weimar Germany because similar factors lead from a defective electoral democracy to an electoral autocracy. We demonstrate that a structural explation with socio-economic factors is not appropriate to explain democratic breakdown in the "crucial cases" of Weimar Germany and Post-Soviet Russia. We show that 1. a considerable lack of democrats on the elite level as well as on the population level and 2. an ill-defined form of government, that allows the president to rule without the parliament in combination with an nondemocratic actor which gets elected for president are sufficient reasons for a country to experience an authoriarian regression. In the second and third part of the paper we take a look on the question, when an electoral semiautocracy is in danger to get a fascist ideocracy. In the second part we show that there is fertile ground for fascism in Russia today. We demonstrate that as in Weimar Germany we can find in today Russia strong fascist actors and a widespread nationalism among the population. But in the third part we we will show, that all in all, ironically, in current Russia, in distinction to Germany 1. a manipulated party system and a underdeveloped third sector, 2. a strong semiautocratic president make it difficult for the country to become a liberal democracy, but make it also improbable that the Russian regime will transgress into a fascist autocracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AAs the ideological gap between political parties' narrows and party identification decreases, parties need new strategies to attract voters. Politicizing political corruption is one option and this paper explores to what extent and with what results political parties have used the issue of corruption in European parliamentary elections between 1983 and 2007. 171 electoral campaigns in 32 European democracies are analyzed and the main results are that politicization of corruption is correlated with the level of corruption. Moreover, the issue is rather under than over politicized, implying that it is not a used as a populist strategy to win votes. Rather it is established mainstream parties that are the main champions of anti-corruption. Finally, the results show that corruption allegations quite substantially increase the likelihood of governmental turnover in medium and highly corrupt countries, whereas corruption is not politicized at all in low corrupt countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rising literature on voting behavior emphasizes a “two step” model (originally argued by Dominguez and McCann in Democratizing Mexico), where a voter first examines their attitudes toward the dominant party and then towards their personal economic or personal interests. However, there are divergent findings from tests of this model, and there are methodological differences that limit our ability to make consistent conclusions. In this paper, we reexamine the validity of the “two-step” argument using data from the 2000 Mexico and 2006 Paraguay elections and employ methods we argue are more appropriate for these tests: 1) a mixed logistic estimation and 2) statistical backwards induction. From the mixed logistic regression, we conclude that voters in nations with hegemonic parties confer greater importance to the image of the dominant party, confirming the “two step” model. From the statistical backwards induction analysis, we confirm that the existence of the two steps respond to strategic considerations of voters. These findings have relevant implications for transitions to a multi-party democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Connolly is one of the foremost exponents of the trend of "Left Nietzscheanism." In this paper, I critique Connolly's appropriation of Nietzsche both hermeneutically and normatively, and suggest the outlines of a liberal alternative. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do political parties in some nominally democratic systems support militant wings? What effect does violence have on the distribution of voter preferences and consequent party platforms. In this paper I assume that parties care about policies. These parties can utilize violence to escape the median voter's preferred policy as well as effect their probability of winning an election. If parties are relatively immoderate, then supporting a militant wing will deter moderate voters, effectively changing the distribution of voters and allowing at least one of two parties to adopt policies closer to their ideal point. Asymmetric distributions of voters provide both ideological and electoral incentives to initiate violence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While whether economic development determines transition to democracy has been studied and retested several times, the relationship of economic development and semi-democracies has been understudied. Does economic development and semi-democracies have any relationship? Why have they not been fully democratized while their economies have performed well? This paper studies whether economic development has an impact on semi-democracies in terms of whether economic development has a significant impact on semi-democratic regimes and how semi-democracies are related to economic development. It hopes to find the answer of whether economic development can lead to transition to full democracies in semi-democratic regimes. To examine whether there is a significant relationship between economic development and semi-democracies, it uses the economic development and political regimes of Malaysia and Singapore as the case study. The finding is that economic development does not have significant impact on semi-democracies and there seems to be no significant between economic development and semi-democratic regimes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the proper way in which to meet injustice? To answer this question, I introduce a distinction between monist as opposed to dualist conceptions of justice. Monist conceptions of justice, of which Rawls' conception of justice as fairness is a representative example, claim that one set of normative principles apply to both ideal and nonideal circumstances, either because of the identity between both sets of principles or, more generally, because the latter, in a sense to be explained, can be derived from or reduced to the former. Dualist conceptions of justice, by contrast, maintain that the two practical problems of ideal and nonideal theory require, at the fundamental level, two different sets of normative principle: one set of principles for ideal circumstances and one set of principles for nonideal circumstances. My aim in this paper is to examine the difficulties posed by monist conceptions of justice, and, in particular, to assess whether it is possible to derive guidance for responding to injustice from principles designed for the regulation of a perfectly just society. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for variation in support for democracy among religious organizations? This paper explores the importance of institutional factors in determining support for democracy among church authorities in Latin America from 1970-2005. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using worldwide cross-sectional time series data, this study compares the consequences of the type of executive for democracy and stability. After presenting a new classification, the paper tests the potential consequences of each type. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from 1950-2000 this paper investigates whether IOs use a hypothesized mechanism to promote democracy within their member states. I test the effects of net characteristics of IO membership on the probability of democratic transition. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a twoâ€"stage model of religiousâ€"democratic change from Italy, this paper argues that friendly religion-state arrangements might be useful for democratic transitions in countries who host a religion that is seemingly hostile towards democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore the government/business nexus, highlighting the conflict between communities and the Wal-Mart Corporation, with a particular focus on the role of municipal and county governments in mediating this conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the emergence of the Democratic Party in southeast Kansas as the leaders of this nascent movement drew on the anti-slavery rhetoric of pre-Civil War republicanism to construct a new identity for the party in the 1870s. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses original survey data from national elections in Russia in 2000 and 2004 to explore the sources of electoral support for Putin, an example of a strong hybrid regime leader. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that previous literature has focused too narrowly on the institutional limitations to democratic responsiveness, to the neglect of the cultural-identity concerns raised in democratic theory. I provide and test a framework for conceptualizing identity, and noting its determinants, which takes into account a variety of factors previously addressed in the literature on EU support. Eurobarometer survey data is utilized in a multi-level model, allowing for the simultaneous consideration of both individual-level and state-level theories of identity formation. Identity development is found to be primarily influenced by diffuse elements of policy support and latent socialization mechanisms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to offer a starting point for building an understanding of the factors that influence public confidence in the courts of nations that are undergoing a transition from authoritarianism to democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to offer insight into the potential and limits of civil society as a vehicle for deepening democratic values in newer democracies. I analyze a large cross-national survey of Latin American citizens in 18 countries to examine the question: Is civil society in Latin America nurturing democratic values or breeding authoritarian sentiments? A multidimensional analysis of civil society brings nuance to our understanding of the relationship between civil society and democratic values. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to develop and test hypotheses about how nations compare in their use across e-government and e-democracy dimensions, and assess the factors that lead to high use of various aspects of these broad initiatives. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines the structure of the representative relationship and evaluates the treatment of representation in contemporary democratic theory with the aim of developing a normative theory of transnational democratic representation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a systemic-level analysis of the determinants of armed great power conflict between 1870 and 1913. It finds that globalization and the spread of democracy were the most important causes of rising military conflict in this period. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]