H. Kwasi Prempeh, professor of law at Seton Hall University, is former director of legal policy and governance at CDD-Ghana and was a 2011 Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow.
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.
This is a central problem—perhaps the central problem—for classical liberal theory and its crucial distinction between the state of nature and the civil state. Which is better for liberty: nature…
