Center for the Study of Democracy

About: Center for the Study of Democracy is a nonprofit organization based out in Sofia, Bulgaria. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Democracy. The organization has 63 authors who have published 163 publications receiving 2845 citations.

The vital importance of a web of prevention for effective biosafety and biosecurity in the twenty-first century.

Abstract: Biological threats are complex and multifaceted, as evidenced by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Their effective prevention and countering require multiple lines of collaborative action and sustained cross-sectorial coordination. This paper reviews the conclusions of Graham Pearson's 1997 JAMA article titled 'The Complementary Role of Environmental and Security Biological Control Regimes in the 21st Century', taking into account the international policy developments that have occurred over the past two decades. The paper underscores the utility of the concept of a 'web of prevention' for elucidating the need for continuous interaction between the international biosafety and international biosecurity regimes, in order to ensure that the life sciences are used only for peaceful purposes. The terms 'biosafety' and 'biosecurity' are used to denote the primary purpose of the two regimes: the international biosafety regime seeks to prevent the unintentional (accidental) release of pathogens and toxins, including naturally occurring disease, whereas the biosecurity regime seeks to prevent the deliberate release and misuse of pathogens and toxins. The paper concludes by recommending practical steps for strengthening the implementation of all elements of the web of prevention and upholding the norms against the hostile misuse of life sciences.

Components of party polarization in the US House of Representatives

Abstract: We specify the level of polarization in a two-party legislature as an explicit function of three factors: (1) the ideological heterogeneity of district median voters, (2) the distance between candidates of different parties in the same or ideologically comparable districts, and (3) partisan bias in choosing between candidates equidistant from the median voter. Our key empirical finding, reinforced by two alternative methods of calculation, is that, while changes in each factor have contributed to the present day extremely high level polarization in the US House of Representatives, at least 80% of the growth in that polarization from 1956 through 2008 can be attributed to a dramatic increase in the second of these factors: party differentiation at the district level.

The Shapley–Owen Value and the Strength of Small Winsets: Predicting Central Tendencies and Degree of Dispersion in the Outcomes of Majority Rule Decision-Making

Abstract: Drawing on insights about the geometric structure of majority rule spatial voting games with Euclidean preferences derived from the Shapley–Owen value (Shapley and Owen, Int J Game Theory 18:339–356, 1989), we seek to explain why the outcomes of experimental committee majority rule spatial voting games are overwhelmingly located within the uncovered set (Bianco et al., J Polit 68:837–50, 2006; Polit Anal 16:115-37, 2008). We suggest that it is not membership in the uncovered set, per se, that leads to some alternatives being much more likely to become final outcomes of majority decision-making than others, but the fact that alternatives differ in the size of their winsets. We show how winset size for any alternative is a function of its squared distance from the point with minimal win set, and how this point, referred to by Shapley and Owen (Int J Game Theory 18:339–356, 1989) as the strong point, is determined as a weighted average of voter ideal points weighted by their Shapley–Owen values. We show that, in experimental voting games, alternatives with small winsets are more likely to be proposed, more likely to beat a status quo, and are more likely to be accepted as the final outcome than alternatives with larger winsets.

Resistance to international democracy promotion in Morocco and Tunisia

Abstract: Adopting a perspective of resistance and appropriation on the ‘agency of the governed’, this article brings together the study of international cooperation with approaches borrowed from social anth...