TY  - GEN
A1  - Giebler, Heiko
A1  - Ruth, Saskia P.
A1  - Tanneberg, Dag
T1  - Why choice matters
BT  - revisiting and comparing measures of democracy
T2  - Politics and Governance
N2  - Measures of democracy are in high demand. Scientific and public audiences use them to describe political realities and to substantiate causal claims about those realities. This introduction to the thematic issue reviews the history of democracy measurement since the 1950s. It identifies four development phases of the field, which are characterized by three recurrent topics of debate: (1) what is democracy, (2) what is a good measure of democracy, and (3) do our measurements of democracy register real-world developments? As the answers to those questions have been changing over time, the field of democracy measurement has adapted and reached higher levels of theoretical and methodological sophistication. In effect, the challenges facing contemporary social scientists are not only limited to the challenge of constructing a sound index of democracy. Today, they also need a profound understanding of the differences between various measures of democracy and their implications for empirical applications. The introduction outlines how the contributions to this thematic issue help scholars cope with the recurrent issues of conceptualization, measurement, and application, and concludes by identifying avenues for future research.
KW  - application
KW  - conceptualization
KW  - democracy
KW  - democratic quality
KW  - measurement
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v6i1.1428
SN  - 2183-2463
VL  - 6
IS  - 1
SP  - 1
EP  - 10
PB  - Cogitatio Press
CY  - Lisbon
ER  - 
TY  - BOOK
A1  - Tallberg, Jonas
A1  - Bäckstrand, Karin
A1  - Aart Scholte, Jan
A1  - Sommerer, Thomas
T1  - SNS Democracy Council 2023
BT  - global governance: fit for purpose?
N2  - Transboundary problems such as climate change, military conflicts, trade barriers, and refugee flows require increased collaboration across borders. This is to a large extent possible using existing international organizations. In such a case, however, they need to be considerably strengthened – while current trends take us in the opposite direction, according to the researchers in the SNS Democracy Council 2023.
KW  - democracy
KW  - globalization
KW  - international trade
Y1  - 2023
UR  - https://snsse.cdn.triggerfish.cloud/uploads/2023/04/sns-democracy-council-2023-global-governance--fit-for-purpose.pdf
SN  - 978-91-89754-06-5
PB  - SNS Förlag
CY  - Stockholm
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Nuesiri, Emmanuel O.
T1  - Feigning Democracy
BT  - Performing Representation in the UN-REDD Funded Nigeria-REDD Programme
JF  - Conservation & society
N2  - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation plus the sustainable management of forest and enhancement of carbon stocks (REDD+) is a global climate change mitigation initiative. The United Nations REDD Programme (UN-REDD) is training governments in developing countries, including Nigeria, to implement REDD+. To protect local people, UN-REDD has developed social safeguards including a commitment to strengthen local democracy to prevent an elite capture of REDD+ benefits. This study examines local participation and representation in the UN-REDD international policy board and in the national-level design process for the Nigeria-REDD proposal, to see if practices are congruent with the UN-REDD commitment to local democracy. It is based on research in Nigeria in 2012 and 2013, and finds that local representation in the UN-REDD policy board and in Nigeria-REDD is not substantive. Participation is merely symbolic. For example, elected local government authorities, who ostensibly represent rural people, are neither present in the UN-REDD board nor were they invited to the participatory forums that vetted the Nigeria-REDD. They were excluded because they were politically weak. However, UN-REDD approved the Nigeria-REDD proposal without a strategy to include or strengthen elected local governments. The study concludes with recommendations to help the UN-REDD strengthen elected local government authority in Nigeria in support of democratic local representation.
KW  - REDD
KW  - climate change mitigation
KW  - UN-REDD
KW  - democracy
KW  - Nigeria
KW  - symbolic representation
KW  - local government
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.4103/cs.cs_16_106
SN  - 0972-4923
SN  - 0975-3133
VL  - 15
IS  - 4
SP  - 384
EP  - 399
PB  - Medknow publications & media Pvt LTD
CY  - Mumbai
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ganghof, Steffen
T1  - Does public reason require super-majoritarian democracy? Liberty, equality, and history in the justification of political institutions
JF  - Politics, philosophy & economics
N2  - The project of public-reason liberalism faces a basic problem: publicly justified principles are typically too abstract and vague to be directly applied to practical political disputes, whereas applicable specifications of these principles are not uniquely publicly justified. One solution could be a legislative procedure that selects one member from the eligible set of inconclusively justified proposals. Yet if liberal principles are too vague to select sufficiently specific legislative proposals, can they, nevertheless, select specific legislative procedures? Based on the work of Gerald Gaus, this article argues that the only candidate for a conclusively justified decision procedure is a majoritarian or otherwise 'neutral' democracy. If the justification of democracy requires an equality baseline in the design of political regimes and if justifications for departure from this baseline are subject to reasonable disagreement, a majoritarian design is justified by default. Gaus's own preference for super-majoritarian procedures is based on disputable specifications of justified liberal principles. These procedures can only be defended as a sectarian preference if the equality baseline is rejected, but then it is not clear how the set of justifiable political regimes can be restricted to full democracies.
KW  - public-reason liberalism
KW  - democracy
KW  - coercion
KW  - political equality
KW  - majority rule
KW  - Gerald Gaus
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X12447786
SN  - 1470-594X
VL  - 12
IS  - 2
SP  - 179
EP  - 196
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - Thousand Oaks
ER  -