January 2012, Volume 23, Issue 1
China and East Asian Democracy: The Coming Wave
If there is going to be a great advance of democracy in this decade, it is most likely going to emanate from East Asia.
3015 Results
January 2012, Volume 23, Issue 1
If there is going to be a great advance of democracy in this decade, it is most likely going to emanate from East Asia.
October 2019, Volume 30, Issue 4
Reports on elections in Afghanistan, Guatemala, Madagascar, Mauritania, Nauru, Tunisia, Tuvalu, Ukraine.
January 2012, Volume 23, Issue 1
Read the full essay here. Turkish state policy toward the Kurds, the Republic of Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, has evolved from denial and mandatory assimilation to cultural recognition to acknowledgment of the Kurds’ contested status as a political problem demanding political solutions. The election of 36 Kurdish-nationalist lawmakers, most of whom now sit in parliament…
July 2015, Volume 26, Issue 3
How are trends in global democratization likely to be shaped by the distribution of such key structural factors as income, ethnic or religious diversity, and the quality of the state?
July 2021, Volume 32, Issue 3
Once mostly found in authoritarian regimes, personalism is now putting established democracies in peril—a trend that digital technology will likely make worse.
January 2007, Volume 18, Issue 1
Reports on elections in Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Congo (Kinshasa), Ecuador, Gabon, The Gambia, Latvia, Madagascar, Montenegro, Nicaragua, Saint Lucia, Tajikistan, Venezuela, Yemen, and Zambia.
Fall 1990, Volume 1, Issue 4
Reports on elections in: Ecuador, Mongolia, and São Tomé & Príncipe.
January 2005, Volume 16, Issue 1
Repots on elections in Afghanistan, Botswana, Czech Republic, Ghana, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Namibia, Niger, Romania, Slovenia, Tunisia, Ukraine, and Uruguay.
July 2002, Volume 13, Issue 3
Reports on elections in Algeria, Bahamas, Burkina Faso, Chad, Colombia, the Comoros, Congo-Brazzaville, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Hungary, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sierra Leone, Ukraine, Vanuatu, and Zimbabwe.
Elections in nearly eighty countries around the world captured headlines throughout 2024. Meanwhile, NATO turned 75, Viktor Orbán ramped up his repression, and Bitcoin became the currency of choice for democracy activists under threat. These ten essays were the JoD’s most-read online exclusives of 2024.
Billions in much-needed American military aid are now headed for Ukraine. The following Journal of Democracy essays demonstrate what it will take to reverse the course of this war of attrition, and why this struggle is a “contest between democracy and dictatorship.”
January 2019, Volume 30, Issue 1
A crackdown on the opposition, followed by sham parliamentary elections in July 2018, has deepened and extended the decades-long personalist dictatorship of Hun Sen.
January 2011, Volume 22, Issue 1
In most Arab countries, Islamist groups are the only ones with the popular support needed to win free and fair elections. Yet Islamist parties have shown an ambivalence about and in some cases even an aversion to seeking power via the ballot box.
In July 2016 and January 2017, the Journal of Democracy published two articles on “democratic deconsolidation” by Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk. These essays not only generated a great deal of commentary in the media, but also stimulated numerous responses from scholars focusing on Foa and Mounk’s analysis of the survey data that is at the heart of their argument.…
January 2012, Volume 23, Issue 1
Read the full essay here. In the West, Turkey is considered a model for a secular democracy in the Muslim world, yet the country finds itself mired in a crisis of civil rights and liberties under a third term of the pro-Islamic AKP government. Ironically, while the government maintains a discourse on political reform—including constitutional…
April 2008, Volume 19, Issue 2
Despite sweeping political and constitutional changes in Africa, a notable feature of the ancien régime survives—the imperial presidency. African presidents may be term-limited, but they have not been tamed.
April 2024, Volume 35, Issue 2
Malawi is a “hard place” for democracy—its economy struggles and state capacity is weak. So how has it avoided the pitfalls that have doomed so many others?
October 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4
Despite all its flaws, Iran’s May 2017 presidential balloting amounted to another small but genuine advance for the cause of democracy.
October 1999, Volume 10, Issue 4
Reports on elections in Indonesia, Kuwait, Malawi, and Venezuela.
January 2013, Volume 24, Issue 1
Although the Chinese Communist Party has tried to institutionalize the political system in the reform era, such efforts have been hampered by the Maoist legacy. To cope with challenges from the society, the CCP mainly relies on a highly centralized and resource-intensive weiwen system, and shows little respect for institutional differentiation and formal procedures.