We propose a new, unified approach for comparative research on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy (SWD). It starts with a well-specified individual-level model of the considerations citizens draw upon when answering the SWD survey question. Then we specify the relationship from contextual factors (especially institutions) through these individual-level mediating considerations and on to the SWD attitude. Multilevel structural equation estimation is applied to a merged dataset of European Social Survey (ESS) and country-level contextual data. The results add solidity to theoretical and empirical findings that citizens’ judgments of democracy are driven mostly by policy outputs and lived experience and not much by institutional variation or its political consequences.

Democratic cooperation is a particularly complex type of arrangement that requires attendant institutions to ensure that the problems inherent in collective action do not subvert the public good. It is perhaps due to this complexity that historians, political scientists, and others generally associate the birth of democracy with the emergence of so-called states and center it geographically in the “West,” where it then diffused to the rest of the world. We argue that the archaeological record of the American Southeast provides a case to examine the emergence of democratic institutions and to highlight the distinctive ways in which such long-lived institutions were—and continue to be—expressed by Native Americans. Our research at the Cold Springs site in northern Georgia, USA, provides important insight into the earliest documented council houses in the American Southeast. We present new radiocarbon dating of these structures along with dates for the associated early platform mounds that place their use as early as cal AD 500. This new dating makes the institution of the Muskogean council, whose active participants have always included both men and women, at least 1,500 years old, and therefore one of the most enduring and inclusive democratic institutions in world history.

For many, transnational capital is one of the most important driving forces of economic globalization; yet, we know little about what determines cross-border portfolio investments. In addition to recent economic literature's focus on information asymmetries as one key determinant of cross-border investment, this study brings in a political aspect to the field of international trade in assets. The –race to the bottom’ thesis connects domestic economic policies to investment decisions and argues that capital is more likely to move towards economies characterized by economic liberalism; political institutions are also relevant for portfolio investments, because democratic institutions often provide more credible protection against predatory practices. In this study, I model bilateral portfolio investments as a function of economic policies, political institutions, and levels of transparency of sending and receiving countries as well as important international connections. Empirical findings indicate the importance of transparency to attract portfolio investments. Moreover, transnational portfolio investments are only sensitive to some fiscal policy indictors and only within the OECD countries. Therefore, for non-OECD countries, there is still ‘room to move’ in maneuvering different aspects of fiscal policies. Finally, I find that investors care about the nature of political institutions as democratic institutions tend to be associated with higher levels of portfolio investment inflows. This is good news for developing countries that have undergone or are in the process of democratization. In addition to democratizing for peace, increased foreign capital further incentivizes a progression towards democratization.

After the downfall of President Suharto in 1998, communal violence occurred in several Indonesian provinces, producing an image of the country as one characterized by strong ethnic politics. In this article, I propose that this image is mistaken. The political salience of ethnicity has subsided greatly as a new democratic system has settled into place. Overall, Indonesia is a weakly ethnicized polity. Ethnicity still counts in arenas such as local elections, but what prevails is a soft form of ethnic politics, with few of the deep disputes about ethnohistory or cultural policy that occur in more ethnicized polities. Moreover, rather than producing ethnic polarization, democratization has created powerful new norms of compromise. I present this overarching argument by advancing nine general theses on Indonesian ethnic politics and by pointing to explanations concerning institutional crafting, historical legacies, and the deep architecture of politics, notably the prevalence of patronage. Rather than positing definitive answers, I propose new questions and frameworks for investigating the weakness of ethnic politics in contemporary Indonesia.