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Johns Hopkins Univ. Press

January 2010, Volume 21, Number 1

Democracy's Past and Future
The Editors

Still Bowling Alone? The Post-9/11 Split
Thomas H. Sander and Robert D. Putnam
The crisis of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has sparked a surge of increased civic engagement by young people in the United States, but there is also evidence of a growing divide along class lines.

Twenty-Five Years, Fifteen Findings
Philippe C. Schmitter
A coauthor of the pathbreaking study Transitions from Authoritarian Rule reflects on the lessons that he has learned about democratic transition and consolidation since the publication of this work nearly 25 years ago.

Schmitter’s Retrospective: A Few Dissenting Notes
Guillermo O’Donnell
Another coauthor of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule questions whether his former collaborator is underrating the current dangers to democracy.

Transitions to the Rule of Law
Francis Fukuyama
While we have witnessed many transitions to multiparty systems, it has proven much harder for countries to attain a genuine rule of law. We need to know more about the origins of the rule of law in order to promote it successfully today.

The Crash of '08
Laurence Whitehead
The short-term political impact of the economic crisis has been less dramatic than initially expected, but it may have lasting effects on the “quality” of democracy, including the legitimacy of prevailing financial institutions.

Why Democracy Needs a Level Playing Field
Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way
In some countries, democratic competition is undermined less by electoral fraud or repression than by a skewed playing field—unequal access to state institutions, resources, and the media.

Authoritarianism’s Last Line of Defense
Andreas Schedler
The new electoral authoritarian regimes of the post–Cold War era have formally adopted the full panoply of liberal-democratic institutions. Rather than rejecting or repressing these institutions, they manipulate them.

Populism, Pluralism, and Liberal Democracy
Marc F. Plattner
In recent years, scholars have begun to focus on the sources of “authoritarian resilience.” But democracy has also shown surprising resilience, in part because the disorders to which it is prone tend to counteract each other.

Why Are There No Arab Democracies?
Larry Diamond
Democracy has held its own or gained ground in just about every part of the world except for the Arab Middle East. Why has this crucial region remained such infertile soil for democracy?

Twenty Years of Postcommunism

Seven leading experts on Central Europe and the former Soviet Union examine the progress of democratization in the postcommunist world since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and point to the challenges that lie ahead.

  1. In Search of A New Model
    Jacques Rupnik

  2. Deepening Dissatisfaction
    Ivan Krastev

  3. The Other Transition
    Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

  4. Citizenship Restored
    Vladimir Tismaneanu

  5. Freedom and the State
    Ghia Nodia

  6. Georgia's Soviet Legacy
    Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr.

  7. What's the Matter with Russia?
    Lilia Shevtsova

Review Essay

  • Democratic Triumph, Scholarly Pessimism
    Bruce Gilley
    By any measure, democratization has achieved remarkable advances over the past twenty years. Why, then, have so many of the leading works written on the topic during this period been so full of gloom?

Election Watch

  • Reports on recent elections in Afghanistan, Botswana, Gabon, Honduras, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Romania, Tunisia, and Uruguay.

Documents on Democracy

  • Excerpts from Ayman Nour's video message to the National Endowment for Democracy's November 18 conference, "Middle Eastern Democrats and Their Vision of the Future."

  • Selections from Wang Lixiong's speech accepting the International Campaign for Tibet's Light of Truth Award. Wang Lixiong, a Chinese writer, coauthored a 12 March 2008 open letter to the Chinese authorities entitled "Twelve Suggestions for Handling the Tibetan Situation."

  • Portions of Ladan Boroumand's speech accepting the Lech Walesa Prize, awarded by the Lech Walesa Insitute Foundation in Gdansk to three Iranian human-rights activists—Ladan and Roya Boroumand, the founders of the Abdorarahman Boroumand Foundation, and Shadi Sadr of the End Stoning Forever campaign.

  • Selections from the "EU Agenda for Action"—the annex to the "Conclusions on Democracy Support in the EU's External Relations" adopted by the Council of the European Union on November 17.

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009)

  • The eminent Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, who had a major influence on the development of the Polish democratic opposition, died on 17 July 2009. A memorial symposium entitled “Democracy, Totalitarianism, and the Culture of Freedom” was held in his honor at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C., on October 15. A second memorial symposium was held on October 24 at the University of Warsaw, organized by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Selected excerpts from speeches at these two events appear in the Journal.

 
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