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Several articles discuss issues surrounding democracy

Introduces democratic governments, discussing the social, political, economic, religious, and cultural effects, and examining various contemporary democracies from around the world.

Political parties have lost swathes of members and effective power is ever more concentrated in the hands of their leaders. Behind these trends lie changing relationships between economics, the media and politics. Electoral spending has spiralled out of all control, with powerful economic interests exercising undue influence. The 'level playing field', on which democracy's contests have supposedly been fought, has become ever more sloping and uneven. In many 'democratic' countries media coverage, especially that of television, is heavily biased. Electors become viewers and active participation

Democracy is defined by two core tenets: voice and pluralism. Within these constraints, a wide variety of regime types can be designed. We show that the only new, untested form of democracy is when every citizen is governed by the political party of his/her choice. Multiple full-edged governments would coexist in the same national territory at the same time, each one sovereign only over the people who chose to vote for it - hence the name: Choice Democracy. Choice Democracy can be regarded as pure polyarchy, the broadest form of political competition, and a robust mechanism for disciplining government agencies. We argue that this system makes democracy more stable by reducing the risk of revolutionary and financial crises. We develop a theory for the optimal number of governments per countries, where the answer is determined by a trade-off between cooperation and competition. We also provide evidence indicating that Choice Democracy would be viable in the real world.

"Intensifying economic and political inequality poses a dangerous threat to the liberty of democratic citizens. Mounting evidence suggests that economic power, not popular will, determines public policy, and that elections consistently fail to keep public officials accountable to the people. John P. McCormick confronts this dire situation through a dramatic reinterpretation of Niccol Machiavelli, 's political thought. Highlighting previously neglected democratic strains in Machiavelli's major writings, McCormick excavates institutions through which the common people of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance republics constrained the power of wealthy citizens and public magistrates, and he imagines how such institutions might be revived today. Machiavellian Democracy fundamentally reassesses one of the central figures in the Western political canon and decisively intervenes into current debates over institutional design and democratic reform. Inspired by Machiavelli's thoughts on economic class, political accountability and popular empowerment, McCormick proposes a citizen body that excludes socioeconomic and political elites and grants randomly selected common people significant veto, legislative, and censure authority within government and over public officials"--

Electoral Democracy: Australian Prospects -- Contents -- Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Part IElectoral Systems -- Chapter 1 -- Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3 -- Chapter 4 -- Chapter 5 -- Chapter 6 -- Chapter 7 -- Part IIPolitical Funding -- Chapter 8 -- Chapter 9 -- Chapter 10 -- Chapter 11 -- Chapter 12 -- Chapter 13 -- Chapter 14 -- Index -- MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Perspectives on Politics is a unique political science journal. Approaching its tenth year of existence, its broad mission is to publish excellent political science, and in so doing to contribute to the enlivening of scholarly communication within the discipline and thus to the broader relevance of the discipline in the world. With this in mind, our editorial team decided to "brand" the journal A Political Science Public Sphere. Readers of this journal know that we publish work in a number of formats that mirror the ways that political scientists actually write: self-contained scholarly research articles, more freewheeling and reflective essays, scholarly symposia and critical dialogues, book review essays, and of course the conventional book review.

"Democracy's Hard Spring" was the title of an article in a respectable international magazine that presented an easily predictable interpretation of the tumultuous events in the Middle East. Although "predictable" is not always the same thing as "trite," the two terms coincided in this case. This only goes to show once again that modern positivists are not daunted by anything, including crises, revolutions, and natural disasters. Adapted from the source document.

In the past century, California has grown a convoluted governing nonsystem that combines the hyper-democracy of the initiative process with the increasingly constricted representative democracy of the formal elective governmental system, most of it imposed by direct democracy. Particularly in the past three decades, the initiative process, driven by a radically changed political culture and reinforced by a spectrum of new technologies, has come close to overwhelming representative democracy. By their very nature, initiatives either require or prohibit specified actions of the ordinary government. As legislatures, governors, county supervisors, city councils, and school boards—and sometimes the courts as well—become more constrained and unable to cope, public frustration increases, producing yet more demands for ballot solutions. As a consequence, the past thirty years have produced vicious cycles of initiatives in which one measure leads to another. The ultimate effect of that dynamic is not just to cloud government accountability but, in the end, the accountability of the voters themselves.