I am looking for three essays by one political theorist related to
democracy. There are a ton of good political philosophers but I can't
find any with THREE seperate essays.

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Request for Question Clarification by pinkfreud-ga on 12 Aug 2002 15:49 PDT

Do you require that the essays be available online, rather than in printed form?

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Request for Question Clarification by pm3500-ga on 12 Aug 2002 16:49 PDT

Your question is a bit vague. Are you looking for a contemporary
political philosopher or a classical political philosopher?

Is there any particular list of philosophers you are looking for?

Are you looking for theoretical or empirical essays? There are
democratic theorists I know who have written more than three boods
with democracy in the topic.

Are you looking for online articles or could they be published in
offline journal?

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Clarification of Question by g_austin-ga on 12 Aug 2002 18:12 PDT

Yes! online would be best if possible. I would take any age
philosopher but post-age of enlightenment is probably best. For
pm3500's question- there is no list of philosophers I'm looking for,
probably the less obscure the better. Theoretical prefered but I'll
take anything of quality (no Iceland fisherman's emails on mass rule).
Sorry for not being clear in the first place. You guys/gals rock.

ok, here goes, two of the most modern political philosophers that
write about Democracy are

John Dryzek, Professor of Political Science, University of Melborne.
Unfortunately his work is not online. He literally has dozens of
philosopical and empirical articles published. He also has three books
(to my knowledge).
http://www.politics.unimelb.edu.au/people/dryzek.htm

Jon Elster. Robert K. Merton Professor of Social Sciences at Columbia
University. He works in rational actor theories of behavior and has
done a good deal of work in democracy. You can find more than a few of
his essays online.
http://www.geocities.com/hmelberg/elster/elarticb.htm

Less well known, Steven Muhlberger, Associate Professor of History,
Nipissing University has online essays on democracy.
http://www.nipissingu.ca/department/history/muhlberger/histdem/

Finally, only the index is online, but you might try the Journal of
Democracy.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/
Larry Diamond is an editor and his focus is democracy. He's a
professor of political science and sociology at Stanford University
and has written dozens of articles.
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/diamond.html

OK, so I didn't use any of these guys but concidering that I did not
make online articles an ablsolute requirement it still gets four
stars. I used David Held who, though maybe not as prolific as some
others, has several articles online that I was able to print out. For
this answer I would have rathered just two (even one) theorist with
three seperate links to three articles that deal specifically with
modern democratic issues. The links given were just about the
theorists themselves with some not-quite on topic articles (democracy
being in the title is a MAJOR plus). I think this has more to do with
the quality of the question than the answer! I searched "works
philosopher democracy" then chose "Politics Timeline" then the
"democracy" link, got Held's name and searched "David Held democracy".
Somewhat lucky I have to admit.

Have you considered The Federalist Papers?  Written mostly by James
Madison, Alexander Hamilton, they are a series of famous historical
essays in defense of the constitutional democracy envisioned by the
founding fathers.

Have a look:

http://memory.loc.gov/const/fed/fedpapers.html

Hey, thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunatly it's not a perfect fit.
The federalist papers deal more with the issues once you have decided
on a democracy rather then the debate over democracy itself which is
what I need.