2195 Results
April 2007, Volume 18, Issue 2
India's courts have been playing a growing role in the country's political life. Yet even as judicial interventions have become more sweeping, the principles undergirding their legitimacy have become less clear.
April 2014, Volume 25, Issue 2
Nelson Mandela, who died in late 2013, fought for freedom for all the people of South Africa and masterfully guided his country’s transition to a nonracial democracy. His record on foreign policy is more ambiguous, but also instructive.
October 2008, Volume 19, Issue 4
Torn between populism and those who fail to respect democratic limits in combating it, Thailand badly needs to locate a middle ground where the best of its old traditions can help it adjust to the new challenges that it faces.
January 2023, Volume 34, Issue 1
The government of Giorgia Meloni, the country’s first female prime minister, is popular, scary, and competent. Her far-right party also enjoys greater democratic legitimacy than any other Italian party in a long time.
April 2020, Volume 31, Issue 2
Escaping the populist trap requires reversing the sequence that brings populists to power in the first place. The 2019 triumph of Greece’s liberal New Democracy party shows how victory can be achieved.
April 2020, Volume 31, Issue 2
In 2019, the global democratic recession deepened, while protest movements proliferated around the world, fighting largely without leaders or support from major democracies.
April 2018, Volume 29, Issue 2
This small Balkan country has been plagued with crises of identity both internal and external. But recent developments, including a democratic change of government via the ballot box, have created an opportunity to find a better path.
October 2015, Volume 26, Issue 4
Once widely celebrated, civil society today is regarded as a threat by many governments, leading them to restrict its funding and activities.
April 2013, Volume 24, Issue 2
A number of countries including Russia and post-Mubarak Egypt are taking aggressive steps to limit or stop foreign funds from flowing to domestic NGOs that promote human rights and democracy. What is driving this trend, how far will it go, and what can be done to counter it?
January 2013, Volume 24, Issue 1
The response of the Chinese state (and of Chinese society at large) to the problems of the country’s periphery—Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, as well as hundreds of counties, prefectures, and townships in Sichuan, Qinghai, Yunnan, and other areas—is piling more tension and misery upon the populations there, but it is not undermining state power.
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…
January 2012, Volume 23, Issue 1
A groundbreaking new survey shows that democracy assistance is highly valued by its recipients but that there remains room for improvement.
October 2010, Volume 21, Issue 4
Development specialists and democracy-support experts should recognize—and maximize—each other’s relative strengths and comparative advantages.
January 2009, Volume 20, Issue 1
The case of Finland challenges conventional thinking on clean politics. Can it serve as a model for its more corrupt counterparts?
July 2007, Volume 18, Issue 3
By world standards, Latin Americans ideologically are slightly to the right. But their attitudes are moving leftward, a trend with potential implications for democratic stability in the region.
January 2004, Volume 15, Issue 1
The fall of the Berlin Wall gave East Europeans a euphoric sense that they were about to give European democacy a new direction. But as many of their countries prepare to join the EU, little has worked out as expected in those heady days.
April 2025, Volume 36, Issue 2
Despite a brutal thirteen-year civil war, Syrians are not building from scratch. In fact, Syria has a long and rich history of state-building to guide them.
July 2022, Volume 33, Issue 3
A group of corrupt authoritarian powerholders has impoverished Sri Lanka and even brought starvation to the island. But behind their misrule lies the deeper and longer-term problem of unconstrained majority rule.
October 2013, Volume 24, Issue 4
Qadhafi is gone after subjecting his country to a brutal dictatorship for more than four decades, but the devastated institutional landscape that he left behind bodes ill for Libya’s democratic prospects.
April 2006, Volume 17, Issue 2
In recent decades, Costa Rican society has evolved and become less deferential. Political arrangements that worked well in the past no longer meet the country’s needs.
