Lottocracy and epistocracy have received deeply insightful attention as political regimes. Herein, by conducting an experiment using an online survey, we explored the extent to which public opinion is receptive to political decisions under various regimes regarding two environmental policies: education policy and environmental tax policy. By doing so, we examined whether the presence of tax burdens affected the acceptability of political regimes, i.e., electoral democracy, lottocracy, and epistocracy. Our results revealed that decisions based on lottocracy and epistocracy were significantly less acceptable than those based on electoral democracy. Nevertheless, lottocratic and epistocratic decisions were more acceptable regarding the issue of environmental tax policy. The difference was mainly attributed to people's rejection of environmental tax policy offsetting their rejection of lottocracy and epistocracy. This suggests, first, that decisions based on electoral democracy increase policies' acceptability if they do not involve taxation, and second, that the status of whether or not a decision is electoral does not significantly affect policy acceptability if taxation is involved, whereas on the other hand, people are sensitive to differences between the regimes if the policy does not involve taxation.

This paper focuses on people's attitudes towards democracy and authoritarian regimes in Myanmar and whether the extent to which they prefer democracy is moderated by the severity of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. If people view the authoritarian regime's capacity to take swift action favourably, their opposition to it may be lower. We explored this hypothesis by conducting a survey of 756 individuals in Myanmar in June 2022 that incorporated a vignette experiment. A hypothetical scenario of Myanmar society in 2023 was presented with a two-by-two design – the conditions of the government (election is restored or not) and the pandemic situation (good or bad) were randomly varied, and the respondents were asked to report their favourability of the hypothetical scenario. The results reveal: (1) regardless of the pandemic condition, respondents prefer democracy to authoritarian regimes by a wide margin; and (2) the extent to which democracy is preferred is lower when the COVID-19 condition is more severe. Similar results were obtained from supplementary analyses using a conjoint experiment.

Political trust, which signifies the belief in the responsible exercise of power by political institutions, is a fundamental prerequisite for democratic legitimacy. However, even amidst a democratic deficit, the public's trust in the military can remain firm. This study aims to illuminate the prevailing trend and potential factors influencing public trust in the military in Taiwan from 2001 to 2022. The trajectory of trust in Taiwan's military implies fluctuating trust levels in response to the varying intensity of external threats. However, in general, confidence in the armed forces remains higher than that in other political institutions, a trend that is also observed in other nations. The statistical evidence demonstrates substantial support for both cultural and institutional explanations of political trust in the military in Taiwan throughout the initial two decades of the twenty-first century. However, the institutional explanation appears to be more robust than the cultural explanation. Notably, statistical results on trust in the government are consistent across all six survey rounds, with institutional factors showing higher overall significance in the pooled dataset compared to cultural factors, thereby emphasizing the institutional perspective.

The study of party systems tends to focus on individual parties and overlooks factions and other sub-party units. Although the impact of the district magnitude on the number of electoral parties is well established, the electoral rules incentives on party subunits have been overlooked. Using electoral results at the district level, we assess the effect of the district magnitude on the effective number of parties and effective number of factions competing in elections and with legislative seats in Colombia (1958–1990). By focusing on parties and factions, we produce empirical evidence from 444 datapoints to support the claim made elsewhere that roots of multi-partism were present throughout the period studied, including under the National Front (1958–1970), where only two parties were permitted. The district magnitude impacts the number of parties and the number of party subunits, but its effect is stronger on the former. When the National Front came to an end and electoral rules were modified in the 1970s, there was an increase in party factionalism and new parties in the years before multiparty system rules were enshrined in the 1991 constitution.

Many democracies have questioned the policy effectiveness of parliamentary petitions because the legislative approval of petitions does not legally bind follow-up measures that lead to petition realization. This study examines the connection between a legislature's adoption of petitions and ex-post policy implementation, using data from an original mail survey of previous petitioners at the prefectural level in Japan. Regression analysis and empirical insights from case studies suggest that the disclosure and transparency of the petition process, especially the issuance of progress reports, enhance officials' commitment to petitions' broad goals, leading to greater accountability, which, in turn, facilitates increased petition realization. These findings imply that citizens in Japan can expect democratic responsiveness to function, partly through the parliamentary petition system after an election.