Discussion of readiness for democracy

continue reading.....

People commonly say that elections are determined by who has the most money. A look at the data gives some interesting and at times surprising insights to this conventional wisdom. Consider the following three items:
1. There are several websites that seem to do a pretty good job of tracking and presenting campaign finances and related [...]

continue reading.....

TIME magazine has named Russian President Vladimir Putin the “Person of the Year” for 2007, although the writers took great care to stress that they are not honoring or endorsing him, just acknowledging the tremendous influence that he has on world events. TIME also notes that while Russia has somewhat receded from the American public [...]

continue reading.....

In my last post, I talked about what role religion should or should not play as criteria for selecting the next U.S. President. In that regard, I happened on interesting data earlier today that adds an additional, important perspective to my previous post. That is this: Most of us would probably agree that The [...]

continue reading.....

How much of a factor should religion be in selecting a President? Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is definitely testing this question in the 2008 election — not that he hasn’t tried to avoid it. The Washington Post said: “Romney has for months publicly expressed little desire to confront the issue directly, usually referring questions [...]

continue reading.....

The President is supposed to work for the citizens. But these days, it seems like the government thinks the chain of accountability is the other way around. The Bush administration in particular feels no compulsion to explain itself and even actively hides what it is doing. If you had someone working for you who routinely [...]

continue reading.....