Sri Lanka: Dr Vinya Ariyaratne

Sri Lanka: Dr Vinya Ariyaratne, President of Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka’s largest grassroots development organisation active in 15,000 villages; Lead Facilitator of the One Text Initiative in the Sri Lankan conflict; Adjunct Faculty at Brandeis University, USA. A medical doctor and public health expert, he has been personally engaged on the frontlines in providing emergency relief country-wide during and after the civil war, in natural disasters and now during COVID 19. He has advised and collaborated intensively with the WHO, World Bank and several UN and humanitarian bodies.

Affluence and Policy Influence in Advanced Democracies

Recent scholarship argues that affluence begets policy influence, thereby questioning whether contemporary democracy lives up to its key promise of formal political equality. A strong empirical emphasis of this scholarship, however, has left fundamental analytical issues unresolved with implications for the conclusions. In this article, I develop an analytical framework in order to solve two central, unresolved issues: (1) the representational implications of formal political equality, and (2) the necessary conditions for policy influence.
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