April 2007, Volume 18, Issue 2
India’s Unlikely Democracy: Civil Society Versus Corruption
Pervasive corruption hampers India's democracy, yet anticorruption movements may be helping to improve governmental accountability.
3063 Results
April 2007, Volume 18, Issue 2
Pervasive corruption hampers India's democracy, yet anticorruption movements may be helping to improve governmental accountability.
July 1998, Volume 9, Issue 3
India has long baffled theorists of democracy. Democratic theory holds that poverty, widespread illiteracy, and a deeply hierarchical social structure are inhospitable conditions for the functioning of democracy. Yet except for 18 months in 1975-77, India has maintained its democratic institutions ever since it became independent of Britain in 1947. Over those five decades, there…
April 2023, Volume 34, Issue 2
Oppositions in monarchies don’t have to stage revolutions to win freedom: Monarchies are as compatible with democracy as they are with autocracy. The challenge for those who would remove a king is not to fall for the promises of reform that never come.
April 2017, Volume 28, Issue 2
Two of the Arab world’s more liberal regimes, the kingdoms of Jordan and Morocco, are sometimes said to be evolving toward democracy. Is this true, and what are the longer-term prospects for these two monarchies?
October 2010, Volume 21, Issue 4
How can Chinese claim strongly to support both democracy and their authoritarian regime? The answer may lie in a Confucian concept of democracy.
January 2010, Volume 21, Issue 1
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 or the state?
October 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4
Read the full essay here. The Russian system of personalized power is growing ever more dependent on the same strategies that proved useless in sustaining the USSR. While the system still has the potential to limp along, its survival tactics render the it progressively more dysfunctional. Among the circumstances weighing against the system’s survival are…
April 2025, Volume 36, Issue 2
The ruling BJP has long sought to sideline Indian Muslims. But even the opposition is opting to exclude them politically. Muslims’ chances at greater representation remain dim.
July 2014, Volume 25, Issue 3
The year 2013 featured unprecedented strides for gay rights in some parts of the world, particularly in Western Europe and the Americas, but also startling setbacks elsewhere, as in Russia and some countries in Africa.
In an essay for Foreign Policy based on his article for the January issue of the Journal, James Loxton shows how one of Latin America’s most unequal and corrupt states is also one of its freest and wealthiest.
January 28, 2022
January 2002, Volume 13, Issue 1
Reports on elections in Argentina, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, The Gambia, Honduras, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Poland, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan.
July 2007, Volume 18, Issue 3
For more than two decades, President Yoweri Museveni has been building an authoritarian regime that answers closely to his personal will.
Summer 1991, Volume 2, Issue 3
Reports on elections in Albania, Benin, India, Nepal, Suriname, the USSR, and Western Samoa.
April 1994, Volume 5, Issue 2
Reports on elections in Antigua, Costa Rica, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, Serbia.
July 2007, Volume 18, Issue 3
After a decade and a half, how do citizens of postcommunist Europe now feel toward their new governing regimes?
July 2012, Volume 23, Issue 3
In Hungary’s 2010 general elections, Fidesz won 68 percent of the seats in parliament—allowing it to impose a wholly new constitutional order.
October 2001, Volume 12, Issue 4
In the wake of the East Asian economic crisis of 1997-98, how has the appeal to “Asian Values” fared as a rhetorical prop for undemocratic rule?
January 2001, Volume 12, Issue 1
Reports on elections in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Haiti, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Mauritius, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Yugoslavia.
April 2024, Volume 35, Issue 2
The battle over rights for sexual minorities has divided countries into opposing camps. But autocrats are lashing out with one aim: countering the liberal international order.
April 2024, Volume 35, Issue 2
The power of liberalism—though limited and never revered—enables it to serve as refuge while taming the demons of liberal society.