Dubi Kanengisser's Homepage

Hello and welcome.

I am Dubi Kanengisser, a Doctorate student at the University of Toronto's Department of Political Science. I have a Masters in Political Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. My BA, also at HUJI, was in political science and communications. The purpose of this website is mainly to allow other students to make use of my class notes from my BA, and to display the various papers I wrote on different subjects, for readers to get ideas, and a decent bibliography, from.
Obviously, most of my older papers are in Hebrew, so this page isn't much use for foreign students, until I start uploading some of my more recent ones. Don't hold your breath. However, I'll try to keep this page updated with useful links I come across to various websites on matters of political science.
Ha! Just kidding.

Papers in English

Hobbes Supergroups - a suggestion for a way to understand human political evolution by utilising Hobbesian analytic tools, as a series of "rights transfers" between ever growing groups.

From Medal of Honor to Grand Theft Auto: The Moral Deterioration of the Computer Game Protagonist – an analysis of the changes that have taken place in the last few years in the moral message of computer games, mainly in the moral "type" of the protagonist (the character played by the player). Includes a comparison of several recent games. Written for Dr. Paul Frosh's "New Media and the Information Age" course.

The Democracy Disease: Is Democracy Contagious? – A quantitative study of the theories of democratizations' spatial diffusion. This study pits several types of diffusions one against the other and concludes with consequences for the mechanisms proposed to explain the diffusion of democracy over space. Written for Prof. Avraham Diskin's "Nations' Characterstics – Regression Analysis" seminar.

Constituting Canada: The Failures of Meech Lake and Charlottetown – An analysis of the two rounds of constitutional debates in Canada in the late 1980's and early 90's, and the reasons for their failure. Written for Prof. David Cameron's "Canadian Federalism in Comparative Perspective" course.

Links:

My blog at LiveJournal.

My wish-list in Amazon.com. Have a sudden burst of generosity? Buy me a gift!

Polity Project - a vast resource of information on regime and authority characteristics in all the countries in the world since 1800. A great source for comparative research.

CIA World Factbook - information on all the countries in the world in various fields: geography, demography, politics, economy, military etc.

Freedom House - a useful information centre on democratization in the world. Includes the Freedom House "Freedom Rating", rating the social and political freedoms in all the countries in the world.