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political concepts

October 11, 2022

🦋 Democracy must not be a distracted caterpillar

Phil Paine Phil Paine is reminded of the caterpillar who, when asked in which order it moved each of its feet, found itself ‘distracted in a ditch, wondering how it walked’. He suspects that there are misapprehensions about the role of definitions in advancing democracy Read more
July 25, 2022

🦋 The ‘Science of Democracy’ is more than falsification

James Wong While Jean-Paul Gagnon’s data mountain project aims to rescue an abandoned science, others reject the study as not genuinely scientific. James Wong advocates a pluralist view of the epistemic commitments of (political) science and argues that Gagnon’s project can be grounded in scientific anti-realism and constructivism Read more
May 11, 2022

♟️ Why we must understand civilian participation in military rule

Salah Ben Hammou Researchers of authoritarian politics and civil-military relations have long examined military rule. However, our understanding of civilian participation in military regimes remains limited and requires greater analytical attention, argues Salah Ben Hammou. Amid last year’s coup resurgence, researchers must move to appreciate the subtle but salient differences among military dictatorships Read more
May 6, 2022

♟️ Autocracies with adjectives: we need better typologies of authoritarian regimes

Hager Ali The study of regime types, Hager Ali argues, is imbalanced. Theories and concepts of democracy have received attention for decades. But amid the resurgence of autocracies, scholars of authoritarianism still do not have the luxury of nuanced typologies to dissect the broad spectrum of non-democratic regimes Read more
March 23, 2022

Why we must beware the oversimplification of political terms

Ana Tereza Duarte Lima de Barros Political terms such as communist, fascist, and populist have become so elastic that they end up losing their analytical precision and meaning, write Ana Tereza Duarte Lima de Barros and Jorge Henrique Oliveira Gomes. It is our responsibility to use them with accuracy Read more

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Advancing Political Science
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