Is TikTok a Threat to Democracy?
The popular social media app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and used by 170 million Americans, is raising national security questions about data privacy and malign foreign influence.
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		The popular social media app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and used by 170 million Americans, is raising national security questions about data privacy and malign foreign influence.
			
		On November 19, a Hong Kong court sentenced 45 prominent prodemocracy activists to years in prison in the biggest crackdown yet under the city’s draconian, Beijing-imposed National Security Law. The Journal of Democracy essays below, free for a limited time, detail Hong Kong’s decades-long fight for freedom, and the CCP’s unrelenting repression.
			
		Mexico’s president recently signed into law a series of reforms that bulldoze the country’s judicial system and eviscerate democratic checks on executive power. Amrit Singh and Gianmarco Coronado Graci explain why this is even worse than it seems.
			
		DeepSeek’s new frontier AI model is the CCP’s most powerful tool yet for surveillance and control. The following Journal of Democracy essays show how authoritarian governments leverage emerging tech to enhance repression. Read free for a limited time.
Drawing on his October-issue contribution “Latin America’s Shifting Politics: The Lessons of Bolivia,” Jean-Paul Faguet explains why the collapse of Bolivia’s party system may offer “an analytical window into the future” for Western countries.
January 15, 2019
			
		The perennial Slovak politician practices a hardnosed, vengeful form of politics. It is also bad news for the future of Slovakian democracy.
			
		For years, they were a fringe vote. Now they are broadening their agenda, tapping into voter frustration, and getting Germans to favor them once again.
			
		When voters are asked to cast ballots for or against important national policies — whether to draft or adopt a new constitution, to abolish or reinstate term limits, or, perhaps most famously, to leave or remain in the European Union — they take that job seriously. Yet national referendums are not always put forward in…
			
		How do autocrats control the media? Will Syria be free now that Assad has fallen? What’s to blame for democratic backsliding? Why must Ukraine win? The April issue of the Journal of Democracy tackles some of today’s most pressing questions.
			
		"A useful compilation popularizing the work of an influential journal… The Journal of Democracy is an effective tribune for mainstream U.S. thinking on these issues."—Political Studies
			
		Mikhail Gorbachev risked everything. Neither Russia nor the West could live up to his vision.
			
		After years of increasingly authoritarian rule, Tanzanian president Samia Suluhu Hassan was hailed as a democratic reformer. But as Dan Paget and Aikande Clement Kwayu write in the July issue of the JoD, the president is more performer than reformer, relying on theatrics to delay real reform while sharpening her tools of repression.
			
		If you want to understand why generals support a presidential power grab, then you need to understand the logic that motivates them. Why they leave the barracks — and what we must do to get them to stand down.
			
		Across Latin America, former leaders are keeping a chokehold on their countries’ politics. It’s time their successors break free.
Hong Kong law professor Benny Tai, who on April 24 received a sixteen-month prison sentence in connection with his role in the 2014 Occupy Central movement, reflected in the April 2019 Journal on the significance of the Tiananmen Square protests for Hong Kong’s democrats. Read a shortened version of his essay at the Diplomat.
May 1, 2019
From the early days of this journal to our most recent issue, the JoD editors have compiled ten essays we think you should not miss this summer.
Is global democracy really in freefall? Here’s what they think.
			
		The newly aggressive U.S. policy toward Nicolás Maduro and his autocratic regime, including the recent sinking of alleged Venezuelan drug boats, did not come out of nowhere.
			
		President Hassan promised Tanzanians freedom, transparency, and reform. Instead, she has delivered repression, violence, and arrests as she bars anyone who dares challenge her.