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Democratic Polity (democratic + polity)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences40%

Selected Abstracts

A Synoptic Outcome Survey of the Quantitative Accrual of Opinion Tokens in Western Democratic Polities

THE POLITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2008
JEREMY L. B. EVETS
First page of article [source]

Peasants and the Process of Building Democratic Polities: Lessons from San Marino

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 2 2003
Ulf Sundhaussen
This essay challenges the conventional wisdom that democracy must be built upon the foundation of an established middle class, a belief forthrightly asserted in Barrington Moore's resolute dictum of "no bourgeois, no democracy". Taking a lead from Aristotle who thought peasants to be the best social group on which to build a political order that would preserve liberty, I consider the hypothesis that peasants can construct democratic systems of government. The little-known little country of San Marino provides a case study. Its long history serves to demonstrate that the driving force behind the establishment of democracy need not be an educated and wealthy middle class but that a poor and uneducated peasantry can provide this impetus. This is a finding that calls into question the very formula that Western governments, scholars and institutions such as the IMF and World Bank routinely prescribe for Third World countries. [source]

FISCAL FEDERALISM, STATE LOBBYING AND DISCRETIONARY FINANCE: EVIDENCE FROM INDIA

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 1 2010
RONGILI BISWAS
In the quasi-federal democratic polity that India has, lobbying for central funds by the states is often done in a subliminal fashion. Hence, it becomes difficult to get an account of how much lobbying has been done to a particular end. Our paper attempts at constructing certain political proxy variables to quantify the extent of such lobbying in India. We quantify lobbying through the ministerial representation in the council of ministers. We also use several time and state dummies to account for the constituent states' political alignment with the center as well as the coalition and the reform period breaks in the Indian system. Taking panel data that cover 29 years and 14 major states we show that our constructed variables do explain disparity in central fiscal disbursements under the non-formulaic "discretionary" head in a robust way. Our findings remain true even after we take into account the impact of endogeneity of net state income on the transfers. Additionally, our exercise brings to the fore the fact that the coalition governments and economic reform measures impact upon state lobbying at the center in a significant manner. [source]

EU Citizenship and Religious Liberty in an Enlarged Europe

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 4 2010
Sonia Morano-Foadi
This article intends to contribute to the theoretical debate on how EU citizenship could be regarded as a bundle of common European individual rights (and, to a lesser extent, obligations) and part of a democratic polity in which every citizen counts equally irrespectively of his/her religious belonging and faith. The EU perceives itself as a community based on shared values. Since there is no European people, nor a European polity, common values play a core role in European polity building. The question, however, is whether common values can be experienced by the EU citizens in daily life and to what extent there are common values in the EU Member States. These issues are explored using the non-discrimination principle on grounds of religion, as a litmus-test for the existence of common values within Europe. [source]

European Integration: Popular Sovereignty and a Politics of Boundaries

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 3 2000
Hans Lindahl
The problem raised by popular sovereignty in the framework of the EU is not whether it is relevant to European integration; it is. The problem is another, namely the identity and, thus, the boundary of a democratic polity. The very idea of ,European' integration suggests that integration is only imaginable by reference to the closure provided by an identity, a boundary that is normative rather than merely geographical. In this minimal sense, a European people is the necessary presupposition of integration, not merely its telos. Bluntly, there is no integration without inclusion and, also, no integration without exclusion. This, then, is the real problem raised by popular sovereignty in a European context: if there is no such thing as non-exclusionary integration, how can a reflection on the boundedness of European integration be more than a rationalisation of exclusion? [source]