3266 Results
July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3
Read the full essay here. Seven decades after gaining its independence from the British Empire, India retains all the hallmarks of a functioning democracy: It holds reasonably free and fair elections, has a mostly independent judiciary plus a largely free press, and enjoys a robust and growing civil society. Yet thanks to India’s colonial inheritance…
April 2017, Volume 28, Issue 2
Three factors help to explain the historically wide split between the electoral and popular vote counts: economic and political fundamentals, polarization among voters over identity issues, and the sharply divergent ways in which the candidates chose to address these issues.
April 2017, Volume 28, Issue 2
Populist nationalism is emerging as the main competitor to liberal democracy. But despite its current resurgence, in the long run, like other illiberal paths to modernity, it is likely to prove a dead end.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
President Alvaro Uribe’s time in office was marked by disturbing trends that included a spike in extrajudicial killings and an attempt to overthrow term limits, but the country’s institutions of horizontal accountability proved remarkably resilient.
July 2014, Volume 25, Issue 3
In order to mark democracy’s progress and to inform policy, we need to be able to measure democracy in sufficient detail. The V-Dem Project aims to deliver exactly such a tool.
January 2013, Volume 24, Issue 1
How should we define the stages of democracy and their sequencing? Although some scholars argue that the rule of law should come first, today it should be viewed as the final piece of the liberal-democratic puzzle.
October 2012, Volume 23, Issue 4
The second wave of the Arab Barometer reveals strong and steady support for democracy in the Arab World but a deficit in democratic culture.
January 2012, Volume 23, Issue 1
Social activist Anna Hazare’s hunger strike has helped to turn the world’s attention to India’s rampant corruption.
April 2022, Volume 33, Issue 2
Conspiracy theories are not the sole preserve of dictatorships, but a global phenomenon. Worse, the political competition that is inherent to democracy is driving the spread of lies, fake schemes, and half-truths.
July 2020, Volume 31, Issue 3
Although South Korea is praised for its success at fighting covid-19, the triumph came at a cost to rights and privacy, and is drawing attention away from a larger drift toward illiberalism and bitterly factionalized politics.
January 2024, Volume 35, Issue 1
Populism is a mortal threat to liberal democracy, but it rarely hits the mark. The evidence shows that these would-be strongmen require an extraordinary set of circumstances to succeed, which is why they so rarely do.
July 2018, Volume 29, Issue 3
Today’s authoritarians are using “sharp power” to project their influence internationally, with the objective of limiting free expression, spreading confusion, and distorting the political environment within democracies.
April 2016, Volume 27, Issue 2
Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are weighed down by high crime, sluggish economies, and heavy reliance on remittances. And when significant political change has taken place, it has resulted in frightening political fragmentation.
April 2012, Volume 23, Issue 2
Of all the “Arab Spring” countries, so far only Tunisia has managed to make a transition to democracy. Tunisians now have a chance to show the world a new example of how religion, society, and the state can relate to one another under democratic conditions.
January 2020, Volume 31, Issue 1
Robert Michels’s classic work on the “iron law of oligarchy” can help us to understand why there is so much dissatisfaction with representative democracy.
July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3
A look at liberal democracy’s complex historical evolution shows that elite fantasies of liberalism without democracy are ill-founded. Authoritarian legacies and democratic deficits lie at the core of trends that threaten liberal rights.
October 2020, Volume 31, Issue 4
When asked by presidents to intervene domestically for crime-fighting or civil-order purposes, Latin American militaries face a number of risks and have a degree of freedom to tailor their responses accordingly.
January 2020, Volume 31, Issue 1
There is still an opportunity to pull the world out of its democratic slump. What is most needed is democratic conviction and resolve.
October 2018, Volume 29, Issue 4
In Malaysia’s May 2018 general election, a grand bargain between ex–prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and reform leader Anwar Ibrahim produced a political earthquake that ended 61 years of rule by the United Malays National Organization (UMNO).
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
As more and more African presidents attempt to remove or circumvent constitutional term limits, African populations increasingly are mobilizing en masse, at great risk, to defend their constitutions.
