Little is known about views on democracy of adolescents. In this article we describe results of our interview study with forty adolescents of fourteen years old on their views of democracy and decision making. The study focuses on the daily lives of adolescents and decision making within local contexts, such as the classroom. The adolescents’ views on decision making appear to correspond to the models of democracy as we know them, that is majoritarian democracy (the largest group), consensual democracy or deliberative democracy. However, only some of the adolescents have an explicit understanding of the concept of democracy and most have limited political knowledge. For these students, the experience or feeling of being part of a political democracy is still something ‘far away’ and not something of any relevance in their daily lives.

Within political science there is an ongoing discussion about the persistent or diminishing influence of social cleavages on voting behavior and the extent to which new voting motives have taken over the explanatory power of these predictors. We investigate the influence of religion, nationalism, ethical conservatism/progressivism and left-right orientations on the voters’ appreciation of political parties in Belgium. This method allows us to make a more qualified analysis on voting motives, in particular for smaller parties. We use data from the 2009 PartiRep election study, which show that traditional cleavages still have an important influence on political preferences. While the left-right-dimension has a limited influence on voting preferences in Flanders, it does play a major role in Wallonia. Contrary to expectations, the explanatory power of left-libertarian and right-authoritarian positions is rather weak, with one major exception: the preference for Vlaams Belang is almost entirely determined by ethnocentrism while this attitude is not relevant for other parties. In general, we find that both traditional and postmaterialist cleavages play a more important role in predicting party appreciations in Flanders than they do for French-speaking respondents.

This article analyzes the US internal justification to invade Iraq in 2003 through a study of the ‘Bush Doctrine’ of 2002, several Congressional acts and resolutions on Iraq, and Presidential speeches before and during the mobilization of US forces. It argues that in order to find domestic support, regime change was one of the main goals, despite the references the US made to UN resolutions. Second, this paper uses Rawls’ ideas to analyze the US decision to democratize Iraq. The results of this study show how political philosophy can be used and abused to shape foreign policy. Rawls’ theory could have provided the US with a moral justification based on the liberal peace assumptions that were underlying their foreign policy. However, the US did not make a consistent appeal to those assumptions and acted like a Rawlsian ‘outlaw state’ instead. Therefore, this paper argues, the US lost the liberal justification to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in favor of democracy.