Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

What Is The Ideal Consensus Conference, And How Would We Recognize It If We Saw One?, Jan R. Coe

Working Papers on Science in a Changing World

The consensus conference is a participatory mechanism that envisages ordinary citizens engaging with experts (scientists and other knowledge producers) on issues of compelling social significance. It invites ordinary citizens to bring their life experience and values to the serious consideration of a technology that may have far-reaching consequences. Three selected examples of consensus conferences are examined in order to see how they match the ideal. The paper concludes with thoughts about the adequacy of evaluation frameworks and suggest that a more dynamic model of consensus conference evaluation (based on public understanding of science models) might invite more compelling reflections about …

Failed States, Or The State As Failure?, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article seeks to challenge a basic assumption of international law and policy, arguing that the existing state-based international legal framework stands in the way of developing effective responses to state failure. It offers an alternative theoretical framework designed to spark debate about better legal and policy responses to failed states. Although the article uses failed states as a lens to focus its arguments, it also has broad implications for how we think about sovereignty, the evolving global order, and the place of states within it.

State failure causes a wide range of humanitarian, legal, and security problems. Unsurprisingly, given …

No Rest For The Democratic Peace, David Todd Kinsella

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Proponents of the democratic peace are accustomed to criticism. Early refutations of the research program's findings focused on questions of measurement and statistical inference. Skepticism about such matters has not fully subsided, but many more now accept the democratic peace as an empirical regularity. The aim of recent complaints has shifted to democratic peace theory. The typical approach has been to highlight select historical events that appear anomalous in light of the theory and the causal mechanisms it identifies. Sebastian Rosato's (2003) is one such critique, noteworthy for the range of causal propositions held up for scrutiny and the unequivocal …

Review Of "Consolidating Taiwan’S Democracy", Su-Mei Ooi

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The article reviews the book Consolidating Taiwan's Democracy by John F. Copper.

Capital Democratization, Robert Ashford

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Although, the ideas underlying binary economics were first published in 1958 (Kelso and Adler), the many books and papers that discuss the subject, with the exception of Kane (2000) and Kurland (2001), do not utilize conventional economics language. To facilitate the teaching of binary economics in beginning and intermediate college courses in economics and business, the paper explains some major microeconomic and macroeconomic fundamentals of binary economics by utilizing conventional neo-classical economic models. It then compares the theoretical results reached in a non-binary economic environment to those that may be reached in a binary one. The most important result from …

How Much Does Money Matter In A Direct Democracy?, John M. De Figueiredo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Democracy Without A Net? Separation Of Powers And The Idea Of Self-Sustaining Constitutional Constraints On Undemocratic Behavior, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

The United States Constitution is designed to achieve good government by relying on two distinct systems: a primary system that achieves good governance through democratic electoral accountability; and a set of self-sustaining structural backup systems designed for situations in which the democratic system fails, and which operate by limiting the ability of bad rulers to do serious harm to the public good. A key premise of this kind of dual structural arrangement is that effective backup systems must operate independently of primary democratic systems; because they are needed precisely when democratic mechanisms have failed, they cannot depend for their success …

Minority Rights, Minority Wrongs, Elena Baylis

Articles

Many of the new democracies established in the last twenty years are severely ethnically divided, with numerous minority groups, languages, and religions. As part of the process of democratization, there has also been an explosion of “national human rights institutions,” that is, independent government agencies whose purpose is to promote enforcement of human rights. But despite the significance of minority concerns to the stability and success of these new democracies, and despite the relevance of minority rights to the mandates of national human rights institutions, a surprisingly limited number of national human rights institutions have directed programs and resources to …