Nature Of Liberal Democracy Research Articles

Against the Harm Argument for Censorship: On the Abuse of Psychology and the Dismissal of Rights

Several recent arguments trying to justify further free speech restrictions by appealing to harms that are allegedly serious enough to warrant such restrictions regularly fail to provide sufficient empirical evidence and normative argument. The two recent arguments critically examined here confirm this picture. Ann E. Cudd tries to make all kinds of clearly protected free speech responsible for “trauma.” However, she misrepresents the psychological studies she relies on and her account legitimizes anti-speech violence on a massive scale, which renders it morally absurd. Melina Constantine Bell tries to combine John Stuart Mill and psychological studies to argue that sexist and racial jokes and slurs produce severe harm and should therefore be restricted. Yet the studies are flimsy and the picture of Mill unrecognizable. I will, then, address, as a corrective to the one-sidedness of those who warn against the alleged harms of free speech, the harms imposed by compelled speech, using the topical example of compelling people to use female pronouns for males who claim to be women. I show that this practice is abusive and wrongful. I conclude with a reminder about the nature of liberal democracy. Its raison d’être is not protection from harm per se but the safeguarding of freedom. There are no convincing reasons to further restrict or, especially, to compel speech, but every reason to defend free speech.

NATIONAL INTEGRATION AND ITS PROCESS IN INDONESIA

National Integration covers the arrangement of culture, territory, power, value and behaviour. Basically, the integration process is a horizontal change for the view of local to national or even international people and vertical change of elite group establishment having power legitimation. Integration process in Indonesia experiences up and downs and it will not enable to satisfy any and all related elements. It is started by national revival to establish the independent country, to find the fit and proper governance, to build a country to be strong in the economy field and then find the independence in liberal democracy nature. National integration is processed in accordance with the history development.

The Freak Election Bet and the Performance of the Democratic Paradox

The article examines the ritual meaning of the “freak” bet of the late nineteenth century, primarily as this took place in the city of Philadelphia. I propose that an election ritual can be thought of as an embodiment of the so-called “democratic paradox” put forward by Chantal Mouffe. The tension of the ritual lies in the question of whether it is able to satisfy competing demands on the modern polity and the citizens who compose it. I argue that the freak bet was an attempt to “think through,” or publicly communicate, some of the paradoxes of modern liberty. It did not succeed in providing a definitive answer, since, as I suggest at the end, it is in the nature of liberal democracy that such an answer will not be forthcoming.

Regime Types and Discrimination against Ethnoreligious Minorities: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of the Autocracy-Democracy Continuum

Although many assume that the relationship between the autocracy-democracy continuum and discrimination is linear, with autocracies discriminating the most and democracies discriminating the least, the assumption is not universal. This study uses the Minorities at Risk dataset to test this relationship with regard to government treatment of religiously differentiated ethnic minorities (ethnoreligious minorities) as well as ethnic minorities that are not religiously differentiated. The results show that the pattern of treatment of ethnoreligious minorities differs from that of other ethnic minorities. The extent to which a state is democratic has no clear influence on the level of discrimination against non-religiously differentiated ethnic minorities, but it has a clear influence on the level of discrimination against ethnoreligious minorities. Autocracies discriminate more than democracies against ethnoreligious minorities, but semi-democracies, those governments that are situated between democracies and autocracies, discriminate even less. This result is consistent on all 11 measures used here and is statistically significant for seven of them, and it remains strong when controlling for other factors, including separatism. This phenomenon increases in strength from the beginning to the end of the 1990s. Also, democracies discriminate against ethnoreligious minorities more than they do against other minorities. The nature of liberal democracy may provide an explanation for this phenomenon.

Understanding liberal democracy

Part 1 What is liberal democracy?: defining democracy defining liberal democracy three key concepts. Part 2 The nature of liberal democracy: direct and indirect democracy traditional democratic theory citizenship theory the academic challenge to traditional democratic theory. Part 3 The radical critique of liberal democracy: the general nature of the radical critique the participatory critique the Marxist critique liberal democracy and capitalism. Part 4 The justification of liberal democracy: questions about the justification of liberal democracy justifications of liberal democracy generality of the justifications.