Through an ethnographic study of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) - an organisation renowned for its persistent fight against corruption in India - this thesis explores the aspirations and tensions of anti-corruption activists. In their commitment to improving governance structures by means of campaigning for transparency and accountability laws and policies, these activists ultimately aspire to strengthen democratic practice and to improve statecraft. By studying in detail the forms of actions, dynamics, politics and relationships among anti-corruption activists, the thesis explores how ideas of the state and democracy come to be internalised and addressed by civil society actors. The context is the nation-wide anti-corruption agitation that swept the country through most of 2011. This agitation gave rise to friction between civil society actors otherwise working for similar ends, leading to tension and competition on what constitutes democratic process and procedure. Based on extensive fieldwork, the thesis examines the ways in which MKSS responded to the shifting political landscape of anti-corruption activism. Drawing on the notion of relationality, I argue that political positions and identities are shaped and consolidated circumstantially through an oppositional stance and through processes of 'othering'. In considering the diverging understandings of democracy among civil society actors, this thesis seeks to expand ethnographically the theoretical concept of 'agonistic pluralism' (Mouffe 1999), that postulates that political conflict and disagreement is not only integral, but, moreover, crucial to democratic debate. Based on this conceptualisation, the conflict over the meaning of democracy among the anti-corruption activists is considered here as creating space for the expansion and enrichment of democratic debate. The very essence of democracy in India, as will be concluded, is constituted by such a productive tension.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Dec., 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 300-317).

Despite the burgeoning literature on right-wing populism, there is still considerable uncertainty about its causes, its impact on liberal democracies and about promising counter-strategies. Inspired by recent suggestions that (1) the emancipatory left has made a significant contribution to the proliferation of the populist right; and (2) populist movements, rather than challenging the established socio-political order, in fact stabilize and further entrench its logic, this article argues that an adequate understanding of the populist phenomenon necessitates a radical shift of perspective: beyond the democratic and emancipatory norms, which still govern most of the relevant literature. Approaching its subject matter via democratic theory and modernization theory, it undertakes a reassessment of the triangular relationship between modernity, democracy and populism. It finds that the latter is not helpfully conceptualized as anti-modernist or anti-democratic but should, instead, be regarded as a predictable feature of the form of politics distinctive of today's third modernity.

Univ., Diss.--Canberra. / Literaturverz. S. 194 - 217.

This thesis deals with the use of knowledge technologies in support of self-organization of people with joint political goals. It first provides a theoretical background for a development of a social-semantic system intended to support self-organization and then it applies this background in the development of a core ontology and algorithms for support of self-organization of people. It also presents a design and implementation of a proof-of-concept social-semantic web application that has been built to test our research. The application stores all data in an RDF store and represents them using the core ontology. Descriptions of content are disambiguated using the WordNet thesaurus. Emerging politically engaged groups can establish themselves into local political initiatives, NGOs, or even new political parties. Therefore, the system may help people easily participate on solutions of issues which are influencing them.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-170).

This thesis examines how American and German constitutionalism, as shaped by the U.S. Supreme Court and the German Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht), have mediated the tension between threats to stability and the imperative of renewal through occasional or constant interventions in their democratic processes. To do this, it primarily assesses the 1960s U.S. reapportionment cases and the European Parliament electoral threshold cases of 2011 and 2014. It also considers the ideas of four thinkers, theorists and jurists who have wrestled with the dilemma of how to maintain the bond between citizen and state: Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville. Stability and renewal represent the twin orientation points for constitutionalism and the courts against which they must adjust to possible democratic threats, or new political and social forces in need of recognition. Threats to the state can emerge either from a surfeit of illiberal views in politics and society aimed at destroying an existing constitutional order, or when democratic channels become starved of new opinions through the constitutional or unconstitutional exclusion of voters and parties. A distinctive feature of the approach taken is the conceptual division between the ‘legal/institutional' space in which the Supreme Court and Bundesverfassungsgericht interpret constitutional meaning, and the ‘civic space' in which citizens accept or reject constitutional meaning. One central question is how American and German constitutionalism, and the U.S. Supreme Court and Bundesverfassungsgericht shape and influence the vital civic space that is integral to the democratic relationship between citizen and state, and the survival of the state itself. Ultimately it is concluded that without acceptance of the importance of law and constitutionalism by citizens in the civic space, the influence of the Supreme Court and the Bundesverfassungsgericht becomes purely institutional and effectively consigned to the courtroom.

第一章：「緒論」： 說明論文的研究目的、研究方法、研究架構。 第二章：「民主政治的理想主義與實際」： 先揩評古典民主思想，後經驗性民主理論為基礎，配合國家主權的概念，說論現代民 主政治不過是政府統治權與人民控制權的互動。 第三章：「當代民主效治中政府治權與人民控制權的互動」： 分析當代民主政治的運作；以政府職能的擴增、專家統台、統治權集中化為政府統治 權運作的特徵；以憲政制度、選舉權擴大、普通法律的創制複決權與罷免權的式微、 輿論、壓力團體、政黨的發達、有利人民控制的垃會條件的存在為人民控制權運作的 特徵或方式；末以平常時期政府統治權與人民控制權的平衡互動與非常時期的調適做 結。 第四章：「中山先生的權能區分思想」： 說明權能區分思想提出的時代背景，並依次論列權能的概念區分、權能平衡的政治運 作理想、權能平衡的制的制度設計。 第五章：「權能區分思想的評估」： 經驗性民主理論與當代民主政治的實際運作，概符合權能區分思想中的原則；唯若干 問題值得討論。