The article argues that AI can enhance the measurement and implementation of democratic processes within political parties, known as Intra-Party Democracy (IPD). It identifies the limitations of traditional methods for measuring IPD, which often rely on formal parameters, self-reported data, and tools like surveys. Such limitations lead to partial data collection, rare updates, and significant resource demands. To address these issues, the article suggests that specific data management and Machine Learning techniques, such as natural language processing and sentiment analysis, (...) can improve the measurement and practice of IPD. (shrink)

Democracy has been a flawed hegemony since the fall of communism. Its flexibility, its commitment to equality of representation, and its recognition of the legitimacy of opposition politics are all positive features for political institutions. But democracy has many deficiencies: it is all too easily held hostage by powerful interests; it often fails to advance social justice; and it does not cope well with a number of features of the political landscape, such as political identities, boundary disputes, and (...) environmental crises. Although democracy is valuable it fits uneasily with other political values and is in many respects less than equal to the demands it confronts. In this volume prominent political theorists and social scientists present original discussions of such central issues. Democracy's Values deals with the nature and value of democracy, particularly the tensions between it and such goods as justice, equality, efficiency, and freedom. (shrink)

This book provides a critique of current international law-making and draws on a set of principles from Persian philosophers to present an alternative to influence the development of international law-making procedure. The work conceptualizes a substantive notion of democracy in order to regulate international law-making mechanisms under a set of principles developed between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries in Persia. What the author here names 'democratic egalitarian multilateralism' is founded on: the idea of 'egalitarian law' by (...) Suhrawardi, the account of 'substantial motion' by Mulla Sadra, and the ideal of 'intercultural dialectical democracy' developed by Rūmī. Following a discussion of the conceptual flaws of the chartered and customary sources of international law, it is argued that 'democratic egalitarian multilateralism' could be a source for a set of principles to regulate the procedures through which international treaties are made as well as a criterion for customary international law-ascertainment. (shrink)

This book examines the political and international thought of Harold Laski (1893-1950). The early chapters discuss his socialist critique of politics within states, paying close attention to the turbulent environment of the early to mid-twentieth century. His ideas on democracy, rights, freedom and sovereignty are closely analyzed and clarified. The book goes on to discuss the way in which he applied many of his political ideas to the analysis of international politics. The final chapter investigates the contemporary (...) significance of his work. Laski will be of interest to scholars today who explore the overlapping themes of political and international thought. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship between African American internal colonialism and democracy, highlighting the complexities of democracy that make it both susceptible to oppressive violence at home and abroad, as well as a potential resource for emancipation and equality. I understand “internal colonialism” here to encompass various terms used by African Americans beginning in the 1830s, including semi-colonialism, domestic colonialism, and a nation within a nation. Much political philosophy assumes that society is “nearly just” or “generally just,” or (...) that oppression and injustice are found in societies that we nonetheless deem legitimate. Centering the complexities and possibilities of democracy instead shifts the focus to how democracy is compatible with violence and injustice, as well as their overcoming. Such a focus leads to a consideration of abolition democracy and the question of what the process of overcoming internal colonialism demands. (shrink)

This contribution intends to examine the role of democracy in the evolution of international law, and equally the role of the latter in the advancement of democracy, or, one might say, in its 'reinvention'. Two aspects of this broad theme are addressed: the influence of processes of democratization at the level of the individual nation on the evolution of international law, and the extent of penetration of democracy and democratic mechanisms within the processes of creation (...) and application of international law. A rich record of examples drawn by international jurisprudence is used to illustrate these complementary processes. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to carry out a comparative study of Immanuel Kant and Jürgen Habermas on democratic governance and citizenship. Both thinkers focus on these two factors but the extent to which these contribute to reinforcing the state and peace has not been investigated by researchers. The present paper questions how cosmopolitanism in comparative and consequential mode: Safeguards peace by presupposing a level of interstate institutional convergence as presented by Kant and Habermas; and Reinforces and innovates (...) democracy on an interstate level not only within the state; and Instead of just safeguarding peace, re‐discovers the political sphere, as presented by Habermas, who on this point develops an array of departures from Kant. The originality of the research derives from the symmetries and asymmetries in Kant and Habermas that extend their arguments on cosmopolitanism to the solidification of democracy and the avoidance of war. (shrink)

Democracies and authoritarian regimes have different approaches to international law, grounded in their different forms of government. As the balance of power between democracies and non-democracies shifts, it will have consequences for international legal order. Human rights may face severe challenges in years ahead, but citizens of democratic countries may still benefit from international legal cooperation in other areas. Ranging across several continents, this volume surveys the state of democracy-enhancing international law, and provides ideas for (...) a way forward in the face of rising authoritarianism. (shrink)

The ways in which international non-governmental development organizations (INGDOs) engage with northern constituencies have important implications for their promotion of principles of global justice and equity, their legitimacy as global actors and their capacity to shape a democratic global civil society. This paper focuses on the diverse forms of engagement currently being sought by international development NGOs. Using development education as a case study the paper explores some of the processes of mediation and negotiation that shape NGOs' articulation (...) of global ethics. The paper argues that the diversity of approaches to engagement in the sector presents an opportunity for INGDOs to strengthen and deepen their relationships with Northern constituencies and to support the articulation and embedding of principles of global justice and equity. It argues that development education can play a central role in achieving this. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy, it is claimed, is essential for the legitimisation of public policy and law. It is built upon an assumption that citizens will be capable of constructing and defending reasons for their moral and political beliefs. However, critics of deliberative democracy suggest that citizens’ emotions are not properly considered in this process and, if left unconsidered, present a serious problem for this political framework. In response to this, deliberative theorists have increasingly begun to incorporate the emotions into (...) their accounts. However, these accounts have tended to focus only upon the inclusion of emotions in the external-collective exchange of reason between citizens. Little work has been done on how the individual will actually cope with emotions internally within their own minds. There has been no consideration of the capacities that citizens will need to perceive, understand and regulate emotions as they formulate reasons both by themselves and with others. Moreover, there has been little consideration of how these capacities might be educated in children so that emotionally competent deliberative citizens can be created. In this paper, emotional intelligence is presented as an essential capacity that can fulfil this role for the deliberative citizen and deliberative democracy more generally. The ‘deliberative school’ is suggested as a potential site for this transformation that can progress from generation to generation, cultivating citizens that are increasingly better equipped to handle emotionally-laden deliberative engagement. (shrink)

This conceptual paper explores whether the normative legitimacy of International Sports Associations such as Fédération Internationale de Football Association and Fédération Internati...

Since its early days, the labor movement has considered itself to be surrounded by a hostile bourgeois public and sought to counter this with a party press. As a result of the Cold War, Western social democratic parties abandoned in part their traditional beliefs about demarcation. Nevertheless, with the International Federation of the Socialist and Democratic Press, an organization emerged from 1951 to 1982 that manifested separation from the bourgeois public sphere. Drawing on an analytical framework derived from counterpublic (...) theory, this article analyzes ideas and practices developed by members of the organization linked to the Socialist International. The analysis of archival sources reveals that social democratic journalists and publishers remained wedded to the idea of a socialist press countering a hostile public sphere. However, the ideas and practices were mostly limited to strategies aimed at adapting to the existing media structures and only later included media policy approaches. (shrink)

The article joins the current debate between epistemic and procedural democrats in contemporary democratic theory and aims to put epistemic democracy on a more secure footing. Yet, unlike those who...

This study highlights a range of perspectives offered by 11 international teachers, participating in a cultural immersion experience, as they reflect on how they saw democracy manifested at their school internships. Teachers from six different countries studied and taught in a rural community in the Southern United States, where a medium-sized research university hosted the teachers as part of a federally-funded program during an academic semester. As a part of a larger qualitative research study analyzing the international (...) teachers’ perception of American schooling, data from intercultural sessions, individual interviews, and assigned reaction papers highlighted multiple contradictions between the teachers’ interpretation of democratic ideals and democratic education as they saw manifested in American schools. These narratives highlight the complex forces that shape individuals’ perceptions of democracy as played out in the everyday life of a cultural immersion experience. The researchers suggest that these transnational perspectives can serve as a mechanism allowing Western educators to listen to the “Other” as they interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions about American schooling. Narratives primarily highlight inconsistencies between the goals of citizenship education and the way in which citizenship is promoted or neglected in K-12 classrooms. (shrink)

In September 2010, the International Organization for Standardization adopted a new International Guidance Standard on Organizational Social Responsibility — ISO 26000. This Article, written by a participant in the process of developing the standard over a five-year period, considers the points of intersection between ISO 26000 and public policy, international law, democracy, and the role of the state. The Article is grounded in an analysis of the standard’s negotiating history. The concluding Part reflects on the implications (...) of these observed facts for the development of appropriate descriptive and normative theoretical frameworks and proposes three innovations that could underpin a less problematic relationship between ISO, public policy and the role of the state. (shrink)

The book examines current debates about the emergence of an international legal norm of democratic governance and also considers some of the wider theoretical issues to which those debates give rise. It asks should international law seek to promote democratic political arrangements? If so, on what basis, and using which of the many competing conceptions of democracy?

Democracy is in crisis in the United States and in many countries around the world. Democracies are forged in the wake of oppression. At first there is trust among those with a common cause. But maintaining unity is a continual challenge. Many nations that started on a path to democracy in this century now are reverting to autocracy. Their elected leaders maintain support by pitting one part of the population against the other as they threaten those who challenge (...) them. They exert their authority by repeating mistruths and intimidating the press. Internal divisions in the United States now threaten that it will tread that path. In the US and other democracies equality and human dignity still have not fully been realized. In every generation we must renew our commitment to democratic principles and their meaning for our time. (shrink)

Rorty was one of the great dissolvers of dualisms, but strangely this iconoclasm ended when it came to liberal democracy. Here he held fast to the most stubborn of dualisms in political thought, a simple dichotomy of the public and the private, and used it, unsuccessfully, to resolve questions concerning the place of religion in modern democratic politics. Yet the philosophical basis of Rorty's pragmatism both undercuts two common ways of spelling out the relationship between religion and the polity (...) in liberalism and makes his use of the public/private dichotomy impossible. By means of an internal critique, I argue for a Habermasian corrective. (shrink)

Ever since the 19th century, political parties and free media were widely deemed indispensable for the proper functioning of representative democracy. They constituted what one might call the criti...

. The general issue addressed in this paper is the relation between the rule of law as a matter of national law, and as a matter of international law. Different institutional conceptions of this relationship give rise to different attitudes towards international law. Nonetheless, questions arise that cast doubt on age-old tenets of certain Western countries concerning the radical separability between the rule of law within the domestic system and in the international realm. The article will start (...) considering some recent developments in the United States' treatment of alien detainees. Then it shall address the relation between domestic constitutions and international legal systems, pointing out the challenge coming from the development of "super partes" international law and jus cogens. The question concerning the appeal to the rule of law will be made: Can our attitude to the rule of international law be exempted from consistency with the rule of law that we claim for our domestic system? In order to answer this question (in the negative), an appropriate theoretical perspective is eventually proposed and displayed. (shrink)

A reexamination of democracy, which during the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment seemed to offer a much-desired escape from arbitrary class structures and oppressive governments, but has not proven to be a sure formula or a simple solution. An awareness of the true complexities of democracy requires an understanding of a perennial dialectic residing at the heart of democracy, and manifesting itself in specific dialectical relationships: between elitism and populism, liberty and equality, smallness and bigness, religion and secular life, politics (...) and economics, etc. This book argues that such dialectical relationships, originally most explicit in particular nations, are also manifest in international relations. (shrink)

While the subject of democracy has been explored by philosophers since ancient times, in the last few decades democracy has been taken for granted in the West as the political norm. The issue of democracy as an empty concept in western political discourse and the emergence of radical democracy has renewed engagement in democratic theory and politics. _Radicalizing Democracy in the Twenty-first Century _explores the radicalizing movement in democratic thought and: • Introduces readers to the (...) key debates in contemporary philosophical theories about democracy. • Confronts popular assumptions about democracy. • Provides a philosophical underpinning for the rise of radical democratic theories, movements and politics. • Examines how radical democracy can respond to the challenges of the contemporary world. Radicalizing Democracy in the Twenty-first Century is an important resource for students, scholars and university teachers in the field of political philosophy, political theory and international relations. (shrink)

A Theory of Universal Democracy empowers cultures and communities across the world to custom design democracy in consonance with their traditional values. For example, the book makes concrete proposals for Muslim countries to democratize their constitutions without accepting Western values and without violating the principles of Islamic law. More importantly, Universal Democracy further develops the idea of Free State, which the author first presented in his previous book, The Extinction of Nation-States (Kluwer, 1996). The proposed fusion of (...) Universal Democracy and Free State is designed to revolutionize the classical theory of government and to offer a new paradigm that accommodates both universality and uniqueness. Scholars, teachers and students of international law, constitutional law, legal theory, and Islamic law will find this book a source of valuable ideas. (shrink)

As modern viewers, it is tempting to interpret Frank and Claire’s manipulations of democratic institutions as representing perversions or distortions of democratic ideals. After all, most of us think (or at least hope!) that real-world democracies we actually live in aren’t quite that badly governed. Whatever the moral faults of our leaders are, they don’t (as a rule) murder journalists, crudely provoke international crises for political gain, or cleverly set up their political adversaries with Bond-villain-like cunning. Real politicians, so (...) the story goes, lack the cleverness, the ruthlessness, and the luck of the Underwoods. While this sort of faith in the general validity of democratic ideals and institutions is now widely shared, the Underwoods’ clever “gaming” of the system can also be seen as providing an especially clear illustration of some of the things that might be inherently wrong with democracy. In this essay, I’ll take a look at how the Underwoods’ behavior might look to some of the most famous critics of democratic government, including Plato, Thomas Hobbes, and Karl Marx. According to these thinkers, the most significant flaws that Underwoods exploit to gain political power have little, if anything, to do with the peculiarity of their talents, the weaknesses of the individuals around them, or even the structures of the US political system. Instead, their success is made possible by certain fundamental features of democratic government, features that guarantee both the instability and eventual failure of any democratic government. On this reading, the fact of the Underwoods’ success presents a significant problem for all of us, since it changes the question from “How do real-world democratic politicians differ from the Underwoods?” to the much-more-difficult “What’s so great about democracy in the first place?”. (shrink)

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. If we don't know what the words 'democracy' and 'democratic' mean, then we don't know what democracy is. This book defends a radical view: these words mean nothing and should be abandoned. The argument for Abolitionism is simple: those (...) terms are defective and we can easily do better, so let's get rid of them. According to the abolitionist, the switch to alternative devices would be a significant communicative, cognitive, and political advance. The first part of the book presents a general theory of abandonment: the conditions under which language should be abandoned. The rest of the book applies this general theory to the case of 'democracy' and 'democratic'. Cappelen shows that 'democracy' and 'democratic' are semantically, pragmatically, and communicatively defective. Abolitionism is not all gloom and doom. It also contains a message of good cheer: we have easy access to conceptual devices that are more effective than 'democracy'. We can do better. These alternative linguistic devices will enable us to ask better questions, provide genuinely fruitful answers, and have more rational discussions. Moreover, those questions and answers better articulate the communicative and cognitive aims of those who use empty terms like 'democracy' and 'democratic'. (shrink)

International Perspectives on Pragmatism combines, in a very appealing manner, a pragmatist approach of democracy with practical politics and history of ideas. The result is a meditation on contemporary society, while in the background there is a continuous debate on the concept of democracy, as defining mark of Western culture. Both its critics and its supporters talk about a decay of democracy, which would not justify an idealist perspective anymore. Arguments for this transpire from both the (...) practical politics section of the volume, as well as from the second part that focuses more on the theoretical side of the discussion on democracy. On a more practical direction, there are contributors maintaining the idea that democracy is corrupt (and examples from today’s world are offered), while the theoretical perspective brings up the Rortian view, manifested through the well-known debate between the foundationalist and the anti-foundationalist perspectives. (shrink)

Is democracy a human right? There is a growing consensus within international legal and political practice that the answer is “Yes.” However, some philosophers doubt that we should see democracy as a human right. In this paper I respond to the most systematic challenge presented so far, which was recently offered by Joshua Cohen. His challenge is directed to the view that democracy is a human right, not to the view that democracy is part of (...) what justice demands. It is instructive because it forces us to consider important questions about the nature and justification of human rights, including the putative human right to democracy. There is a tendency to see every claim of justice as a human right, and Cohen presses us to face the risk that this slip may occur in the case of democracy. Thus my aim is not simply to refute Cohen’s arguments but to engage the questions he forcefully and helpfully puts on the table. I start in section 2 by analyzing Cohen’s account of human rights. In section 3 I defend the human right to democracy against his challenge. I conclude in section 4 by articulating some reasons for the claim that democracy is a human right that mobilize and elaborate on some of Cohen’s own key premises. (shrink)

Democracy and Common Interests across Borders Our conception of the nation state, and the borders that separate nations, is an anachronism. It derives from the 17th century origins of the European state, and the general roughly Newtonian ideas of the time, according to which individual things are entirely distinct from one another. If we shift our fundamental ideas and consider things, including nations, as relational, then borders take on different functions than they traditionally do. Furthermore, if nations are constituted (...) in their relations with one another, then there are serious implications for our conception of democracy in general and international relations conducted democratically. Democracy, and democratic international relations, consists of the pursuit of common interests across borders and boundaries, domestic and international. (shrink)

The concept of democracy is fraught with ambiguity. There are none who know what democracy means, where it came from or indeed where it is going despite it being the system of governance that is most widely heralded for its modernity and promotion of equality. For example, the theory and principles that underpin democracy are unimaginably complicated while its institutions across time and space are contradictory. The stark reality is that democracy is imprisoned by parochialism, subjectivity (...) and myopia with humanity being governed by a system that is does not fully understand. If democracy is everywhere and everyone wants it, then how do we not know what it means? If we do not know what democracy means, then why is it forcefully driving our politics and societies? This extremely ambitious and illuminating book offers a way out by answering these important questions and by exploring democracy in its purest form and as such has been nominated for the 2013 Stein Rokkan Prize. Evolutionary Basic Democracy has been nominated for the 2013 Stein Rokkan prize. This extremely prestigious award is presented by the International Social Science Council, The University of Bergen and the European Consortium for Political Research. For more details please click the link below."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

While the word “democracy” has proliferated in social and political discourse in recent decades, I suggest that the liberal democracy of the past, connected as it is (especially in the West) to the market economy, is insufficient for the challenges facing the contemporary Latin American context. I assess and criticize democratic ideas in order to suggest that the way forward is radical democracy based on socio-economic and political justice. These, however, have to be articulated at a variety (...) of levels, from that of local and indigenous peoples to that of national and international relations. (shrink)

There are international and so-called “global” forces framing Africa within a larger world, a world structured predominantly by Europe and North America and their needs for raw materials and markets, power, and leisure. This paper therefore pursues questions like, “What does democracy mean for Africans today?” and, “What does freedom mean when colonial liberation has been achieved?” or, to be more precise, “What is democracy in the world today from an African perspective?”. I distinguish between freedom (as (...) the exercise of autonomy and accompanying responsibility), and liberation (as the throwing off of foreign domination). I argue that democracy should be understood as a “concern for freedoms” (religious, economic, or political), and that democratic law seeks, in principle, the most space for the exercise of freedom for everyone. This conception of democracy is quite naturally the “other” face of the independence and liberation movements throughout Africa. (shrink)