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Was democracy invented by the Greeks to replace the anarchy and imperial rule characteristic of earlier Near Eastern societies? Although what was explicitly borrowed from antiquity by modern political thinkers looks Athenian, there was democracy before the polis. Egyptian and Mesopotamian politics relied on public debate and detailed voting procedures; countless assemblies convened at the thresholds of public buildings or city gates; disputed trials were submitted to superior courts; countervailing powers reminded leaders that justice was their responsibility. This was not full democracy, but the Greek version was not perfect either. In this article, "archeopolitics" is used to contrast this efficient form of pluralistic regime ("hypodemocracy") with truly egalitarian ones ("hyperdemocracies") and group interests' polyarchies.

This article explores the relationship between democracy & social democracy from the late nineteenth century through to the present. It discusses the emergence of different concepts of democracy within European social democracy at different times during this period & attempts to locate key junctures in the relationship between those two concepts. After investigating the strong links between radical democracy & social democracy in the second half of the nineteenth century, it goes on to argue that Marxism, through an anti-pluralist legacy which social democratic reformists & revisionists tried hard to overcome after 1900, considerably influenced social democracy's perception of democracy. Yet a fundamental ambiguity of social democracy towards democracy was only overcome under the conditions of the Cold War & the long economic boom after 1945. In the 'golden age' of social democracy between the 1940s & the 1960s, Social Democrats fully endorsed the politics of pluralist democracy. From the 1970s onwards, when the 'social democratic consensus' came under intense criticism from the political Right, the commitment of social democracy to democracy remained one of the few uncontentious areas, & the renaissance of social democratic fortunes in the 1990s has tended to focus on democracy as a key element of 'new' social democracy in Europe. [Copyright 2002 Sage Publications Ltd.]

A review article on books by (1) John B. Judis, The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests and the Betrayal of Public Trust (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000); (2) Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret (London, Ithaca, NY: Cornell U Press, 2000); & (3) Ruy Teixeira & Joel Rogers, America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2000). As America inaugurates its 43rd president, it enters a period of reflection. The danger is that all emphasis on voting procedure will silence a longstanding & ultimately more significant criticism of US democracy & its policy of democracy promotion. The separation of economics from politics & the promotion of so-called "market democracy" does a disservice to the wider democratic project & is potentially self-defeating. This article reviews three books to argue that the declining international reputation of the US can be traced to its own democratic shortcomings. It explores the possibility of a popular working-class movement to address these failings & examines the implication this may have on the liberal international order. Adapted from the source document.

Der Autor möchte mit einigen thesenhaften Anmerkungen zum gemeinsamen Nachdenken und zur Diskussion über das Leitbild "Demokratie stärken" innerhalb der Gewerkschaftspolitik anregen. Er weist in seinem Vortrag im Rahmen der Ver.di-Programmdebatte des Hamburger Landesbezirks darauf hin, dass eine enge Verbindung zwischen der Demokratie und dem Gemeinwesen besteht. Die Demokratie hat Allgemeinheit erlangt und kann als gemeinsamer Maßstab für pluralistische Optionen und unterschiedliche Handlungen in der Gesellschaft gelten, insofern diese "Gemeinsamkeit der Demokraten" nicht zugleich zur politisch-ideologischen Ausgrenzung missbraucht wird. Das einzig gültige Kriterium für Demokratie in allen gesellschaftlichen Institutionen gesellschaftlicher Ungleichheit lautet nach Meinung des Autors: Selbstbestimmung und unmittelbare Teilnahme des Bürgers. Der Autor diskutiert abschließend die Frage, was eine traditionelle Gewerkschaftsorganisation zur Verständigung über das Wesen des Politischen und zur Stärkung der Demokratie leisten kann. (ICI)

Argues that democracy has succeeded in establishing itself as the "normal" form of political organization & as the political dimension of a modernity founded on secularization & a market economy. It is further contended that if democracy is to ameliorate the growing opposition between the North, which identifies rationality with power, & the South, which is increasingly shaped by cultural defense & the collapse of subjectivity, it must be redefined & defended against both liberal & revolutionary misconceptions. It is shown that democracy is above all a political condition for the existence of the subject -- a notion that refers to the conflictual unity of freedom & tradition, & to the efforts of human beings to become creators of their collective & individual lives. W. Howard

"The following paper presents the basic concept for the Democracy Ranking of the Quality of Democracy and positions this approach in context of academic discourses about democracy and the quality of democracy. Key dimensions of democracy are freedom, equality and control. Quality-of-democracy models commonly emphasize a democracy understanding that is broader than earlier concepts of primarily electoral democracies. Different global democracy and democratization measurement initiatives (Freedom
House, Polity IV, Vanhanen's Index of Democracy, and the Economist Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy) are reviewed and compared. The Democracy Ranking underscores a conceptualization of the Quality of Democracy = Quality of Politics + Quality of Society. The conceptual formula for the Democracy Ranking (see Figure 5 in Chapter 5), therefore, may be summarized as: quality of democracy = (freedom + other characteristics of the political system) + (performance of the nonpolitical dimensions). This formula offers an opportunity for creating regularly conducted indicator-based rankings of countries, based on the quality of their democracy." (author's abstract)

In den drei Definitivartikeln seiner Friedensschrift formuliert Immanuel Kant 1795 drei entscheidende Voraussetzungen zum "ewigen Frieden": Die Einzelstaaten sollen im Inneren auf republikanische Verfassungen, das Völkerrecht soll auf einem föderativen Zusammenschluss freier Staaten gründen und durch die Ergänzung um ein öffentliches Menschenrecht zu einem Weltbürgerrecht fortgeschrieben werden. Erst wenn man sich "in einer kontinuierlichen Annäherung an die Verwirklichung aller drei Staatsmaximen befindet", dürfe man "sich schmeicheln", den Weg zum öffentlichen Frieden zu beschreiten. Kants Thesen wurden in der politikwissenschaftlichen Disziplin der Internationalen Beziehungen zum Ausgangspunkt genommen, um über Kant hinaus vor allem folgende Fragen über den Zusammenhang von Krieg und Demokratie empirisch zu prüfen: (1) Führen Demokratien weniger Kriege als Autokratien? (2) Ziehen Demokratien gegen Demokratien in den Krieg? (3) Sind Kriege Geburtshelfer von Demokratien? (4) Verringern sich mit ansteigender Quantität und Qualität der Demokratien auch die Anzahl der Kriege und die regime-externe wie interne Gewalt? Der vorliegende Beitrag geht auf diese Fragestellungen ein. (ICD2)