October 2009, Volume 20, Issue 4
Jordan: Ten More Years of Autocracy
Jordan gets much good press for having one of the more open and liberal regimes in the Arab world, but that reputation masks a considerably grimmer reality.
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July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
China Since Tiananmen: A New Rights Consciousness?
Read the full essay here. Despite the suppression of the Tiananmen Uprising of 1989, popular protest in China has by all accounts escalated steadily over the ensuing two decades. These protests have spread to virtually every sector of Chinese society, prompting more than a few observers to proclaim the emergence of a “rising rights consciousness”…
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
China Since Tiananmen: The Labor Movement
Read the full essay here. The twenty years since 1989 have brought two major developments in worker activism. First, whereas workers were part of the mass uprising in the Tiananmen Movement, there is today hardly any sign of mobilization that transcends class or regional lines. Second, a long-term decline in worker power at the point…
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
China Since Tiananmen: Rural Protest
Read the full essay here. Although China’s farmers did not play a large role in the 1989 protests, they have been quite contentious since. Rural unrest has been triggered in part by reforms and in part by savvy “peasant leaders” who quickly seize opportunities that appear. Recently, many protest leaders have concluded that tame forms…
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
China Since Tiananmen: Online Activism
Read the full essay here. Online activism is an integral part of the broader landscape of citizen activism in contemporary China. It assumes a variety of forms, from cultural and social activism to cyber-nationalism and online petitions and protests. Technological development and social transformation provide the basic structural conditions. A fledgling civil society of online…
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
Bangladesh’s Fresh Start
After a nearly two-year interlude of authoritarian rule, Bangladeshis voted decisively for democracy, a secular approach to politics, and the center-left. The challenge now is to show that parliamentary democracy can deliver stability and socioeconomic progress.
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
Scottish Democracy in a Time of Nationalism
The Scottish National Party proposes to free Scotland from its supposed tutelage to London, but betrays habits of political centralism and elitism that raise questions about the quality of democracy an independent Scotland would enjoy.
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
Democratization by Elections? Competitive Clientelism in the Middle East
Legislative elections in the Middle East often become contests over patronage and wind up reinforcing authoritarian regimes.
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
The Turnover in El Salvador
In March 2009, El Salvador saw its first peaceful alternation of power since independence, as the FMLN, a former guerilla movement that laid down its arms in 1992, finally won the presidency.
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
Nicaragua: Progress amid Regress?
Despite increasing authoritarian tendencies at the national level, there are signs that Nicaragua has been making democratic advances at the local level.
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
Arms and the Humanitarian
A review of Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention by Gary J. Bass.
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
Reading Russia: It’s No Mystery
A fan of Mario Puzo’s Godfather novels will see the Putin government for what it is: a mafia.
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
Reading Russia: Tools of Autocracy
Read the full essay here. Arguably a flawed democracy in the 1990s, Russia took a distinctly authoritarian turn under President Vladimir Putin from 2000 to 2008. The country now lives under a façade democracy that barely conceals the political and administrative dominance of a self-interested bureaucratic corporation. The regime manufactures consent by means of three…
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
Reading Russia: Forms Without Substance
Read the full essay here. Twenty years ago, there was a more thoroughgoing political pluralism in Russia than there is today. In some respects, the forms of democracy-including party consolidation-have been enhanced, but they have been so manipulated as to deprive them of substance. Either “electoral authoritarianism” of “multiparty authoritarianism” (Juan Linz’s terms) may reasonably…
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
Reading Russia: The Dying Mutant
Read the full essay here. The corporatist kleptocracy being erected by Russian President Vladimir Putin is profoundly misunderstood in the West. This model dooms Russia to economic degradation and margin-alization. The current global crisis has made this truth painfully clear. The artificially created image of a threatening West (and U.S. in particular) is now becoming…
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
Reading Russia: Is There a Key?
Read the full essay here. Of all of the national republics that emerged out of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has had the most profound difficulties in determining its national identity. What is the essence of being Russian, and where are the boundaries of the “Russian World”? There has never been a Russian…
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
Reading Russia: The Return of Personalized Power
Read the full essay here. In contrast to authoritarian power structures, which rest on a form of bureaucratic corporatism that makes the leader its hostage, the regime in Moscow rests on personalized power, something that signals a return to the traditional Russian political matrix. The regime has fused power and property in a manner that…
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
Reading Russia: The Merger of Power and Property
Read the full essay here. The regime in Moscow mixes key features of a capitalist economy with a political system wherein power is monopolized by a close-knit professional and age cohort whose members often have a background in the secret police. Instead of seeking to base its legitimacy on broad-based, transpersonal institutions with character and…
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
Hugo Chávez’s “Petro-Socialism”
Will Hugo Chávez’s victory in the 15 February 2009 vote to end term limits enable him to drive Venezuela toward “Bolivarian socialism”? There are reasons to doubt this, but for now democracy’s prospects do not look encouraging.
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
The 2008 Freedom House Survey: A Third Year of Decline
Although 2008 was marked by democratic setbacks as well as authoritarian “pushback” against reformers, democracy remains the only system of government that commands global respect.