367 Results
January 2007, Volume 18, Issue 1
Does the nature of an authoritarian regime affect the potential for democratic transition? Data since 1972 indicate that some kinds of authoritarian regimes are more likely to democratize than others.
January 2006, Volume 17, Issue 1
Strategies based on transition pacts that reduce rulers' risks and cushion their retreat from total power may be the most promising route to democracy in the Arab world.
January 2003, Volume 14, Issue 1
Successful institutionalization will help the regime survive the pressures of advanced modernization and integration with the global economy.
January 2003, Volume 14, Issue 1
After a decade of partial liberalization begun by the late King Hussein, freedoms are now being rolled back by an anxious regime.
January 2003, Volume 14, Issue 1
Holding regular, free elections may not be enough to stop turbulence that threatens both the quality of democracy and the coherence of the state.
July 2025, Volume 36, Issue 3
President Samia Suluhu Hassan came into office promising democratic reforms. Four years later, it is clear she is more of a performer than a reformer. Far from delivering on her promises to unwind Tanzania’s authoritarian machinery, she is relying on the repressive tools we know so well.
October 2018, Volume 29, Issue 4
AMLO’s sweeping victory in Mexico’s 2018 elections could point to a long-term dealignment of the country’s party system, but it is more likely that a less radical process of partisan recomposition will take place.
July 2023, Volume 34, Issue 3
People obsess over where Russia’s democracy went wrong. The truth is it did not fail: Russia’s democratic transition never got off the starting blocks.
Even in an era haunted by democratic decline, Jason Brownlee and Kenny Miao find that wealthy democracies are unlikely to collapse in their contribution to the October 2022 Journal of Democracy. Six top experts in the field debate their conclusions.
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 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
The image of Putin’s Russia as an authoritarian oil state attracts many Western analysts because it seems to carry a promise that falling oil prices will bring regime change. Thus, many were convinced that a major economic crisis would force the Kremlin either to open up the system and allow more pluralism and competition, or…
October 2011, Volume 22, Issue 4
The Arab events of 2011 may have some similarities to the wave of popular upheavals against authoritarianism that swept the Soviet bloc starting in 1989, but the differences are much more fundamental.
January 2008, Volume 19, Issue 1
Asia's oldest democracy is sinking into a morass of corruption and scandal. The Philippines' president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, continues to undermine the country's democratic institutions in order to remain in power.
October 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4
Read the full essay here. “The pursuit of national glory,” which M. Steven Fish counts among the features of Vladimir Putin’s “populism,” is emerging as central to the regime’s legitimation. Unlike previous instances of patriotic mobilization (around the Second Chechen War and the 2008 Georgia war), the current one appears to have evolved into a…
July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3
Read the full essay here. When the authors of India’s Constitution took the extraordinarily bold step of establishing universal suffrage, thus giving the right to vote to all adult citizens, India became the world’s first large democracy to adopt universal adult suffrage from its very inception. We call India’s move “instant universal suffrage,” and distinguish…
April 2015, Volume 26, Issue 2
The Iranian regime has sought to recast conventional principles of human rights and political participation by forging alliances with like-minded regimes and by broadcasting its narrative to an international audience.
January 2011, Volume 22, Issue 1
As an analysis of recent electoral results shows, the world’s emerging democracies are weathering the global economic crisis surprisingly well. Yet they remain under an even sharper threat from their own failures to deliver good governance.
January 2010, Volume 21, Issue 1
In some countries, democratic competition is undermined less by electoral fraud or repression than by a skewed playing field—unequal access to state institutions, resources, and the media.
