And in countries where PR is the electoral system, central governments spend on average a "whopping" 5% more of GDP than countries with single-party governments.Arend Lijphart, a Dutch academic who has looked at the performance of 36 democracies in recent decades, also says that coalition rule usually means more state spending.
It thus follows that good functioning of democracy (good democracy) entails high salience of the local-urban dimension.
a threat to the functioning of democracy.
WARSAW — In the dark aftermath of the plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland's president and dozens of top politicians and policy makers, Poles found solace and even hope in the performance of their young democracy.
In Burma, disappointment attends the performance of Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy campaigner who swept to power last year after decades of ill-treatment by the military (which renamed the country Myanmar).
The ritual performance of the legend of democracy in the autumn of 2012 promises the conspicuous consumption of $5.8 billion, enough money, thank God, to prove that our flag is still there.
He does see some unspecified hope in "a gradually expanding discussion that begins in scholarly circles, moves outward to the media and intellectuals more generally, and after some years begins to engage a wider public" — specifically, a discussion of how our system stacks up against the performance of constitutional systems in other advanced democracies and against democratic principles.
But Latin Americans are learning to separate the performance of their governments from the desirability of democracy itself.
The TV candidate... is measured... not against a standard of performance established by two centuries of democracy -- but against Mike Douglas.
Lack of freedom, democracy and funding, as well as brain drain and the difficulty of publishing research of local interest in high impact journals, all contribute to the low performance of biomedical research in the Arab world [ 10, 11].
