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This article explores the context for the accompanying suite of papers on creating and sustaining democratic spaces in education. Prompted by the centenary of Summerhill, the internationally famous democratic school founded in Suffolk, England, in 1921, by A.S. Neill, this collection of papers explores and broadens out the central questions at the heart of experiments in democratic education. We suggest that, at a time of distrust in and questioning of the central institutions of democratic government, and in the wake of challenges to the mainstream system of state schooling, these questions are more relevant than ever. We argue that detailed attention to the everyday practice of creating democratic spaces in a variety of educational and social contexts can highlight the myriad ways in which educators, students, families and communities can keep democratic values and principles alive, thereby enriching our discussions about the meaning and value of democratic education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the role that US played in the development of Korean democracy and maintaining peace and security in the Korean peninsula. First, it looks back into the US role in the Korean political transformation from 1950s through 1980s. It examines why the US introduced American style democracy in the divided country and what was the role of the US in the critical junctures of regime changes and transformations. The United States had two contradictory objectives in South Korea: to build up South Korea as ‘a showcase for democracy’ and as an anti-communist buffer state. The two objectives set ‘the American boundary’ to South Korean democracy. The first objective acted upon as an enabling condition for incipient democracy, while the second acted upon as a confining condition to development of democracy in South Korea. Second, it investigates the role that the US played in the outbreak of financial crisis in 1987 and in the ensuing comprehensive neoliberal restructuring of the economy by the Kim Dae Jung government after the crisis. Third, it analyzes three events that put US–Korean relations under stress since the inauguration of Bush administration: Anti-Americanism, perception gap on North Korea, and the new military transformation initiative of US. Finally, it draws policy rationales for stronger Korea–US alliance in the future from the Korean perspective: Korea–US alliance as leverages against China and Japan, means of pursuing an effective engagement policy toward North Korea, a cornerstone to lift South Korea to a hub state in Northeast Asia, and geopolitical balancer and stabilizer in Northeast Asia after the unification of Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a brief introduction to the second part of a suite of papers on the theme 'Political Education for Human Transformation'. Sceptical of the familiar and somewhat narrow frameworks for citizenship education, this East‐West collaboration looks again at the very idea, and the possible means, of education for democracy. It examines the principle of an equality of voices as crucial to mature democratic citizenship, expanding on this through the idea of the 'education of one's experience'. This is a matter not of introspection but rather of turning attention outward—towards the language we use, the way others are treated, works of art and popular culture—in order to be more critically awake and to experience more fully how the world comes to light. We introduce papers by Alexis Gibbs and Léa Boman, which respectively consider the reflections of de Tocqueville on democracy in the United States and Emerson's essay 'Self‐Reliance'. Together, these essays contribute to an understanding of the manner in which we are always already implicated in structures of power. They offer a redefinition of political subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to better understand the evolution and institutional roots of Hong Kong's growing economic inequality and political cleavages. By combining multiple sources of data (household surveys, fiscal data, wealth rankings, national accounts) and methodological innovations, two main findings are obtained. First, he evidence suggests a very large rise in income and wealth inequality in Hong Kong over the last four decades. Second, based on the latest opinion poll data, business elites, who carry disproportionate weight in Hong Kong's Legislative Council, are found to be more likely to vote for the pro-establishment camp (presumably to ensure that policies are passed that protect their political and economic interests). This paper argues that the unique alliance of government and business elites in a partially democratic political system is the plausible institutional root of Hong Kong's rising inequality and political cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the twenty-first century, why did country after country in the developing world open their economies to the global market? This paper argues that increases in democracy were more likely to lead to trade liberalization when governments violated workers' basic rights to act collectively. Democracy empowered pro-trade domestic groups and therefore had the potential to lead to trade liberalization, but respect for labor rights empowered protectionist labor unions to launch protests and strikes that hampered such reforms. This paper supports these arguments with a multimethod approach that combines quantitative analysis of data from 126 developing countries from 1985 to 2010 with qualitative case studies of Argentina and Mexico. In general, the empirical evidence suggests that democracy and labor repression often worked together to facilitate the process of trade liberalization in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers comments on an article by authors, John Ferejohn and Pasquale Pasquino, regarding the mechanisms for controlling emergency powers. It states that the authors has drawn a contrast between slowing-down and speeding-up mechanisms in institutional design. It discusses the relationship between emergency powers as problem solvers and emergency powers as problem creators. It describes how the legislative approach to address emergencies is becoming the rule in Western democracies.

This paper offers a new insight on the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) in the theory of epistemic democracy. This theorem states that democratic decision-making leads us to correct outcomes under certain assumptions. One key assumption is the 'independence condition', which requires that voters form their beliefs independently when they vote. This paper examines the role of an opinion leader as an informational source, which potentially violates independence. We demonstrate that voters' beliefs may be correlated in the presence of the leader, and that the CJT can fail if the leader's opinions are reliable. This leads us to the following paradoxical observation: for epistemic democracy, good leaders may be bad, while bad leaders may be good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective Impact, a framework for improving social service provision first articulated in 2011, promises to improve efficiency while creating win–win cross-sector collaborations to solve the root causes of pressing community needs. This paper argues that in its current articulation, Collective Impact might deliver efficiencies but not transformative change. Positioning Collective Impact within the tradition of US democratic traditions, starting with Alexis de Tocqueville's observations about the importance of US civil society for building an engaged citizenry, highlights specific ways to augment the framework's transformative potential. In contrast to the neoliberal insistence that marketized social service providers are best suited for delivering efficient social service provision, this paper argues that Collective Impact leaders can take responsibility for strengthening civil society for real transformative change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how Emerson's 'Self‐Reliance' offers a meaningful account of political and moral self‐education in Western democracies. Emerson's moral perfectionism involves an ethical, political and democratic individualism that needs to be reconsidered. This paper explores a perfectionist interpretation of the modern forms of self‐education as political and ordinary practices, first with the case of conspiracy theories, which express an individual desire for self‐education but appear as the result of a lack of self‐reliance and a failure of political self‐education, and then through the explicit claim to self‐education made by activists in ecological, anti‐racial or feminist organisations, which embodies the democratic need for self‐reliance. These two examples reveal a new kind of efficient and ordinary political power at the edge of civic commitment. This leads us to define an alternative conception of pedagogy, in which equality in self‐reliance matters. This also underlines our moral and ordinary political responsibility and challenges the traditional philosophical opposition between personal and public, subjective and universal. This paper underlines the accuracy of Stanley Cavell's interpretation of Emerson's 'Self‐Reliance' in order to provide a perfectionist interpretation of activism. It also opens a new crossed perspective between the French and American approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties occupy a contradictory position in the criminological literature: at once active participants in the political contestation of crime but virtually absent from contemporary debates concerning the relationship between crime and democratic theory. In this paper, I present a 'rational reconstruction' of party and partisanship as distinctive modes of political association that are vital to liberal democratic systems that take seriously (1) the value of political pluralism and (2) the limits of public reason to yield definitive answers to the crime question. Currently, political parties are failing to perform these mediating roles satisfactorily and I conclude that a stronger normative commitment to an 'ethic of partisanship' can help to revitalize our representative democracies and foster a better politics of crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Hart Ely's representation-reinforcing theory of the US Constitution had a significant impact on the drafting of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. This short article begins by recapping briefly the pathway by which that influence occurred. It then expands on earlier accounts in two ways. The first is to suggest that Ely's influence in New Zealand illustrates the significance of American postgraduate legal education programs as a vector for the migration of constitutional ideas (although the causal relationship in this case is neither straightforward nor direct). The second is to confront more explicitly a nagging question raised by earlier scholarship: to what extent was it Ely specifically (rather than US process theories more generally) that influenced the New Zealand experience? The article suggests that, at very least, Ely's work acted as the conduit by which the ideas underlying American process theory were transmitted into the New Zealand text. Although it is inevitably somewhat speculative, the article also suggests that it is unlikely that, in the absence of Ely, the drafters of the N.Z. Bill of Rights would have pursued a process-perfecting strategy with quite the same vigilance and systematicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on patient public involvement and engagement (PPIE) in health research has grown significantly in the last decade, with a diverse range of definitions and topologies promulgated. This has led to disputes over what the central functions and purpose of PPIE in health research is, and this in turn makes it difficult to assess and evaluate PPIE in practice. This paper argues that the most important function of PPIE is the attempt to make health research more democratic. Bringing this function to the fore and locating PPIE in the wider context of changes in contemporary forms of democratic engagement provides greater conceptual clarity over what PPIE in research should be trying to achieve. Conceptualizing PPIE as a form of democratization has a number of benefits. First, theories of what are appropriate, normatively justifiable and workable criteria for PPIE practices can be developed, and this can provide tools to address the legitimacy and accountability questions that have troubled the PPIE community. Second, this work can be used to form the basis of a research agenda to investigate how PPIE in health research operates, and how it can facilitate and/or improve democratic processes in health research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plato scholarship in education is currently experiencing a marked renaissance. In the last half decade, dozens of articles have been published in the journals of philosophy of education that engage with Plato's educational vision, and several book-length treatments have appeared at major publishing houses alongside these articles. From one perspective, this development might seem surprising, even baffling. Plato, as we hear from countless, seemingly reliable sources, is a metaphysician par excellence. He believes in a dubious realm of forms that somehow stands above or behind the things we see in the world. He claims that all learning is ultimately recollection from a time in which our soul resided in this realm, before it was infused into our bodies at birth. He is a trenchant critic of democracy. Given these credentials, it would seem that Plato has very little to say to us in post-metaphysical democratic societies and especially to teachers who hope to have a bit more success than Socrates. And yet the authors of the aforementioned works on Plato argue the very opposite. Plato is an indispensable conversation partner for contemporary educational philosophy and theory, they maintain, and overlooking his insights would seriously impoverish our conceptions and methods of education. This suite of papers aims to provide a helpful overview of the contemporary debate concerning Plato's educational legacy and show that it provides important guidance for educators today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a taxonomy of political regimes that distinguishes between three sets of rights—property rights, political rights and civil rights. The truly distinctive nature of liberal democracy is the protection of civil rights (equal treatment by the state for all groups) in addition to the other two. The paper shows how democratic transitions that are the product of a settlement between the elite (who care mostly about property rights) and the majority (who care about political rights), generically fail to produce liberal democracy. Instead, the emergence of liberal democracy requires low levels of inequality and weak identity cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complementing the existing partisanship and income distribution literature that focuses on the earnings of all employees, this paper examines the effect of left government partisanship on top managers. Drawing on firm-level top executive compensation data across thirteen advanced industrialized countries, the paper shows that left government partisanship principally leads to lower CEO compensation, either through laws that enhance workers' collective bargaining power vis-à-vis management or laws that allow shareholders to cast proxy votes on executive compensation (i.e. say-on-pay laws). Furthermore, I show that left government partisanship reduces CEO pay more heavily in those firms that more strongly favor labor's competing stakeholders. In particular, left partisanship reduces executive compensation more heavily in firms that set aside more revenue for shareholders, managers, or creditors, that is, firms with higher asset return, stock return, or debt. These findings highlight how the macro-politics of rising top income inequality at the national level interacts with the micro-distributive conflicts at the firm level. In particular, financialization, such as the rise of the shareholder value revolution, may accentuate the impact of partisan politics against top income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a systematic review of 119 articles and working papers, we provide an overview of how administrative burdens in citizen–state interactions have been studied since the inception of the research agenda in 2012. We develop a new and comprehensive model of how key concepts in the framework are related, assess the evidence of the causal relationships proposed by the model, and discuss where more evidence is needed. Empirical research supports conventional claims that burdens are consequential, distributive, and constructed. However, the literature has moved further by (1) demonstrating that factors such as frontline service delivery and government communication influence experiences of burdens; (2) highlighting how factors beyond ideology influence constructions of burdens; (3) introducing the burden tolerance concept; (4) illustrating that experiences of burden influence policymakers' and members of the publics' burden tolerance. Based on the review, we propose an agenda for future administrative burden research. We call for studies linking experiences of burden to outcomes such as democratic behavior and take-up, and for studies connecting policymakers' burden tolerance to actual state actions. Moreover, we argue that future studies should use qualitative methods to further explore the nature of burdens from the perspective of citizens, rely on experimental methods to establish causal links between state actions and experiences of burden, and compare burdens across contexts. Further, empirical studies should examine the tradeoffs between legitimacy and experiences of burden, and how actors outside the citizen–state interaction may influence experiences of administrative burden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research suggesting that leader transitions increase the probability of war termination is based on the assumption that leader change is exogenous. However, the exogeneity of leader change needs to be tested, not assumed. This paper uses a bivariate discrete survival model to test the exogeneity of leader change and correctly estimate its partial effect on war termination. The paper extends the analysis by estimating a competing risks model of types of leader transitions. The evidence shows that leader change in large coalition systems never increases the probability of war termination, while leader change in small coalition systems never reduces the probability of war termination. In short, leader transitions in autocratic systems are more likely to bring interstate war to an end than leader transitions in democratic ones. The study also shows that the marginal effect of leader change fades away as the war progresses, and that war has negative duration-dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines mass public opinion in three small states of the South Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, to understand why some individuals in these states prefer a pro-Western foreign policy orientation–pursuing membership in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU), while others do not. We draw on social identity theory to hypothesize the potential affinity some individuals feel toward the West. Using public data from the South Caucasus region where Russia has strongly attempted to block Western penetration, the paper demonstrates that the commitment to democratic values is central to the understanding of mass opinion over foreign alliances in small states: individuals who demonstrate pro-democracy attitudes and support democratic values are more likely to approve of pro-Western foreign policy orientation. These findings suggest that the study of foreign policy preferences in small states is important for our understanding of great power politics and alliance competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern democratic constitutions mediate the tension between democracy and the rule of law through institutions that check unrestrained popular rule with expert judicial bodies. This paper considers the alternative arrangement that existed in ancient Athens, where checks on popular rule coexisted with strong popular control. Judicial review in Athens, however, raised two additional threats to democracy and the rule of law: unpredictability and partisanship. We combine a formal model with historical exegesis to show how the strategic incentives of Athenian institutional design, along with a strong societal consensus on the value of constitutional democracy, were necessary ingredients for dispelling both threats. In Athens, institutions responsive to citizens' demands existed alongside a robust rule of law. This case study provides empirical evidence allowing us to reflect on the feasibility of extensive democratic input to the process of constitutional review. [ JEL : H11—structure, scope, and performance of government; K40—legal procedure, the legal system, and illegal behavior (general)] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Black Lives Matter campaign has led many people around the world to reassess monuments that are installed in public spaces to commemorate historical figures. These reassessments raise questions about what it means to attack the statues of the past, what the rights and wrongs of such actions are, what this teaches us and how all this is passed on to the next generation. In line with this, I focus on a statue of the former dictator of Korea, Chun Doo‐hwan, installed in 2019. The purpose of the statue was, however, somewhat different from that of many other statues currently at issue. It was erected for the purpose of humiliation rather than respect. By examining the case of the statue of Chun Doo‐hwan in Korea, this paper discusses the nature of democracy in relation to these attacks on statues. In particular, it attempts to interpret the installation of the statue as a form of art for an emancipated community, where democracy is understood as involving a haunting of the collective memory. It concludes that democracy is something never to be grasped fully, something that slips away from its intentions and that is always to be tested and reconsidered. Finally, the paper addresses the educational significance of the statue in question in terms of how history is to be taught and how, in our interactions with the statues around us, the past is to be remembered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the first co‐operative trust school at Reddish Vale in Manchester in 2006, the following decade would witness a remarkable growth of 'co‐operative schools' in England, which at one point numbered over 850. This paper outlines the key development of democratic education by the co‐operative schools network. It explains the approach to democracy and explores the way values were put into practice. At the heart of co‐operativism lay a tension between engaging with technical everyday reforms and utopian transformative visions of an educational future. A new arena of debate and practice was established with considerable importance for our understanding of democratic education within the mainstream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To speak of democracy is often to speak less of a fact than of a hope. In his introduction to Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville admitted that '... in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress'. De Tocqueville recognised that democracy's success would rely on its constant promotion, the affirmation and revaluation of its terms and conditions, such that it sustains the investedness of its (voluntary) participants. This paper considers the work of Stanley Cavell as inheriting the tone of de Tocqueville's romantic will to democracy, particularly in the discovery of its analogous image in 'remarriage comedy'. I look first at the ways in which popular pictures of (in this case, American) democracy on film sustain an expression of hope for a better set of relations amongst equal and consenting participants, an expression that is identified as romantic in nature. By contrast, I will also discuss how representations of democracy's reality on screen—pictures that sit outside comfortable generic expectations, and reveal those moments in which interest in democratic participation or values has ebbed or is dormant—have as much to tell us about democracy's character as more idealist expressions of what it might be or become. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil society organizations (CSOs) are a cornerstone of democracy in Europe. Nonetheless, "civil society" and "political society" should not be equated as membership-based organizations are not necessarily politically engaged. This paper theorizes and empirically examines which membership-based CSOs engage in interest representation through sustained advocacy activity. We propose an incentive-theoretical framework on CSO investments in advocacy activities—a collective, non-exclusive incentive from which also non-members can profit—by organizations fundamentally dependent on member support. Theorizing how CSOs' own structural characteristics, resource dependencies, and government demand for CSO input affect how CSOs reconcile selective and collective incentive provision, we test our hypotheses using new data from four recent surveys conducted in four European democracies. In line with our framework, CSOs organizing individual citizens rather than corporate actors and those pursuing member interests are less likely to engage in advocacy, while CSO professionalization and state funding access enhance CSOs' propensities to do so. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the former structural CSO characteristics are similarly relevant for CSO advocacy across distinct country settings, while the role of resource variables is mediated by institutional context revealing an important source of inequality in democratic interest representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I outline Du Bois's WWI-era theory of democracy, which comprises three parts: first, an historically specific explanation of the racially exclusionist character of the modern struggle for democracy; second, a justification of universal suffrage; and third, an account of democratic culture, the promotion of which he believed was necessary to supplement the enfranchisement of black people where white supremacy still threated the achievement of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much writing in comparative criminology on the punitive turn and developments in Western penal states has focused on how the state provides security to its citizens. However, the number of private guards exceeds those of police officers in many European countries, and private security services carry out numerous law and order tasks. Our paper links the literature on private security with comparative penal policy studies. It explores how the cross-national variance in the relative importance of public and private security—which we term 'the security balance' – can be explained by quantitatively analysing data on public and private security in 23 European countries from 2009 to 2018. We contribute to the literature on crime and politics by highlighting the significant role of private security in today's balance of security provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust in one's fellow citizens and in politicians are both conducive to well-functioning government. Beyond their separate importance, it is a long-standing notion that generalized social trust and political trust are connected in a mutually reinforcing relationship that further undergirds democratic governance. While it is well established that social trust and political trust are robustly positively associated at the individual level, there is much less compelling evidence regarding the causal nature of this relationship. Previous analyses have been unable to adequately rule out confounding and correct for reverse causality. This paper tackles these challenges through data and a research design close to ideally suited for addressing the causal status of the relationship. Using a 20-wave individual-level panel survey from Sweden analyzed using a dynamic panel model, we find evidence for a relatively strong positive causal effect of political trust on social trust, but little evidence for the reverse relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I make the case that the tradition of pragmatism may usefully inform aesthetic criticism. To that end, I contrast the anti-essentialist outlook and the ethico-political concerns of neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty with the epistemological underpinnings of analytic aesthetics. The aim is to outline an alternative meta-theoretical perspective that 'overwrites' long-standing concerns with exactitude and objectivity. Drawing on examples from my own area of expertise, film, and television studies, I seek to explicitly set up aesthetic criticism, especially evaluation, as a means of social progress and human flourishing within the framework of liberal democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations scholarship has posited multiple pathways through which democracies accrue advantages in world politics. These range from enhanced warfighting capabilities to sovereign borrowing capacity to more constructive cooperation with like-minded regimes. A series of crises over the past generation, however, have called these advantages into question. This paper re-examines the key conceptual pillars underlying the democratic advantage in world politics. Scholars have posited that democracies possess inherent advantages in credible commitment mechanisms and public goods provision. The rise of populism has eroded these underlying advantages. Furthermore, the rise of China threatens to hamper the network effects that enhance democratic flourishing at the global level. Whether the democratic advantage is real and sustainable should be one of the defining political science research programs of this century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effects of religious regulation and favoritism on religious markets in the Muslim world. Specifically, the paper examines to what extent the institutional promotion of Islam has generated more robust national religious markets and whether levels of political openness have conditioned such robustness. The paper builds a “comparative political economy” approach to analyze Muslim-majority religious markets by drawing on a more complex understanding of the varieties of ways in which states institutionalize their relationships with the religions of their nations. In doing so, the paper argues that some types of state-sponsored religious monopolies are more efficient at promoting religious dynamism than others. A cross-national analysis of religiosity in the Muslim-majority world suggests that religiously friendly policies in democratic settings can boost national rates of religiosity and that the possibility of religious coercion in authoritarian settings magnifies the effects of the promotion (or de-promotion) of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information about several papers discussed at a symposium on the social and economic development in Africa is presented. The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa has provided grants for research and a variety of national, regional, and transnational research programs and projects. Historian Yusuf Bangura discussed his ongoing research into ethnicity and democracy in Africa.

The article offers information on conferences to be held from June-October 2020 which include Twenty-Sixth World Congress of Political Science, Third International Conference on Election and Democracy and Fifth International Interdisciplinary Conference on Refugees and Forced Immigration.

The theme of this paper is the dynamics through which political order and organized government is constituted and reconstituted in democratic contexts. Key questions are how basic political rules evolve and change and the possible significance of reflection, deliberate design and explicit constitutional policy. In democracies a focus on reflection and choice requires an understanding of how political support is mobilized and acquiescence, agreement and allegiance are achieved. It is important to analyze how constitution making may turn a political system with enduring tensions and conflicts into an organized system of democratic governance, cooperation and problem solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the democratic provenance of the law ground a pro tanto duty to obey the law? According to the social-egalitarian argument, it does, because individuals have a pro tanto duty to uphold relations of social equality, and because, by obeying a democratically made law, they uphold relations of social equality. In this paper, I argue, however, that even if we grant the premisses of the argument, the conclusion still does not follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares Friedrich Hayek's classic analysis of 'unlimited democracy' to arguments put forward by Walter Eucken, the founder of German ordoliberalism. It is shown that Eucken's criticism of democracy is directly related to his liberal conviction: similar to Hayek, Eucken anticipates the possibility of interest groups to engage in rent seeking through the democratic process. In view of Hayek's distinction between the basic ideal of democracy and its institutional realisation, it is argued that Eucken's criticism relates to the latter aspect. Furthermore, the paper maintains that a comprehensive liberalism as represented by Eucken and Hayek implies a constitutional concept of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General political knowledge is a central variable in American politics research. Individuals with high political knowledge exhibit behaviors that are consequential to a well-functioning democracy, including holding more stable political opinions, exhibiting greater ideological constraint, knowing more about political candidates, and being more likely to vote correctly. In this paper, we examine whether the internet revolution, enabling citizens to look up anything at any time, has changed the relative importance of political knowledge in American politics. We show that important generational differences exist between Americans raised during the broadcast era and Americans raised with the presence and accessibility of the internet. Internet access can be a substitute for political knowledge stored in long-term memory, particularly among this younger generation, who may be relying on the internet to store knowledge for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the evidence on how technology will affect labour markets in advanced democracies over the next 10–15 years. In addition to assessing evidence on the impact of technology on the aggregate number of jobs, we take a wider view to consider how the 'Digital Revolution' will affect the quality and composition of jobs, how and where we work, and whether labour is supplied as part of a larger firm or as a self-employed micro-entrepreneur. This assessment further aims to situate the papers covered in this issue of the Oxford Review of Policy within the broader literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper models the executive's choice of whether to reschedule external debt as the outcome of an intra-governmental negotiation process. The key issue the paper tries to explain is the stark difference in default rates between the group of developing countries that have presidential forms of government and those that are parliamentary (6.0%/year vs 1.6%/year). This difference is present in spite of the fact that the latter group tends to have a somewhat higher turnover of the executive. The conditions under which parliamentary democracies will deliver lower probabilities of default than presidential countries are derived in a model with opportunistic politicians. Empirically, I find that middle-income democracies with parliamentary regimes, more checks on the executive, lower turnover in leadership and coalition governments show lower default propensities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Satisfaction with democracy registered its lowest global score in 2019, with Latin America being the worst-performing region and the most seized by social protest. This paper briefly surveys and assesses the main narratives that attempt to explain the causes of this discontent in the region. The results show that discontent has different roots, which are mostly explained from an individual point of view rather than from a contextual one. Inequality of opportunity and institutional weaknesses play the main role. Considering the COVID-19 social and economic crisis, our results shed light on the key elements to address whether discontent is to be contained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the justification of the work of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The idea that moves this text is that, commonly, we study the decisions of the Court trying to determine whether they refer to an activist or self-restrained Court; whether those decisions are liberal, conservative or progressive; but we seldom reflect on the very justification of the Court's task. In this brief paper, I will begin to examine the question, taking into account a particular conception of democracy—which I will call "democracy as conversation among equals." From that standpoint I will derive a certain justification of judicial review—a model of judicial review that would be sensitive to the context and institutional peculiarities of the region—that will help me to critically evaluate the role and mission of the Inter-American Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the transnational dimensions of low-level conflict and state repression. In this regard, special emphasis is placed on the role of political regimes. Drawing on a simple model, we argue that democracy has opposing effects on conflict intensity. On one hand, democracy satisfies demand for political participation and thus reduces conflict potential, while, on the other hand, we highlight that domestic democracy may spur dissatisfaction and conflict abroad, which, in turn, may induce conflict spillovers. As a result, the net effect of democracy on low-level conflict and state repression is ambiguous and depends on the level of democracy in the neighborhood: We predict that democracy is more pacifying in democratic environments and may spur conflict in autocratic environments. By the symmetry of the model, we also predict that democratic environments are more pacifying for democratic countries and may spur conflict in autocracies. Empirical evidence using panel data on different types of low-level conflict and state repression for 160 countries in the period from 1950 to 2011 supports these hypotheses. Additionally, two case studies illustrate the mechanisms of our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes an argument for the democratic value of distrust. It begins by analyzing distrust, since distrust is not merely the negation of trust. The account that it develops is based on Martin Luther King Jr.'s work in Why We Can't Wait. Distrust is the confident belief that another individual, a group of individuals, or an institution will not act justly or as justice requires. This paper argues that distrust's democratic value lies in its ability to temper tyranny. The main example discussed is Ring's involvement in the Birmingham Campaign during the Black Civil Rights movement in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper generally explores the role of legislative counsel within the lawmaking process. It considers different ways that legislative counsel work to strengthen the democratic principle within that process. It also considers how the context of a small maturing government may impact this role. The case of underdeveloped instructions is explored throughout this paper as a means to investigate how legislative counsel can ensure that, in working with clients, their actions strengthen the democratic principle as oppose to weaken it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Megaprojects are increasingly common across countries and attract substantial political attention from a variety of actors. Recent studies have highlighted the need to move from an understanding of megaprojects as linear and rational processes towards a more nuanced approach that accounts for non-linear and conflictual aspects. Participatory governance is often proposed as a valuable resource in this regard. In this paper, we investigate the setting and design of two participatory venues operating in the context of the implementation of the Lyon-Turin high-speed railway megaproject: the Italian Observatory for the Turin-Lyon Railway and the French Public Inquiry. Empirical evidence shows that the Italian case featured substantial structural barriers to effective democratic participation. As for the French case, while better designed and implanted in its context, it featured important agentic limitations that undermined its democratic potential. On the basis of our case study, we therefore argue that both the Observatory for the Turin-Lyon Railway and Public Inquiry failed to promote democratic participation. We thus propose a deliberative approach to (the study of) of megaprojects. Whereas deliberative democratic ideas command growing interest across disciplines, these have found only limited application in the study of megaprojects. We contend that a deliberative democratic approach holds promise to improve the democratic and epistemic qualities of decision making on megaprojects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concept of 'radical otherness' from the perspectives of John Rawls' political liberalism and Chantal Mouffe's agonistic pluralism, and studies the relevance of these approaches to contemporary citizenship education. In this context, the notion of 'radical otherness' refers to such ethical, political or religious doctrines that are incompatible with the basic principles of liberal democracy and thus present a potential challenge to democratic institutions. The article suggests that despite its recent popularity in political philosophy and theory of education, Mouffe's agonistic pluralism faces difficulties in providing an adequate response to the issue of accommodating radical others in contemporary democratic societies. As a rejoinder to the Mouffean approach to political education, the paper develops a view of citizenship education based on Rawls' concept of reasonableness, and the democratic principles associated with it. It is argued in the paper that these principles—reciprocity and the burdens of judgment—are constituent elements of the symbolic space required by democratic politics. The article further suggests, however, that to properly address the issue of radical otherness in contemporary democracies, the limitations of the Rawlsian approach must also be recognised. Accordingly, Rawls' theory needs to be complemented with a more critical understanding of the economic, social and political processes and mechanisms that currently create structural injustice and social and political inequality in contemporary democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses corporate-led jobless growth propelled by development-induced displacement caused by land acquisition by the State. It shows as its inevitable outcome an expanding informal sector which encroaches upon land-related natural resources allocated to the corporate sector. This reduces the latter's labour productivity and competitiveness along with negative impact on environment and social cohesion. Using the example of India as a multiparty democracy, the paper points to the emergence of a dangerous developmental politics of mutualism between political parties and corporations over land acquisition, which subverts the very democratic process through which political power is wielded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I Tempo i 's advocacy of the weekend is a sensible way to understand the appeal of the newspaper and the directions it championed. In the marvellous first sentences to his 1925 short story "Disorder and Early Sorrow", Thomas Mann described what a slice of time looked like: 'The principal dish at dinner had been croquettes made of turnip greens. For I Tempo i , the means were the end: the motions of informed citizens who would fashion best practices necessary for collective life, and the paper was sure that the new dispassionate attitudes of young people would determine the shape of an increasingly pluralistic republic. [Extracted from the article]