Germany’s Constitution of 1911 provided referendums on federal, state and local level. The constitution of the Weimar Republic allowed the people to hold a referendum on issues. After World War II, Germany has no provision for popular participation through referendum at federal level. By 1990 only seven states had referendums at state level and only one state had direct democracy at local...

Some recent studies have found little explanatory power of religious attachment to the attitude toward democracy or war in the Muslim societies. This result challenges the conventional wisdom that the religious factor is deeply connected to political turmoil in the Middle East. However, political scientists so far lack a powerful theory to explain the support of political Islam. The purpose of...

For the past four decades, Almond and Verba’s pioneering work, The Civic Culture, has remained one of the most popular books in political science, despite many criticisms. Indeed, the continuing popularity of The Civic Culture in the academic community is evidence of its groundbreaking quality and subtlety in treating culture as an independent variable. However, the number of criticisms and...

The study of “split-ticket voting” has become a non-negligible topic in political science recently as the upsurge in ticket-splitting has led to a major impact on U.S. politics, at both the national and state levels, by making divided governments normal rather than exceptional. In fact, split-ticket voting occurs not only in presidential democracies; voters in many parliamentary democracies...