... democracy elections electoral institutions political participation local politics One of the challenging aspects of designing democracies is deciding which public officials to directly elect and which to appoint. America’s founders ratified a Constitution that relied almost exclusively...

...Zhaotian Luo; Adam Przeworski The puzzle entailed in erosion of democracy by backsliding — a process in which the incumbent government takes every opportunity to reduce citizens’ ability to remove it by democratic means — is how a catastrophic situation can be gradually brought about by steps...

...Renard Sexton Numerous recent studies show that sharing politician or bureaucrat performance information with voters seldom succeeds at generating bottom-up pressure. One explanation is that local politics in developing democracies are typically mediated through local “development broker” elites...