October 2004, Volume 15, Issue 4
The Quality of Democracy: Addressing Inequality
Democracy requires robust political equality, but the persistence of social, economic and cultural inequality complicates its realization.
3263 Results
October 2004, Volume 15, Issue 4
Democracy requires robust political equality, but the persistence of social, economic and cultural inequality complicates its realization.
July 2004, Volume 15, Issue 3
President Vladimir Putin's lopsided election victory was assisted by an unlevel electoral playing field, but elections still matter in Russia and they will make more difficult the consolidation of authoritarianism.
July 2004, Volume 15, Issue 3
Three leading French political thinkers reflect on why modern democracies tend to forget their own natures, even to the point of encouraging an assertive "identitarianism" that could undermine liberal democracy itself.
January 2004, Volume 15, Issue 1
Despite the threats posed by terrorism, 2003 saw a second consecutive year of significant momentum of freedom, and showed encouraging evidence that political rights and civil liberties can endure despite economic privation.
October 2003, Volume 14, Issue 4
The EU was founded partly for the purpose of strengthening democracy, but it has been created in a way that is intrinsically not democratic.
July 2003, Volume 14, Issue 3
The decaying trajectory of democratization in South Africa represents a kind of settlement failure, resulting for the main parties in the transition having come to the table with incompatible cultural paradigms of negotiation.
July 2003, Volume 14, Issue 3
Democratic and ecnomic development will become sustainable in sub-Saharan Africa only with the emergence of coherent, legitimate and effective states.
January 2003, Volume 14, Issue 1
With both reformists and leftists pushed aside, political center-stage now belongs to new pragmatists both inside and outside the Communist Party.
January 2003, Volume 14, Issue 1
The vast obstacles to democratic reformism include basic provisions in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic itself.
October 2002, Volume 13, Issue 4
Saudi Arabia would seem to exemplify full-blown authoritarianism. Yet there are trends pushing the country toward more open politics.
October 2002, Volume 13, Issue 4
How well-founded are Western concerns that the nascent parliaments of Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain will be captured by antidemocratic Islamists and lead to the ‘Talibanization’ of the Gulf?
October 2002, Volume 13, Issue 4
While President Ali ABdallah Salih continues to call Yemen an ’emerging democracy,’ it more closely resembles athe autocracy of the pre-unification North.
October 2002, Volume 13, Issue 4
In 1997, Thailand adopted constitutional reforms. Now, five years after the reforms and almost two years into the premiership of Thaksin Shinawatra, we can see the gaps and ironies that the reforms left behind.
July 2002, Volume 13, Issue 3
The gravest challenges facing democracy in the Balkans are problems not of ethnicity or postcommunism, but of citizen disaffection and disillusionment.
April 2002, Volume 13, Issue 2
Many countries have adopted the form of democracy with little of its substance. This makes the task of classifying regimes more difficult, but also more important.
April 2002, Volume 13, Issue 2
Political scientists have long theorized that the use of “preferential” election systems can help promote successful conflict management in divided societies. As it turns out, evidence from five real-world cases supports this conclusion.
January 2002, Volume 13, Issue 1
The year 2001 saw modest gains in the strengthening and consolidation of democracy worldwide, but in predominantly Muslim countries—especially the Arab states—the status of freedom and democracy lags far behind the rest of the world.
January 2002, Volume 13, Issue 1
Recent studies suggest that civil society in the postcommunist countries is significantly weaker than in other types of democracies, old or new. Can this legacy of communism be overcome? If not, what are the implications for democracy?
October 2001, Volume 12, Issue 4
The 15 states of the former Soviet fall into three broad categories, largely defined by fault lines of history and culture.
October 2001, Volume 12, Issue 4
To grasp what is happening in the former USSR, we must examine the types of nationalism that flourish there.