Related papers: The Calculus of Democratization and Development
Information transparency is a major building block of responsible governments. We explored factors influencing the information transparency of 117 world nations. After controlling for the effects of confounding variables of wealth (GDP per…
Identifying the real causes of democracy is an ongoing debate. We contribute to the literature by examining the robustness of a comprehensive list of 42 potential determinants of democracy. We take a step forward and employ Instrumental…
Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all…
The goal of this research is to uncover the channels through which research and development (R&D) impacts economic growth in developing countries. The study employed nine variables from three broader categories in the World Economic Forum…
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power…
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so (Galileo Galilei). According to the above sentence we do not ask why we need to measure democracy but if it is possible to measure something which is not unequivocally defined.…
Political regimes have been changing throughout human history. After the apparent triumph of liberal democracies at the end of the twentieth century, Francis Fukuyama and others have been arguing that humankind is approaching an `end of…
Most democratic countries use election methods to transform election results into whole numbers which usually give the number of seats in a legislative body the parties obtained. Which election method does this best can be specified by…
Current political developments worldwide illustrate that research on democratic backsliding is as important as ever. A recent exchange in Political Science & Politics (2/2024) has highlighted again a fundamental challenge in this…
Disease outbreaks force the governments to rapid decisions to deal with. However, the rapid stream of decision-making could be costly in terms of the democratic representativeness. The aim of the paper is to investigate the trade-off…
This paper uses natural language processing to create the first machine-coded democracy index, which I call Automated Democracy Scores (ADS). The ADS are based on 42 million news articles from 6,043 different sources and cover all…
This study demonstrates the persistent dominance of identity based voting across democratic systems, using the United States as a primary case and comparative analyses of 19 other democracies as counterfactuals. Drawing solely on election…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
Humans have been arguing about the benefits of dictatorial versus democratic regimes for millennia. Despite drastic differences between the dictatorships in the world, one of the key common features is the \emph{Dictator's Dilemma} as…
The transition of several East and Central European countries and the countries of the Former Soviet Union from the socialist economic system to the capitalist one is studied. A recently developed microeconomic model for the personal income…
Do robots vote? Do machines make decisions instead of us? No, (at least not yet), but this is something that could happen. The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on democracy is a complex issue that requires thorough research and…
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations outlines 17 goals as global challenges for countries of the world to address in their development. However, the progress of countries towards these goals has been much slower…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
The process of desertification in the semi-arid climatic zone is considered by many as a catastrophic regime shift, since the positive feedback of vegetation density on growth rates yields a system that admits alternative steady states.…
Based on what we know about thermodynamics of synergy, we explored the relationship between countries socio-cultural order (negentropy), estimated through their constitutions, indicators of Rule of Law and their academic development; with…