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Abstract: Since the mid-2000s, democratization has slowed, stopped, and even reversed across the world. At the same time, societies have become more oriented toward free markets as measured by indexes of economic freedom. Relying on a panel sample of 141 developed and developing countries between 2006 and 2017, this paper is the first to investigate whether the two phenomena are related by employing economic freedom data. It finds that there is no net-negative relationship between aggregate economic freedom and democracy in this time-period. Instead, mixed findings of both an overall positive and overall neutral (but not negative) association are uncovered in between-country and within-country analyses, respectively. In between-country analyses, using the disaggregated index shows that the legal system/property rights component drives most of the positive relationship between aggregate economic freedom and democracy in the developed world. The same between-country analyses in the developing world show that freedom of international trade is positively associated with democracy, while modest regulation has a negative relationship. However, additionally controlling for omitted variable bias using country-fixed effects, the paper does not find evidence for either a positive or negative relationship between subsequent changes in levels of economic freedom and democracy.
Keywords: democratic recession, democracy, economic freedom, neoliberalism, free-market capitalism
Published in DKUM: 13.03.2024; Views: 332; Downloads: 22
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Abstract: The present doctoral thesis develops a pioneering system for the self-management of jural eligibilities by means of ICTs as the basis for a novel form of government of juropolitical societies. By means of this system we aim to contribute towards a form of government that would not require a dedicated civil service for the creation, storage, change, and deletion of jural eligibilities in the context of the res publica. In the thesis we explore the concept of jural relations as the atomic links of governmental systems, the composition of the jural relations as such, as well as the role of the jural subjectivity as a crucial component for creating complex systems of jural relations that serve as the underlying structures of juropolitical systems. We then walk through the history of the civil service – the bureaucratic machine, as Banfield called it, to understand its role and implications on the course of civilization, up till present time, where we discuss the impacts of ICTs on the development of the bureaucratic machine as such. We argue that the changes which ICTs so far brought to the government sector through what is known as e-government, e-democracy, and e-governance respectively, are based on unsustainable artefacts and hence there are strong reasons for them to be considered more of a burden to future generations, rather than a source of relief. Based on the implications of the so explored context we describe a model for an information system that would enable self-managed creation and determination of jural eligibilities, and thus self-managed government of juropolitical societies as such. We call this model Sustainable Non-Bureaucratic Government (SNBG). SNBG bases on a network of electronic registries, which store jural facts, from which eligibilities can be derived through a dedicated mechanism, which we call constellation-based reasoning (CBR). CBR bases on a purposely developed fine-grained data access control mechanism, which does not rely on predefined accessor roles, but dynamically enables / disables access to data based on the context of the request and the context of the data stored in the accessed registry. As such, CBR is purposely designed to support changing the rules of access to the stored data by means of collaborative decision making, as such is required in the political legislative context, whereby the rules that regulate such decision making, are again governed by the very same system, which ensures full flexibility of the SNBG system to fluidly undergo at design-time unpredictable transitions that would happen through time. This feature amongst others then, assures the system’s sustainability. We describe the architecture and the stakeholders of SNBG, as well as auxiliary constructs for planning and communicating regulations which make-up the CBR rules. We define the functional characteristics that instances of the electronic registries must satisfy in order to assure sustainability and to be applicable in the juropolitical context in accordance with core jural principles (and in order to avoid the mistakes as conducted in the course of development of e-government artefacts). Then, we describe the instantiation of a prototype SNBG system, i.e. the instantiation of a respective electronic registry that provides CBR-based access to the underlying data stored in a relational database. We evaluate this prototype instantiation based on three demo applications, which prove its technical feasibility in different scenarios. Finally, we evaluate the SNBG model in four different real-world scenarios to argue for its feasibility in crucial governance situations.
Keywords: unsustainability of e-government, self-management of jural relations, computability of jural eligibilities, non-bureaucratic government, collaborative decision making, liquid democracy, fine-grained data access control, fair non-repudiation, digital identity
Published in DKUM: 04.06.2015; Views: 2045; Downloads: 82
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