Representative Democracy Research Articles

Unveiling the Apathy: Understanding the Causes of Student Disengagement in Student Governance

This study delved into the causes of student disengagement in any form of student-based governance of the University of Cebu College of Arts and Sciences Department's Student Body Organization (CAS-SBO) during the academic year 2023-2024. A descriptive phenomenological research design was employed, exploring participants' experiences in student governance, how these experiences influence their lack of total disengagement and the strategies that could revitalize their engagement and active participation in the said area. Data were gathered through in-depth interviews with twelve students selected via linear snowball sampling, focusing on those with prior governance experience who did not participate in recent CAS-SBO activities. Thematic content analysis revealed nine emergent themes: (1) Lack of Connection, Inequality in Representation, and Faculty Intervention as essential experiences in student governance; (2) Student Unfamiliarity, Feeling Unrepresented, and Unmet Expectations as reasons for disengagement; and (3) Inclusive Activities, Addressing Electoral Disparity, and Empowered Leadership as potential strategies to increase engagement. Based on these findings, the study recommends regular CAS-SBO general assemblies, teambuilding exercises, leadership seminars, and the election of representatives for each degree program to foster more vital student involvement and improve representation. The study also suggests future research topics, including electoral system reforms and former CAS-SBO presidents' experiences.

The Government Financial Advantage of Early Elections: Evidence from UK MP Candidate Spending

In many parliamentary democracies, incumbents retain the right to call early elections. This is thought to provide incumbent governments with an advantage due to the ability to time elections to favorable economic conditions. This article explores an additional incumbency advantage of early elections. Due to information asymmetry about election timing, government parties can better plan fundraising in early elections years compared to non-government parties, which gives government parties a relative financial advantage. This proposition is tested on campaign spending data from over 50,000 British parliamentary candidates 1945–2019. The results support the argument. Government party candidates gain a relative financial advantage in early elections years compared to scheduled election years. The effect is found only for non-incumbent candidates and was eliminated by the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011, which removed government early election calling. The results suggest that government election calling power provides incumbent government parties with a relative financial advantage.

Parliamentarians and the covid-19 pandemic: insights from an executive-dominated, constituency-oriented legislature

ABSTRACT Because parliaments are the cornerstone of representative democracy, we know a significant amount about how they operate in ordinary times. Covid-19 presented extraordinary challenges to the functioning and operation of national parliaments. This article explores the impact of Covid-19 on parliament from the point of view of its members. We report results from a survey of Irish parliamentarians, exploring members’ perceptions of their engagement in law-making, government oversight, and constituency representation. The results suggest an interesting paradox: Parliamentarians felt less able to perform their legislative and oversight functions but – with the aid of new technologies – felt better able to perform their representative and constituency roles. The wider implication is that Covid-19 intensified existing patterns of executive legislative relation: in the Irish case at least, the (electoral) incentives to undertake constituency work motivated continued constituency service, while the weakness of parliamentary oversight of the executive intensified.

The Electoral Consequences of Tax Increases: Are Parties Punished for Raising Taxes?

Do governments presiding over tax increases lose votes? One assumption is tax increases affect incumbent parties equally but we also expect asymmetric responses with differing penalties for left- and right-wing parties. Influential literature also assumes voters incapable of assigning responsibility to policymakers or holding them accountable. We find that tax increases are more costly to a left-of-centre party. Previous research assessing this is hampered by a lack of comparable cases; however, our tests are conducted with results from thousands of English local elections across decades. We find tax increases by labour-controlled councils corresponded with a significant vote swing against labour. There were no effects of rate increases on votes for conservative-controlled or Lib Dem-controlled councils. These results have implications for how democratic elections may produce responsive governments, and we discuss why there may be an asymmetry, where there is more electoral responsiveness to tax increases by governments of the left.

Hermann Heller’s critique of liberalism

ABSTRACT Hermann Heller’s critique of liberalism was both theoretical and conjunctural. He derided liberalism’s erosion of the concept of sovereignty and lamented liberalism’s complicity with the substantive inequality of his time. It its place, he argued for a restoration of the concept of popular sovereignty, as a dialectical formation of political unity and material equality through the democratic process. As a matter of political practice and strategy, however, Heller equivocated in his stance on the constitutional politics of the Weimar Republic. He initially tolerated the abrogation of parliamentary democracy due to his faith in the neutrality of the state, before diagnosing the regime as a form of authoritarian liberalism determined by the capitalist economy. This article examines Heller’s theoretical and political critique of liberalism. It outlines Heller’s conception of popular sovereignty against both Kelsen’s legal rationalism and Schmitt’s political decisionism. It also examines the significance of the interwar conjuncture, highlighting that the turn of the bourgeoisie to authoritarianism and ultimately to fascism represented a continuity of the liberal elision of the principle of popular sovereignty.

Digitalized Electoral Democracy, Subversive Politics, and Islam

Abstract Increasingly democracy is becoming digitalized through the use of information technologies in the conduct of elections and political campaigns. At the same time, politics is becoming more contentious, and even subversive, as democracy fuses with divisive social issues and identity politics. This article examines the issue of subversive politics in a variety of democracy settings. As the authors show, subversive politics is an issue that is affecting emerging and established democracies. Yet, the effect can be more severe in the former as democratic institutions are still developing. Notably, Muslim-majority countries face major challenges in making democracy work due to subversive politics and the political and ideological conflicts between different Muslim groups. As such, the article niches on the intersection of (digitalized) electoral democracy with subversive politics with a special focus on Indonesia as a Muslim-majority democracy. The authors argue that Indonesia stands as an in-between case in the continuum of subversive politics. They show this by explaining how democracy failed in some Muslim countries, became threatened in consolidated democracies, and survives in Indonesia. The combination of institutional quality and relative independence of religious organizations in politics has been crucial for the way Indonesia deals with subversive politics.

Digital transformation and organizational restlessness.

In modern society, organizations are expected to be increasingly flexible and adapt to constantly changing environments. While such flexibility is often considered a positive trait of organizations, the risks of continuous organizational change are often overlooked. Against this background, we argue that continuous, multiple and uncoordinated organizational change can lead to a state we define as "organizational restlessness" and a loss of the benefits of stable structures. Paradoxically, it is even possible that organizational restlessness reduces the capability of organizations to planfully introduce specific and highly desirable changes, such as those related to digital transformation. Using qualitative data from interviews and participant observations, we analyze a large German public administration and identify three sources of organizational restlessness: the innovation imperative of modern society, changes in political leadership as a result of democratic elections and the bureaucratic principle of personnel rotation. While barriers to digital transformation are often explained by bureaucratic rigidity, we show that also constant uncoordinated change hinders sustainable digital transformation. Our paper thus contributes to an enhanced understanding of organizational continuity and disruption, as we show that both are needed to digitalize organizations further.

Decolonization and Democratization in African Countries: The Impact of Liberal Democracy on Political Stability

Since the 1990s, the African continent has experienced dramatic changes in the political sphere. Specifically, as mentioned by Samuel Huntington in The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, many Sub-Saharan African countries have undergone democratic transitions, marked by reforms from one-party systems or military rule to multiparty systems with regular elections, a process that prominently features characteristics of Western-style liberal democracy. Despite the fact that African countries employing Western-style democracy have made certain progress in political development and social governance, many African countries that have undergone this political transformation exhibit a lack of political stability. As such, this article studies the development of liberal democracy and political stability in Kenya against the backdrop of the third wave of democratization. Through analyzing the historical and socio-economic contexts of African countries, it argues that the winner-take-all logic of the western representative democracy contradicts with the cultural tradition in African countries, which emphasizes social consensus and consultation. Considering the historical problems left since the colonial era, it adds to the difficulty of applying the western democracy in contemporary African countries, and thus results in the incompatibility between the liberal democracy model and the reality of African social contexts. Consequently, it is argued that the democratization process in Africa requires further exploration and more appropriate combination of advanced political institutions and the local contexts.

Flexible representative democracy

AbstractWe introduce Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD), a novel hybrid of Representative Democracy and Direct Democracy in which voters can alter the issue-dependent weights of a set of elected representatives. In line with the literature on Interactive Democracy, our model allows the voters to actively determine the degree to which the system is direct versus representative. However, unlike Liquid Democracy, Flexible Representative Democracy uses strictly non-transitive delegations, making delegation cycles impossible, and maintains a fixed set of accountable, elected representatives. We present Flexible Representative Democracy and analyze it using a computational approach with issues that are binary and symmetric. We compare the outcomes of various voting systems using Direct Democracy with majority voting as an ideal baseline. First, we demonstrate the shortcomings of Representative Democracy in our model. We provide NP-Hardness results for electing an ideal set of representatives, discuss pathologies, and demonstrate empirically that common multi-winner election rules for selecting representatives do not perform well in expectation. To analyze the effects of adding delegation to representative voting systems, we begin by providing theoretical results on how issue-specific delegations determine outcomes. Finally, we provide empirical results comparing the outcomes of various voting systems: Representative Democracy, Proxy Voting, and FRD with issue-specific delegations. Our results show that variants of Proxy Voting yield no discernible benefit over unweighted representatives and reveal the potential for Flexible Representative Democracy to improve outcomes as voter participation increases.

A convoy, an emergencies act, and a state of exception: How Canada’s Emergencies Act contradicts Carl Schmitt’s critiques of deliberative democracy

As a liberal and parliamentary democracy, Canada should be a prime target for Carl Schmitt’s critiques about determining the ‘state of exception’. Yet, Canada’s Emergencies Act, which permits ‘special temporary measures that may not be appropriate in normal times’ immediately after the declaration of an emergency, brings forth an interesting research puzzle: can a liberal or parliamentary democracy have both the practices of deliberative democracy and still fulfil Schmitt’s criteria of the sovereign both determining when and deciding on what occurs during the state of exception? By examining the events of the 2022 Freedom Convoy, we find that Canada’s use of the Emergencies Act meets Schmitt’s criteria of the -*sovereign determining when, and deciding on what occurs during the state of exception, but ultimately escapes Schmitt’s critiques of liberal and parliamentary democracies.

The pursuit of ‘good’ Internet policy

AbstractAs our digital society continues to advance, an increasingly diverse array of scholars, policymakers, civic interest groups, companies and regulatory bodies from around the world are seeking to have an increased say in its governance. This diversity makes the challenge of achieving ‘good’ Internet policy more complex and contested. Of course, the notion of 'good Internet policy' raises several important questions: What defines a good Internet policy? Who is it intended for? How can it be achieved and evaluated? Why is it worth pursuing? The papers in this collection explore a number of issues relevant to this pursuit. They include research into deploying digital systems to increase participation in democratic elections and other e‐governance initiatives, navigating the intersection of local norms and global rules, addressing algorithmic discrimination, confronting the role of conspiracy theories in democratic processes, defining responsibility in content moderation, balancing legal certainty with operational flexibility in platform governance and the potential for data justice in AI governance.

Science as public service

The problem this paper addresses is that scientists have to take normatively charged decisions which can have a significant impact on individual members of the public or the public as a whole. And yet mechanisms to exercise democratic control over them are often absent. Given the normative nature of these choices, this is often perceived to be at odds with basic democratic principles. I show that this problem applies in similar ways to civil service institutions and draw on political philosophy literature on the civil service (e.g. Rosanvallon, 2011; Heath, 2022) to discuss when such normative judgements can nevertheless be said to be democratically legitimate. Concretely, I seek to show that normative judgements in research need not be democratically legitimated in order for science to be democratically legitimate. Indeed, it can be democratically legitimate for scientists to go against the expressed views of the public or political representatives if this is justified in light of, firstly, the role science has been asked to fulfil and, secondly, when it is in line with public institutions’ key principles. This is a counter-position to views currently held in the values in science debate (e.g. by Kitcher, 2011; Intemann, 2015; Schroeder, 2021; Lusk, 2021) which argue that value-laden judgements in science are legitimate if they are aligned with the public’s views or directly decided by public.

Active commuting as a form of sustainable urban mobility: The case of the Brno Metropolitan Area

Abstract Environmentally friendly alternatives to motorised transport have recently become a topic of discussion among political representatives. To achieve sustainable urban mobility objectives, political discussions have focused on promoting cycling, walking and using public transport in cities. These modes of transportation are attractive ways of commuting to and from work for a portion of the population. In the literature, there is a growing interest in the phenomenon of active commuting. This paper examines the spatio-temporal patterns and practices of active commuting and evaluates their significance in the context of sustainable urban mobility. The empirical research is based on data obtained from a questionnaire survey and semistructured interviews conducted in 2023 in the Brno Metropolitan Area. Based on the data, three categories of active commuting were identified, namely pragmatic active commuting, physical active commuting, and combined active commuting, which differ in the implementation of different spatio-temporal practices. For the development of sustainable transport in the city, it is necessary to promote the construction of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, with the aim of making movement for pedestrians and cyclists more straightforward, efficient, and safer, including paying attention to actions leading to the embedding of this mode of transport in the wider societal context.

Bit Reduction for Locality-Sensitive Hashing.

Locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) has gained ever-increasing popularity in similarity search for large-scale data. It has competitive search performance when the number of generated hash bits is large, reversely bringing adverse dilemmas for its wide applications. The first purpose of this work is to introduce a novel hash bit reduction schema for hashing techniques to derive shorter binary codes, which has not yet received sufficient concerns. To briefly show how the reduction schema works, the second purpose is to present an effective bit reduction method for LSH under the reduction schema. Specifically, after the hash bits are generated by LSH, they will be put into bit pool as candidates. Then mutual information and data labels are exploited to measure the correlation and structural properties between the hash bits, respectively. Eventually, highly correlated and redundant hash bits can be distinguished and then removed accordingly, without deteriorating the performance greatly. The advantages of our reduction method include that it can not only reduce the number of hash bits effectively but also boost retrieval performance of LSH, making it more appealing and practical in real-world applications. Comprehensive experiments were conducted on three public real-world datasets. The experimental results with representative bit selection methods and the state-of-the-art hashing algorithms demonstrate that the proposed method has encouraging and competitive performance.

Remembering Australian Constitutional Democracy

For many years, historical accounts of Australian Federation ignored the distinctive ideological origins of the Australian Constitution. From the mid 1980s until the 2000s, however, a generation of historians remembered how the Australian drafters built a distinctive constitutional democracy that combined trust in parliament with a direct constitutional role for a plural ‘people’: the people of Australia and the people of the states. Drawing on Chartist and American ideas of popular sovereignty, this system of popular political constitutionalism textually guarantees that ‘the people’ can ‘directly’ choose both houses of parliament, break deadlocks between these houses and make constitutional law. The definition of ‘the people’ in this distinctive form of constitutional democracy was, however, racially exclusive. In particular, First Australians were excluded from the plural people of Australia. This intellectual history of the Australian Constitution, however, has had remarkably little impact on constitutional interpretation and discourse. This paper will begin the process of examining those implications. First, it will show how this history provides important contextual support and direction to the implied limitations on parliamentary power that stem from the constitution’s guarantee of representative democracy in sections 7 and 24 of the Constitution. Second, it will demonstrate how it aids in better understanding Australia’s unique constitutional system. To date, this system has remedied the racist roots of the original constitutional definition of the people largely through legislative reform. The constitutional recognition of First Australians is a critical step in acknowledging that First Australians are a distinct part of the plural Australian people. In the aftermath of the failure of the First Nations Voice to Parliament proposal, meaningful constitutional recognition for First Australians must address their structural exclusion from the plural Australian people.

Challenges Faced by Indian Democracy

Democracy is almost a perfect system in which common people can play an important role directly or indirectly. India is a democratic state. It is the largest democracy in the world. Democracy has many features and characteristics (rule of law, equality, justice, transparency, accountability, promoting individual rights and liberties, etc.). India is also trying to follow these features or characteristics. Democracy is gradually changing its nature day by day. Democracy in present era is not same as it was before. Democracy is redefining its definition. The democracy of India is also changing and facing many problems and challenges. Democracy is a form of government in which people either directly or indirectly participate in the decision-making process through a system of representation involving periodically held free elections. The Democracy of India is considered as the largest democracy in the world. In a democracy, authority is enjoyed by the people or their representatives and people are the final authority in every field of system of governance. However, in modern India, democracy has faced a lot of challenges like social and economic inequalities, poverty and unemployment, Illiteracy, Casteism, communalism, corruption, terrorism, population explosion. It is required to be addressed to sustain true parliamentary democracy in India. This paper tries to examine and analyse the existing democratic system in India & its implication towards the democratic system of the world. It also suggests certain possible measures or institutional reforms in order to ensure a healthy and sustainable democracy for India. I would like to discuss mainly the problems and challenges with some examples that Indian democracy is facing.

Ballot Box Representation: Spatial Voting and the Effects of Information in Direct Democracy Elections

AbstractIn states and localities with direct democracy, citizens can advance their policy interests without the aid of elected officials. Research documenting citizens’ lack of political knowledge raises questions about their ability to do so. We conduct three studies during real-world direct democracy elections to determine whether citizens choose alternatives (the ballot proposal or status quo) that are closest to their ideological positions and whether political information improves this outcome. Using original surveys, our first two studies estimate citizens’ ideological positions and show that citizens regularly choose alternatives that are closest to these positions. Using a survey experiment, our third study indicates that political information (party cues, policy information, and spatial maps) further improves such spatial voting. These results demonstrate citizens’ capacity to advance their policy interests in direct democracy elections and identify conditions under which political information strengthens the relationship between citizens’ policy interests and choices about ballot propositions.

Ukraine’s Parliament during Wartime: Balancing Security and Transparency

Abstract The article examines the challenge of balancing security restrictions with the need for transparent and democratic legislative functioning. It begins by highlighting the importance of transparency and its relationship with democracy and good governance. Using Ukraine as a case study, the article reviews the open data and other transparency measures employed by Ukraine’s Parliament before the onset of the full-scale Russian aggression on February 24, 2022. It then discusses the limitations imposed on these measures following the declaration of martial law, the ensuing public debate, and subsequent modifications to specific transparency restrictions. Through concrete examples, the paper argues that a lack of transparency and the failure to balance security limitations with public demand for openness can undermine the parliament’s legitimacy and constitutional authority. The article concludes that security measures must be proportionate and regularly updated to preserve the integrity of parliamentary democracy and the constitutional role of the parliament.

Yang Han-mook's participation in the March 1st Movement and the selection of national representatives

Yang Han-mook's participation in the March 1st Movement and the selection of national representatives

Complementing electoral democracy assessment: The Plebiscitary Electoral Democracy Index and its application to the Andean Community, 2003–2022

Complementing electoral democracy assessment: The Plebiscitary Electoral Democracy Index and its application to the Andean Community, 2003–2022