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Digital platforms are a primary means of communication in society. Public libraries play an empowering role in these processes, strengthening citizens’ digital competences. This raises questions about what democratic processes the digital technology is made to enable. The study investigates how a Swedish Digital Library (DL) is envisioned and organised within a national digitalisation strategy. Qualitative methods are used, and a theoretical democracy framework is developed and used together with the concepts of education and Bildung in the analysis. Four empirical themes are identified. The analysis centres on tensions related to horizontality and hierarchy, and Bildung and sociality. The DL vision is dominated by a hierarchical and instrumental educational vision that connects to representative democracy. A subordinated social and pedagogical vision of inner motivational drives and partial forms of sharing, connected to deliberative and semi-participatory democracy forms, exists, mostly in the form of some cherry-picked Web 2.0 discourses.

This study analyzes the quality of citizen representation in local government in Albania. The territorial administrative map of Albania contains 61 municipalities and 12 regions. The territory of a municipality lies in urban, peri-urban and rural areas. In them coexist civic communities with different social, economic, cultural, ethnic characteristics, etc. The current legislation provides only the election of the mayor, every four years, according to the majority system with one round and the election of municipal council members according to the proportional system, with closed lists. The lists are proposed by political parties. Independent citizens also have the right to run for mayor or members of the municipal council. Apart from the municipality, for all other territorial-administrative levels, city, neighborhood, administrative unit, village, according to which the municipality is organized, the law on local self-government provides for the establishment of bodies responsible for the administration of local affairs appointed exclusively by the mayor of the municipality. The analysis of the level and quality of the representation of the citizens in the elected local bodies, shows that: (i) the representation in the Municipal Council of the communities living in the urban areas and the rural area is not proportional; (ii) civic communities belonging to marginalized groups are not qualitatively represented; (iii) the representation of national minorities, in particular the Roma and Egyptian minorities, is negligible. The analysis highlights the need for intervention in legislation in order to increase the level of representation and quality of service for local communities, through: (i) election of the administrator and the administration council of the administrative units, every four years, by the citizens; (ii) providing a proportional representation in the municipal council and the regional council of communities residing in urban and rural areas. (iii) providing for the establishment of representation quotas in local elected bodies of national minorities, in accordance with the law on national minorities. The revision of the legal package under which the last territorial-administrative and local selfgovernment reform was implemented, aiming at a comprehensive and consensual legislative process is an effective opportunity to increase the quality of local representative democracy.

A growing dissatisfaction with the political class has emerged in Italy. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the original strategy adopted by the Five Star Movement (FSM) was to connect citizens and institutions directly, thanks to ICTs. A participation platform called “Rousseau” was created to this end in 2016. However, after the Movement’s great success in the 2018 national elections, digital utopianism was gradually abandoned. In 2021, the statute was reformed, creating new roles and organs making the FSM more akin to a traditional party, and the ‘Rousseau’ platform was replaced by another one with limited functions. This evolution leads to three theses: first, the reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a mainly symbolic value for FSM; second, as recent facts show, this ideal reference weakened with the action of governing and the ‘normalisation’ of the party; third, this evolution confirms that the Rousseauian ideal is difficult to realise in a complex society.

The Condorcet Jury Theorem and subsequent literature establish the feasibility of information aggregation in a common-value environment with exogenous policy options: a large electorate of imperfectly informed voters almost always selects the correct policy option. Rather than directly voting for policies, citizens in modern representative democracies elect candidates who make strategic policy commitments. We show that intermediation by candidates sometimes improves policy choices and sometimes impedes information aggregation. Somewhat paradoxically, the possibility of information aggregation by voters encourages strategic conformism by candidates. Correlated information or partisan biases among voters can mitigate the political failure we uncover. We also discuss possible institutional solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines whether an institution has a differing impact on cooperation if it is introduced by a representative of the affected subjects rather than exogenously imposed. The experimental design controls for selection effects arising from the endogenous policy choice. The treatment varies whether the decision-maker is elected or randomly appointed. There is evidence of a large democracy premium in the sense that endogenously chosen institutions lead to more cooperation than identical exogenous institutions, but only if the group leader is democratically chosen. Especially the subjects who initially did not prefer the policy are more likely to cooperate if it was brought about by an elected representative. There is no democracy premium for randomly appointed group leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metropolitan governance studies have traditionally focused on factors such as effectiveness and efficiency in the provision of public goods and services. Yet, we have recently seen the resurgence of debates around metropolitan democratic governance at the same time as the consolidation of new structures of metropolitan government have occurred in several European countries. In spite of that, there is still an important knowledge gap about metropolitan models of government and metropolitan electoral systems. Through the comparative analysis of metropolitan governments in the United Kingdom, France and Germany we identify four main models: metropolitan presidentialism, localist metropolitan parliamentarism, consolidated metropolitan parliamentarism, and full metropolitan government. Moreover, the comparative analysis shows not only the influence of the respective local institutional contexts in the metropolitan government and electoral systems, but also how these reforms are opportunities to introduce innovative institutional designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-elected actors in governance networks are legitimate representatives when the constituency accepts their claims of representation. However, not all constituents have the resources to approve or oppose this representation. Consequently, I argue that the audience, often the decision-making authority, which enables non-elected actors to act as representatives has a responsibility to consider their legitimacy. Drawing on seven business and urban development networks in Norway, this article explores how the decision-making authority considers credibility, qualifications and connectedness to legitimise non-elected representatives in governance networks. Through interviews with civil servants and politicians organising and participating in the network, relevant documents and observations, this article demonstrates that the decision-making authority legitimises non-elected representatives based on credibility and qualifications rather than connectedness with the constituency. The decision-making authority believes that claims grounded in specialist expertise, self-representation and shared experiences with the constituency legitimise non-elected representatives. Similarly, truthful representatives are considered legitimate. Finally, the decision-making authority is divided with regards to how the interactive process between the non-elected representative and the constituency legitimises the content of the representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing dissatisfaction with the political class has emerged in Italy. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the original strategy adopted by the Five Star Movement (FSM) was to connect citizens and institutions directly, thanks to ICTs. A participation platform called "Rousseau" was created to this end in 2016. However, after the Movement's great success in the 2018 national elections, digital utopianism was gradually abandoned. In 2021, the statute was reformed, creating new roles and organs making the FSM more akin to a traditional party, and the 'Rousseau' platform was replaced by another one with limited functions. This evolution leads to three theses: first, the reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a mainly symbolic value for FSM; second, as recent facts show, this ideal reference weakened with the action of governing and the 'normalisation' of the party; third, this evolution confirms that the Rousseauian ideal is difficult to realise in a complex society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to analyze impeachment as a mechanism of institutional control of political actors, searching for its historical and theoretical bases in common law, so as to uncover the sources of the Brazilian originalist model. The Brazilian model deserves special attention due to its highly distinct, descriptive constitutional hypotheses. Before attempting to define the nature of impeachment, the main objective was to place the general idea of responsibility within the theoretical scope of representative democracy, accounting for potential failures resulting in frustration of expectations of constituencies and/or abuse of power by representatives. While identifying structural distinctions between political accountability and legal responsibility, it was appropriate to bring forth the requirement of legal violation in classical Athenian precedents (eisangeliai). In the end, this analysis goes over historical mutations of the impeachment mechanism: a) establishment of procedural parameters (British first cases); b) inceptive prerequisite of legal violation (Stuart period); c) attemptable specification of appropriate legal hypotheses (US); d) constitutional provision of precise categories of legal violation (Brazil). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we wish to provide a survey of online documentary resources for the historical study of political thought and illustrate a series of “good practices” which could be adopted to optimize the use of publicly available digital collections in historiographical research. As a case study, we first report on the search, in very large digital collections of historical documents, for occurrences of the phrase “representative democracy” (and its dictionary equivalents in Italian and French) between 1778, the first occurrence of the term recorded in our data, and 1799. Most of the occurrences retrieved through a careful process of selection and scrutiny have not previously been discussed in the literature. In the last part of the article we discuss the contribution of text analysis tools to diachronic research, looking at frequency data from resources such as Google Books Ngram Viewer and HathiTrust + Bookworm, and comparing findings about the lexical profiles of “democracy” and “representative democracy” in historical and contemporary corpora.

Resentment is a complex, multi-layered emotion, within which perceptions of unfairness and feelings of anger are central. When linked to politics, it has predominantly been associated with the alleged “crisis of representative democracy” and populism. However, recent studies have shown that resentment can intervene positively in people’s relations to politics and political institutions by facilitating certain types of political participation (Capelos & Demertzis, 2018). Despite this, the concept of resentment, and hence its role in contemporary representative democracy, is often poorly defined, with empirical investigations of its manifestation(s) remaining scarce. Borrowing a conceptualization of resentment as “resentful affectivity,” our article draws on the analysis of focus groups carried out in Belgium (2019–2020) with individuals where resentful affectivity is likely to be observed (i.e., contemporary movements of contestation such as the Yellow Vests, Youth for Climate, and individuals who occupy a socially disadvantaged position). We find that experiences of intense anger, fear, disappointment, and the unfairness of representative democracy, i.e., of how representative democracy works on the ground, coexist simultaneously with remaining hopes in the democratic system. We show how this complex blend of emotions confronts citizens with what we call a “democratic dilemma.” We document the different ways in which citizens cope with this dilemma and conclude by highlighting both the positive and negative ways in which resentment intervenes in the contemporary “crisis of representative democracy.”

Political parties seeking reelection should try to fulfill their election pledges. A number of studies trying to confirm this assumption were written in the last three decades. Existing studies have also identified a number of factors that increase or decrease the probability of pledge fulfillment. The goal of this review is to apprise the reader with the most important findings of these research attempts. To achieve this, the author have analyzed 44 studies focused on the topic of pledge fulfillment. The results clearly show that a political pledge has a better chance of fulfillment if it doesn‘t seek to change the status quo, its passing is agreed upon in the government coalition, and its fulfillment is not obstructed by the economical situation. The analyzed studies, however, also show that controlling the specific portfolio and issue saliency do not, contrary to the prevailing theoretical assumptions, increase the chance of fulfilling political pledges.

Although an increasing volume of research has identified several negative sociopolitical attitudes as correlates of conspiracy theories, to date it remains unclear whether belief in conspiracy theories is necessarily in conflict with support for democratic governance. In this contribution, we integrate previous findings suggesting inconsistent relationships between belief in conspiracy theories and support for democratic governance. Study 1 (N = 300) shows that belief in conspiracy theories is associated with decreased support for representative democracy but increased support for direct democracy. Study 2 (N = 270) replicated these findings and revealed that these relationships were mediated by political cynicism and feelings of powerlessness. In Study 3 (N = 298), we experimentally show that a system with direct democracy (as compared with representative democracy) empowered participants and therefore decreased belief in conspiracy theories. Contrary to the common notion that conspiracy theories are associated with decreased support for democracy, these findings suggest that conspiracy beliefs are associated with a preference for direct over representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislative body Parliament through its representatives plays the decisive role in the democratic development of the rule of law. In order to establish a constructive line leading to a constitutional democracy, the Parliament was made up of two electoral cores, the parliamentary majority, those under the auspices of the government, those who exercise power and the opposition, minorities from an electoral point of view but who have critical dialogue and sanctioning acts that do not target the interest of the voter. Thus, the binomial opposition/parliamentary majority has always been based on the principle of dualism, in which the one who makes a mistake is corrected in the issue of governance. The two cores can also be viewed as an effective contrast that through democratic means participates in the governance of the rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the use of technology to improve democracy, comparing the cases of Estonia and Catalonia. Both examples are closely related in their use of technology to further democratize the decision-making processes, but have opposite starting points. Estonia's internet voting system is an offshoot of the comprehensive e-governance system developed by the Estonian government. It is meant to make it more convenient for people to vote and, thus, easier for them to take part in elections. In Catalonia, the online participation system Decidim, initially set up in the city of Barcelona, represents a bottom-up project that emerged from the 15 May protests and aims to make the representative democratic system more direct and participatory. In our comparison we approach both paradigmatic cases from a theoretical reflection on the ideal types of democracy in relation to how decisions are made and by whom. Both projects have evolved and integrated new features that draw them together. First, internet voting is able to reach wider portions of society and digitally transform the Public Administration. Second, online participation platforms increase the potential for collecting citizens' proposals and enriching discussions. These features make them more like a mixed model which, in the current model of representative democracy, creates spaces for a more direct and deliberative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This research focuses on how members of the UK Parliament engaged with evidence in relation to the policy decision leading to the Selective Schools Expansion Fund, a policy designed to enable the existing 163 English grammar schools to apply for additional funds to expand their intake. Although a small case study, the narrow focus provides a fertile setting for analysis of the relationship between research evidence, parliamentary debates and policy decisions. The article provides contextual background in relation to the dominant political parties' (Conservative and Labour) education policy manifesto statements and a discussion on the nature and understanding of evidence. Particular attention is given to how evidence can be used to support claims and the importance of justified warrants. Using NVivo software, we identified the thematic content of 11 parliamentary debates and analysed the findings using descriptive statistics, which we tested with a playful, carnivalesque extrapolation of the data. Argumentative analysis shows that within the debates a number of rhetorical tools are used to avoid empirical evidence, including the deployment of a 'moral sidestep' which discourse analysis reveals in this case to be the repeated communication that grammar schools are 'good'. In this way, Ofsted ratings are conflated with moral goodness, leading to a disproportionate diversion of school funding in their favour. This case study exposes strengths and weaknesses of parliamentary debate, which might be relevant to educational researchers who focus on evidence-based policy and to the policy makers and other stakeholders who engage with the evidence such researchers offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this article is to explore the relationship between populism and representative democracy. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, the paper offers a detailed analysis of the three criticisms of populism and the implications these criticisms have on our understanding of representative democracy. First, it addresses the argument that populism inevitably relies on demagogy and it examines the inference this argument has on the concept of political representation in democracy. Second, it discusses the claim that populism relies on the oversimplification of political issues and what this claim reveals about the democratic ideal of the informed and politically responsible voter. The third criticism deals with the anti-pluralist character of populist politics, which, the paper argues, can also be extended to the concept of popular sovereignty itself. In the second part, the article looks more closely at the relationship between populism and representative democracy. Relying on the insights from the first part, it examines different institutional restraints on the will of the majority and how populism redefines these restraints as anti-democratic and elitist barriers to popular will. Finally, the paper questions the prevailing view that sees populism as a phenomenon arising from the tension between liberal and democratic principles within representative democracy and offers an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between populism and democracy.

While delegation of policymaking authority from citizens to parliament is the most defining characteristic of representative democracy, public demand for delegating such authority away from legislature/government to technocrats or back to citizens appears to have increased. Drawing on spatial models of voting, we argue that the distance between individuals' ideal policy points, the status quo, experts' policy positions and aggregated societal policy preferences can help explain whether individuals prefer to delegate decision-making power away from parliament and, if so, to whom. The effects of individual's preference distance from these ideal points are likely to be stronger the more salient the policy issue is for the respective individual. We test this argument using survey experiments in Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The analysis provides evidence for the empirical implications of our theoretical arguments. The research presented here contributes to better understanding variation in citizens' support for representative democracy and preferences for delegating policymaking authority away from parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper posits that the global COVID-19 pandemic shock propelled the rational voters to the ballot box in 2020 presidential election to repudiate the 45th President of the United States (POTUS) for mishandling the pandemic and for propagating baseless conspiracy theories and disinformation, thus the resuscitation of representative democracy in the United States. We utilize a composite linear equation to derive the democracy strangulation coefficients and the democracy resuscitation coefficients to highlight the magnitude of the strangulation and the resuscitation. In addition, we derive and compute the democracy resuscitation index from which one can conclude that less than one percent of the net 7,052,770 winning votes barely resuscitated representative democracy in 2020. The strangulation of representative democracy is still ongoing because many aspiring candidates in the Republican Party, running for political offices at different levels, have strategically adopted the democracy strangulation playbook that the 45th President embedded in the Republican Party in order to achieve ochlocratic autocracy if they win and control the three coequal branches of government in 2025. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusion in local policy processes through citizen dialogue has been depicted as both the solution to many democratic challenges and a democratic problem in itself. Nevertheless, it has been widely adopted throughout Europe. The hierarchically flat, co-governing setup of these instruments can be expected to clash with representative-heavy political cultures, such as that in Sweden, which raises questions about what role they end up having in this context and whether they complement representative democracy. By conducting a comparative study of two rural Swedish municipalities, we confirmed that traditional, hierarchical governance indeed dominates the studied processes. Our results also suggest that, due to skewed participation and unclear input handling, the studied instrument does not appear to constitute a viable complementary democratic institution in terms of representation. Instead, we argue that, conducted in this way, it may potentially fill a range of different purposes without aspiring to fully complement representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a double reflection on the cognitive differences between humans and machines from ethics. In the first place, I will try to differentiate between human thought and machine processing through etymological, semantic and comparative methods that will reveal why it is not possible to attribute thinking capacities to artificial intelligences. On the other hand, these terms will be related to the praxis of representative democracy through various examples. This analysis is based on three aims: the need for mutual recognition through language; the commitment acquired through the word; and democracy as an expression of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revista de Relaciones Internacionales, Estrategia y Seguridad is the property of Revista de Relaciones Internacionales, Estrategia y Seguridad and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Verba Iuris is the property of Universidad Libre Bogota, Centre de Investigaciones Socio Juridicas de la Facultad de Derecho and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Interamericana de Psicología is the property of Sociedad Interamericana de Psicologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article investigtes the powers and parliamentary procedures in the standing committees and commissions of several countries of Western Europe and Latin America. The author believes that one of the modern paradigms for the development of parliamentary democracy is to strengthen the role of standing committees in the work of parliament by transferring to the committee level a number of constitutional powers of parliaments. In this regard, the author clarifies approaches to the classification of the committee structure of parliaments and looks at committee parliamentary procedures in Italy, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Brazil and Argentina at the present stage. The author comes to certain conclusions regarding the paradigm of the committee parliamentary procedure, including further improvement of domestic constitutional-legal matter in the context of the ongoing development of parliamentary democracy in the Russian Federation.

In the recent years we have witnessed the growing criticism of the representative framework and the way it operates in many European countries. At the local level, numerous authorities try to answer the shortcomings of representation by applying new participatory agendas. This, however, not only influences the governing process, but also often leads to the clash between elected politicians and citizens. By examining the attitudes of local councilors from Finland and Poland toward citizens’ involvement, the present article contributes to the discussion on the coexistence of representative and participative schedules. The analysis draws on empirical data gathered in selected municipalities of both countries. The research findings demonstrate that, in spite of different governing models, the Finnish and Polish local representatives have quite similar, positive attitudes towards increasing the citizens’ direct involvement. However, they still consider voting in local elections the key instrument of civic engagement. The results of the research also display the barriers the expanded participative framework encounters and this can be interesting for local practitioners who design participative instruments and monitor their operation.

The author conducts a comparative analysis of authoritarian liberalism’s concepts in contemporary political theory. The article deals with the main directions of interpretation of authoritarian liberalism in the framework of methodological approaches and conceptual models of neoliberalism, ordoliberalism, John Rawls' theory of political liberalism, Jan-Werner Mueller's “restrained democracy”, Jürgen Habermas' “legitimation crisis”, Colin Crouch's “post-democracy”, Michael Wilkinson's “de-democratization”, Crawford Macpherson's “participatory democracy”, Wolfgang Streeck's “democratic capitalism crisis”, Giandomenico Majone's «crypto-federalism». The basic analytical concept is the idea of authoritarian economic liberalism, fi rst proposed by H. Heller and K. Polanyi. For the purpose of methodological refl ection, an analytical review of methods and concepts based on modern political and constitutional theory and used in the study of the institutional specifi cs of authoritarian liberalism has been carried out. Authoritarian liberalism is conceptualized as the neoliberal ideology and practice of de-democratization and restriction of democracy, which results in regionalization of protest against the supranational regime of liberal democracy and political integration in Europe. If authoritarian liberalism focuses on economic liberalism, then authoritarian ways of implementing policies are subject to the interests of private property: authoritarianism strengthens economic liberalism, which, in turn, reinforces the EU's “authoritarian transformation”. In the context of the Euro-crisis, authoritarian liberalism restricts traditional forms of representative democracy, political struggle, and the legitimation of power, contributing to the reanimation of ethnic nationalism. In contemporary Europe, right-wing euroskeptics are gaining popularity. The authoritarian-liberal restriction of social democracy can lead not only to the strengthening of capitalism, but also to the revival of the reactionary forms of «new nationalism» and authoritarian illiberalism. The EU is developing today in the “neo-colonial paradigm” in accordance with the relations between the core and the periphery between creditor countries and debtor countries. Transnational solidarity suppressed by authoritarian liberalism can become a democratically legitimate tool for resolving a fundamental confl ict between market capitalism and representative democracy

As an exceptional device in the life of contemporary constitutional democracies, direct democracy is normally considered to be separate from representation. In this paper, I explore this well-established divide, asking how it interacts with our understanding of the central subject of direct democracy, the people. I show how theorizing that takes its cue from the dichotomy between "absence" and "presence", ascribed to the separation of representation and forms of direct democracy, is tied with identifying the active electorate and the people. On the other hand, this approach is inept for comprehending the ways representations of the people are produced and instrumentalized in the wake of direct democracy. In this paper, I suggest that this phenomenon may be approached by examining how direct democracy is entangled with representing "the people" through arguments, processes and constructs.

Studies concerning the dynamics of party systems between parliamentary elections are usually based on legislative party switching analyses. This issue was considered and proved in some Western European case studies as well as in some comparative analyses dedicated to the parliaments in the consolidated democracies. But the personal structures of the parliaments in the East-Central European countries are impacted by more than just party switching processes. In this article we propose adopting a broader concept of intraparliamentary volatility, which includes both party switching and replacements of parliamentary mandates. Using data from a full term, 2011–2015, we reconstructed chronological changes in the personal structure of the lower house of the Polish parliament, placing them on a specially created timeline with the intervals marked for each month and distinguishing between change resulted from party switching and replacement of parliamentary mandate. During the period we analyzed the number of independent deputies and the number of parties in the parliament increase alongside with the approaching of the next election. We claim this indicates a stable level of intraparliamentary volatility – immanent for the party systems between parliamentary elections – but this could rise when some special occurrences (i.e. other types of elections or splits within the relevant political party) take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Jeremy Bentham put forward a distinctive and original theory of representative democracy which can be helpfully analysed through his concept of the 'deputy'. A deputy, Bentham argued, evoked a specific political relationship between governors and the governed – a relationship that was functionally different to that between the people and a 'representative' or a 'delegate'. Whereas a representative was suggestive of too great a degree of governmental independence from the people and a delegate implied an excessive dependency of governors upon the governed, a deputy for Bentham best described the relationship between the rulers and the ruled that should subsist in a representative democracy. A political form based on deputies, who were to be relatively free to conduct the business of government yet simultaneously accountable to their sovereign electors, was the only way in his eyes to guarantee the promotion of utility in politics and the security of the people from being misruled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the special issue on 'Administering Representative Democracy. The European Experience of Parliamentary Administrations in Comparative Perspective', explaining how it seeks to make a major addition to the study of parliaments as well as of public administration. It specifically aims at demonstrating that parliamentary bureaucracies are 'silent' organisations playing a fundamentally serving function, and yet they offer a crucial contribution to the well-functioning of representative assemblies. It explores the distinctive nature of this subject matter in Europe, and in this way ties into the wider debates about the functioning of representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After every general election in Nigeria, there comes a lull in the tempo of political activities which take the back seat for four years until the eve of another general election when such activities again assume a feverish scale. This time, politicians jostling for elective offices seek the votes of the electorate to represent them, and the electorates are also eager to either retain their current representatives or substitute them through the ballot box. This depicts the primacy which elections assume in democracy such that voting in elections has become the trappings of democracy to the neglect of its other elements such as the doctrines and theories which are regarded as the classics of liberal democracy. This practice which has largely reduced democracy to multiparty electoral competition, tells rather little about democracy since there is very little interest in the facts or realities which challenge this well internalized ideological representation. With some of Nigeria's Fourth Republic elections as case study, this article evaluates election not just as an indispensable component of democracy, but interrogates the facts or realities which challenge it-the missing value and ideal components which bring credibility to such elections. The study finds that because elections are not credible, the regimes they produce turn out to be not democratic because a regime is only as credible as the process that brought it into existence. Thus, the nature of the election that brought a "democratic" regime into existence is crucial in considering same as genuine. It follows therefore, to conclude that if elections are to remain indispensable components of democracy, they must be credible so that the sanctity of the ballot box becomes the core value of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populism and technocracy constitute the main challenges to party government. While significant research has been devoted to support for populism, less is known about voters' demand for experts. In this study, a conjoint experiment in Spain to examine whether citizens prefer experts in executive positions is presented. It focuses on the most common form of expert participation in office: individuals who combine technical expertise and a party affiliation, the technopols. The conjoint experiment is complemented with a priming manipulation to examine to what extent the demand for experts depends on whether the crisis of representation is presented as a crisis of responsiveness or a crisis of responsibility. The results show that voters value expertise above any other candidate trait, including partisanship. Exposure to neither framing of the crisis substantially alters the strong demand for technopols. These findings contribute to the literature on voter attitudes towards the crisis of party government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Strategic & Social Research is the property of Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, Social Science Institute and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Namelessness is a double-edged sword. It can be a way of avoiding prejudice and focusing attention on one's ideas, but it can also be a license to defame and misinform. These points have been widely discussed. Still, the breadth of these discussions has left some of the depths unplumbed, because rarely is the question explicitly faced: what is the normative significance of namelessness itself, as opposed to its effects under different conditions? My answer is that anonymity is an evasion of responsibility for one's conduct. Persons should ordinarily be held responsible for what they do, but in some cases, where there is sufficient justification, they may enjoy a privilege not to be. One such privilege--the privilege to participate in community thinking--is based in the First Amendment interest that persons have in developing their thinking with others without having to be held responsible for it. I argue that this privilege was not applicable eleven years ago to the challengers in Doe v. Reed and is, for somewhat similar reasons, not applicable to the challengers in the Supreme Court's most recent anonymity case: Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta. I argue it was wrongly decided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]