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This paper aims to provide an evaluation of the new education system, based on Life Skills and Citizenship Education (LSCE), in Egyptian primary schools. This study analyzes how effective could be the implementation of LSCE in the process of constructing active democratic citizens, in particular, in the case of Egypt, highlighting problems facing the new education approach.

The study methodologies are twofold; the content analysis of the primary one new curriculum “Discover”, to assess the curriculum's strengths and weakness; and the questionnaire to the primary six students, to investigate the relationship among the twelve life skills.

Content analysis of the textbook shows that the learning process based on LSCE is appropriate for the construction of active citizens. The textbook provides Egyptian children with the necessary opportunities to learn and create, through creative participatory methods. The relationship between the social dimension and other dimensions has been proven by means of the chi-square test. The relationship between participation and the two approximately absent skills “resilience and empathy” has been clarified as both are strongly interrelated with participation. The results illuminate a strong relationship between participation and the remaining life skills.

More questionnaires are needed to assess the grade of life skills achievement among students in grade one and two, as it is regarded one of the limitations of the present study, owing to the complicated procedures and the limited time.

The research suggests the formulation of wider project-based activities to be included in the textbooks of all the primary grades. In this regard, real contribution with NGOs and local governments shall be developed to facilitate the involvement of children in actual projects, in accordance with their ages, and to encourage students to participate, as they notice the efficient results of their contribution.

The research stresses on the importance of enhancing participation, as it is proven through the chi-square test that it is strongly related to other skills.

The scarcity of analytical studies to evaluate the effectiveness of citizenship education programs on children, after the application of the new Egyptian education system.

Measuring and understanding the dynamics of democracy as well as democratic attitudes of people have become a big challenge for every democratic state. The study proposes the investigation of middle-class peoples’ attitudes towards democracy in Pakistan.

The study employs a deductive approach based on cross-sectional data from Pakistan’s middle-class people. The researchers use a survey questionnaire through a convenience sampling technique. Finally, the study utilizes 1854 samples to conclude the findings.

The evidence confirms that trust in public institutions and political engagement positively and significantly impact peoples’ democratic attitudes. In addition, the investigation witnessed the preference for democracy also supports understanding middle-class peoples’ democratic attitudes.

The study would provide an endorsement for politicians of Pakistan to perceive the inclination of middle-class people towards democracy. The study would guide the researchers and policymakers and intellectualize the middle-class peoples’ opinions and attitudes. Moreover the study would support reflecting the public confidence in decision making and ability to deliver. Finally the study findings would contribute to the literature of political science and democracy to understand democratic attitudes mainly focusing on middle-class populations.

This study empirically confirms the Pakistani middle-class peoples’ attitudes towards democracy.

This paper aims to explore individuals’ economic empowerment and political empowerment association and the moderation role of entrepreneurship development programs on this relationship in the context of post-revolution Tunisia, which is a newer developing democracy.

The study uses a quantitative approach based on econometric modeling. A questionnaire was designed and administrated to a stratified random sample of 343 participants in the Entrepreneurship for the Participation and Inclusion of Vulnerable Youth in Tunisia program, funded by the United Nations Democracy Fund and implemented in rural northwestern Tunisia between 2017 and 2021. A coarsened exact matching method is also applied for robustness analysis.

The analysis shows that when individuals have enhanced economic decision-making agency and are involved in economic networks, they are more likely to demonstrate higher political empowerment. It also shows that expanding rural individuals’ economic opportunities by providing entrepreneurial resources, such as entrepreneurial training and microcredit, strengthens individuals’ economic empowerment and political empowerment association.

The study provides practical implications for policymakers in newer developing democracies. Citizens’ political empowerment and inclusion in rural areas could be promoted by developing entrepreneurship development programs, which could help reinforce the citizens-state relationship and establish more stable social contracts. The research also provides practical implications for the international development community, donor agencies and program designers through duplicating similar programs in other countries with weak central government structures (i.e. post-conflict environments, post-revolution).

The research attempts to contribute to the ongoing debates linking entrepreneurship, economic empowerment and political/citizen empowerment. It focuses on a Middle East and North Africa country, Tunisia, characterized by socioeconomic issues and low civic participation.

This paper aims to scrutinize some determinants that affect the functions and roles of contemporary parliaments. In particular, such parliaments attempt to involve in new areas that were not represented in parliamentary study and to play new roles in the areas of development, diplomacy, the establishment of post-conflict peace rules and achieving the objectives of the sustainable development. The study found that the most important determinants affecting the new roles of contemporary parliaments are the constitutional and legal frameworks.

This paper adopts three basic methodologies so as to reach some applicable scientific findings that can be generalized. The researcher has used the descriptive methodology, to shed light on the parliament’s various activities and new roles and to take note of the many surrounding factors and available dimensions that enable parliaments to perform such roles. The researcher has also used the comparative methodology, to study parliaments with a view to identifying their roles in a way that includes their similarities and dissimilarities and the possibility of generalizing the outputs.

The paper has reached many findings, the most important of which are: first, the need to present appropriate amendments to the constitutions to give space to parliaments to play more effective and influential roles. Second, the internal regulations of parliaments must be in line with the attitudes and aspirations of the parliament and its members, giving appropriate cover for playing new roles in various areas.

This study has found that contemporary parliaments can play new roles in various fields, whether internal or external and in different sectors as well, as a result of the great developments and complexities introduced around the world. Such developments and complexities have cast a shadow on governments and affected their abilities in dealing with the issues immediately because of the enormous challenges in addition to the ongoing developments occurring to the legislative systems in the world, at the technical level of the departments and secretariats of contemporary parliaments or for members of Parliament and the institution as a whole.

The new roles of contemporary parliaments have been affected by the determinants of the research, which are the constitutional framework, the legislative framework, the relationship between Parliament and civil society and the relationship between Parliament and the government. These factors cast a shadow over the expansion or contraction of the attempts of modern parliaments to play new roles.

This study has found that contemporary parliaments can play social roles in various fields of a social nature, which is find solutions to the problems experienced by societies emerging from civil wars, which need national reconciliation, for example, the reconciliation of the ethnic tribes carried out by the Iraqi council of representatives between the local tribes to resolve the internal problems, in addition the role of Borondian council by it is trying end the conflict between the tribes of Hotsi and Tutsi.

The importance of the study stems from the fact that it focuses on the most important determinants of the new roles of contemporary parliaments that may be conducted outside the traditional framework of the parliament's study of legislation and supervision. Such contemporary parliaments have played new roles that take the form of political, economic, social, humanitarian, diplomatic and environmental works and other works concerned with the climate and their attempts to end internal and external conflicts and disputes.

This study examined how likeminded Facebook comments with incivility and without supporting evidence influence readers' evaluations of the commenter and online political participation intention. This study also investigated whether the indirect effect of exposure to uncivil comments and comments without evidence on online political participation through evaluations of the commenters is contingent on the strength of partisanship.

The study used a 2 (uncivil comments vs civil comments) × 2 (comments without supporting evidence vs comments with supporting evidence) factorial design with a scenario about reading similar viewpoints about the gun control issue in Facebook comments.

The results showed that compared to exposure to civil agreeing comments, exposure to uncivil likeminded comments resulted in higher levels of negative evaluations of the commenters, which in turn decreased willingness to participate in political activities online. Exposure to comments without evidence led to more negative evaluations of the commenters, but it did not significantly influence online political participation. In addition, the strength of partisanship did not significantly moderate the indirect effect of exposure to uncivil comments and comments without evidence on online political participation through evaluations of the commenters.

Although previous studies have demonstrated the significant effects of incivility and reasoned argument, little is known about whether and how people evaluate ingroup members' comments that are uncivil and lacking reasoned arguments. Most of these studies have examined incivility in political contexts, but few have extended the context to the effect of likeminded comments, especially when the comments are uncivil and lack supporting evidence. The current study aims to fill this gap in the literature.

This study is motivated to provide a theoretically informed, data-driven assessment of the consequences associated with the participation of non-human bots in social accountability movements; specifically, the anti-inequality/anti-corporate #OccupyWallStreet conversation stream on Twitter.

A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling approach as well as XGBoost machine learning algorithms are applied to a dataset of 9.2 million #OccupyWallStreet tweets in order to analyze not only how the speech patterns of bots differ from other participants but also how bot participation impacts the trajectory of the aggregate social accountability conversation stream. The authors consider two research questions: (1) do bots speak differently than non-bots and (2) does bot participation influence the conversation stream.

The results indicate that bots do speak differently than non-bots and that bots exert both weak form and strong form influence. Bots also steadily become more prevalent. At the same time, the results show that bots also learn from and adapt their speaking patterns to emphasize the topics that are important to non-bots and that non-bots continue to speak about their initial topics.

These findings help improve understanding of the consequences of bot participation within social media-based democratic dialogic processes. The analyses also raise important questions about the increasing importance of apparently nonhuman actors within different spheres of social life.

The current study is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, that uses a theoretically informed Big Data approach to simultaneously consider the micro details and aggregate consequences of bot participation within social media-based dialogic social accountability processes.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the position of religion for the three constitutions of Egypt.

In this study, by tracing religious identity-related studies and seeing whether their existence is attributed to the ruling elites’ attitudes, it examines how factors such as new elites and new in ideology affect change of articles of religion.

The results demonstrate that the most significant factor was the existence of a new elite having a different ideology, which was obvious in the three constitutions: 1971, 2012 and 2014.

The manner in which studies of religion are written is the basis for legislation and the source of public policies that affect the discourse of political systems or results in economic and social rights that affect public policies. Therefore, if people are engaged in the process of drafting identity articles, they would participate in the reformation of their traditions and systems and there would be more integration in the society.

Few studies have attempted to work on the sociology of constitutions and religion in the Egyptian context.

This paper presents insights on expatriates in Africa and sets out a research agenda for Africa’s expatriation. The objective of the paper is to provide background and context on expatriation in Africa and to stimulate and guide further research in this important area.

The reviewed papers were drawn from journals and other sources that reported on expatriation to/from African countries. It also incorporates an array of literature on contextual African issues, exploring conceptually how these relate to expatriation.

The review confirmed that there is little research on the topic, particularly with respect to outward expatriation and the studies that exist are one of a kind and stand alone. There has been no attempt to build systematic theory or develop a wholistic picture. This means that the field is wide open for more research. The data provide a picture of the current expatriate situation, including numbers, demographics, host/home locations, success rates and so on, and are provide a basis for further research developing and testing hypotheses regarding individual, organizational and country/national characteristics and how these influence and relate to expatriate experiences and outcomes. Researchers can also draw on the existing expatriation literature from around the world for replication studies to identify uniquely African issues as well as similarities with other locations. As Selmer (2016) noted, replication research is widely used in the sciences and is at the core of the scientific method and thus should be considered for expatriation research.

Limited previous research means there is a need for further research.

Expatriation is a critical aspect of companies operating internationally and companies are increasingly interested in doing business in African countries. Africa's economic growth and development are strong and foreign direct investment (FDI) into Africa is growing with consequent increases in the number of expatriates going to Africa. Understanding expatriation in the African context is thus very important to a variety of companies.

Management literature focusing on Africa is limited and this is true regarding expatriation. This means there is a need for researchers and practitioners to understand expatriation issues in this context, particularly considering economic growth on the continent, increasing interest in doing business there, along with increasing FDI and use of expatriates, as well as the expansion of African companies. This paper provides a research agenda as a guide on which researchers, including those in Africa, can build.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

This paper aims to discuss the practical dilemmas of institutional change to tackle the climate crisis in a UK university, identifying key assumptions and issues that block meaningful change. The research was part of an initiative to define a theory of change (ToC) to meet the university’s institutional climate commitments.

The findings are based on interviews with members of an inter-disciplinary ToC working group, a staff–student climate coalition and student representatives at the university. Interviewees were purposively selected to gain insights into assumptions about the nature of the university and its role in tackling the climate crisis, which must be addressed for the university to effectively implement its climate plan.

This paper identified tensions between the university’s role as a public and commercial institution, a lack of clarity over decision-making processes and the difficulties in balancing (and being transparent about) actions with commitments to tackle the climate crisis. A democratic and flexible approach to change is essential to mitigate these issues, providing an opportunity to reflect on the diversity of the university community and openly debate goals and commitments.

In setting out the initial steps of a ToC in a UK university, this paper offers practical insights for higher education institutions looking to change practices. By highlighting assumptions at a particular institution, this paper also contributes a level of granularity to a growing field of research on efforts in higher education institutions to tackle the climate crisis.