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This article explores the ability of historical materialism to articulate a history of democracy that focuses on social conflict as the main engine for the emergence and consolidation of representati- ve democratic institutions. The article begins by reflecting on the withdrawal and rise of Marxism in the academic world. It continues to define democracy as an object of study and investigates the capacity of political Marxism as a tool for the construction of this historical interpretation. Historiographical background in this field continues to be exposed to end with an exposition of the hypotheses of our targeted research plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discute sobre la concepción utópica de Álvaro Márquez Fernández sobre la resignificación de los conceptos de democracia, poder y ciudadanía para la participación y alternancia del poder con el fin de dar cuenta de un mejor ser de los ciudadanos adscritos a las distintas nacionalidades del tercer mundo y la construcción. del buen vivir y la crítica a la modernidad.

El artículo se centra en la historia de la democracia en México. Diversos temas discutidos incluyen percentil de presupuesto de diferentes estados, análisis del gasto público en México, de las entidades federativas de la región, historia de patrimonialismo, casos de corrupción y escándalos en la política mexicana y la democratización en la región.

This article analyzes the role played by Schafick Jorge Handal in the process of political conversion of the Frente Farabundo Martí into la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) in the post-civil war period. We analyzed the main debates about the political and ideological redefinition of the FMLN, once the civil war was finished, the party leadership and internal democracy. This process was marked by bitter disputes between the leaders of the old political-military organizations that formed the FMLN. Handal was one of the main protagonists of these struggles, and gained power and internal recognition. But he died suddenly in 2006, when the process of "unification" was advanced, but not consolidated. Nevertheless, Handal has become the main identity reference in the official memory of the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the history of democracy, with a focus on its relation to demagogues and populism. The authors comment on the political philosophy of ancient Greece regarding democracy, particularly the ideas of Aristotle. The current state of democratic societies and demagoguery is also examined.

This article discusses the political theories of French historian and philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon, with a particular focus on democracy. The author comments on the Rosanvallon's ideas regarding the plurality of democracy, including citizen participation. The relationship between democracy and history is also examined.

This paper analyzes the influence that different political actors in the province of Cordoba had in changing the electoral system starting from the application of Sáenz Peña Law in the province context. In Córdoba, liberal democracy ideas echoed throughout the social fabric: Radical Civic Union, local press, and a liberal faction of the ruling class that since 1890 juarismo crisis had stayed away from the power. This pressure for changes on the provincial government of Felix Garzón, responding to a clerical faction of conservatism Cordoba, resulted in the conventional meeting to reform the provincial Constitution. In this context, conventional discourses are analyzed, highlighting similarities and differences within the provincial conservatism and paying special attention to proposals concerning the ideas of democratization of the political-institutional system of the province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Con los gobiernos de Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) se produjo en Venezuela un cambio de régimen político de una democracia representativa a otra "participativa y protagónica". Este artículo presenta resultados de una investigación sobre los orígenes del concepto participativo constitucional, que son de manera preponderante derivados del pensamiento social de la Iglesia Católica. La primera parte revisa ideas sobre la participación desde Concilio Vaticano II; la segunda, cómo estas ideas pasaron luego a propuestas políticas del partido socialcristiano COPEI (Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente). La tercera indaga sobre el concepto participativo en la izquierda venezolana; y la cuarta y quinta partes examinan la participación en las propuestas de la Comisión para la Reforma del Estado y en la fallida reforma constitucional de 1992, donde quedó asentado el principio participativo que sería copiado a la Carta Magna de 1999. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La finalidad de este trabajo es analizar y discutir la importancia de la dimensión política de la rendición de cuentas vertical. Para ello, primero se expone que el principio de independencia de la representación ha generado una excesiva distancia los representantes y los ciudadanos. También se analiza que el ejercicio de la representación política tiene como límite la calidad de la representación. Para vigilar dicha calidad los ciudadanos deben contar con diversos mecanismos de rendición de cuentas. Este trabajo pretende mostrar que para que los ciudadanos sean tomados en cuenta por los políticos y juzguen la calidad de su desempeño se requiere el fortalecimiento de los mecanismos de rendición de cuentas verticales [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronic communal conflicts embody prisoner's dilemmas. Both communities prefer peace to war. But neither trusts the other, viewing the other's gain as its loss, so potentially shared interests often go unrealized. Achieving positive-sum outcomes from apparently zero-sum struggles requires a particular kind of risk-embracing leadership. To succeed leaders must: a) see power relations as potentially positive-sum; b) strengthen negotiating adversaries when tempted to weaken them; and c) demonstrate hope for a positive future and take great personal risks to achieve it. Such leadership is exemplified by Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk in the South African democratic transition. To illuminate the strategic dilemmas Mandela and de Klerk faced, we examine the work of Robert Axelrod, Thomas Schelling, and Josep Colomer, who highlight important dimensions of the problem but underplay the role of risk-embracing leadership. Finally we discuss leadership successes and failures in the Northern Ireland settlement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its very beginning during the fifth century B.C. democracy, as a political regime, has maintained a constant normative nucleus; equality and freedom among its members. But it also presents notorious discontinuities in the institutional internal organization. Modern democracies are equally indebted to two traditions; on the one hand popular sovereignty, under the form of either direct democracy or republican mixed constitution, and innate subjective rights on the other. Democracy resolved the dilemmas that emerged from opposed interests through two ways: representation, which enables it to incorporate them in a reduced collegiate body, within which deliberation and consensus is possible, and also through the universal election of representatives and governors by pre-established periods of time. This institutional schema is dangerously falling apart due to domestic tensions within each nation, on the one hand, and the constriction coming from the globalized economy on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience of the old Greece created the concept of politics and systematized around it a deep conception of its meaning. The three classical thinkers of the political philosophy (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle with his study on the constitutions of the city-states) proposed the dialectic between the reality and the ideal models in order to find strategies of action for the governments and for the citizens. This article tries to offer a panorama of the rise of the political thought in the old Greece -from Homer and Hesiod, the pre-Socratic thinkers to the IV century IV b. C. with the apparition of the systematic philosophy concluding that the fundamental points of their vision continue being a framework for the debate on politics and democracy in contemporary societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ancient city is defined as a community of free peasants, but with the correction that these are submitted to different ways of surplus delivery and that slave labour is diffused there but with different rhythms and intensity. After Peloponnesian War, freedom of citizen and slave labour fall down in crisis and forms of clientelism that had been abolished by Solon's reforms diffuse again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the transition, Spain has registered consistently high levels of support for democracy, which have evolved not only into a majoritarian support, but also into an unconditional one, creating a "safety attitudinal area" which makes it largely immune to the vicissitudes of politics or economic crises and helping also to overpass the political legacies and conflicts of the past. This attitudinal process, which has produced a consolidated attitudinal democracy, has been the result of an instrumental choice that was shaped above all by the political events of the transition and consolidation periods, and, more precisely, by the consensual and inclusive nature of the Spanish transition and the active avoidance of the politization of the "regime issue" by the major political actors of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article that is shown analyze the firsts years of Chilean transition (1987-1988) from the perspective of the historic memory, considering the shape in that the remembers of had been the Frei and Popular Unity government, thus like the military State Stroke and the Dictatorship, signed the politic and social development in that period, specially, in the voting process of 1988. For that, we consider the instances that made that voting process possible, the developed pro government officials and opponents campaigns, and the reasons that explain the results to consider it the process origin point that it allowed the return to the democracy in Chile, after 17 years of dictatorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy has long been present in Venezuelan history. Despite interruptions by regimes of force, yearning for democracy has never wavered. Revisiting the 19th century offers historical perspective of how democracy is deeply rooted in Venezuelan conscience, so much so that even such characters as Juan Vicente Gómez and Antonio Guzmán Blanco declared themselves to be democrats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author reflects upon the history and growth of democracy in Mexico.