January 2003, Volume 14, Issue 1
China’s Changing of the Guard: The Problem of State Weakness
The Chinese state is much weaker than most people realize, which bodes ill for the country’s democratic prospects.
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January 2019, Volume 30, Issue 1
India Under Modi: The Establishment Overreacts
Charges that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party threaten liberal-democratic safeguards are best understood as the overheated reaction of an insular elite that is still struggling to come to terms with its democratic displacement from power.
October 2009, Volume 20, Issue 4
Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy (II): Aiding Latin America’s Poor
Latin American social policy has at times worked backwards, widening rather than narrowing economic and social inequalities. But new conditional cash-transfer programs seem to be producing positive outcomes.
October 2013, Volume 24, Issue 4
Tracking the “Arab Spring”: Yemen Changes Everything… And Nothing
A long-ruling strongman president has been unseated by popular unrest and a negotiated transition is under way, but to many Yemenis this all appears to be a change more of appearance than of substance.
October 2003, Volume 14, Issue 4
Toward a Science of Ethnic Conflict?
A review of The Deadly Ethnic Riot by Donald L. Horowitz and Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India by Ashutosh Varshney.
July 2002, Volume 13, Issue 3
Middle East Studies After 9/11: Islamists and the Politics of Consensus
Middle Eastern autocracies rely ever more on repression of both their Islamist and secular critics, and therefore increasingly fear that any opening will be uncontrollable. Is there a way out?
July 2002, Volume 13, Issue 3
Africa: The Limits of Power-Sharing
Often recommended as a means of ending intractable civil wars, power-sharing may in fact be least likely to work when it is most needed.
October 2001, Volume 12, Issue 4
Hong Kong: The Perils of Semidemocracy
Hong Kong has experienced a smooth transition from British to Chinese rule, but signs of political, economic, and social malaise mean that further steps toward fuller democracy are needed.
July 2001, Volume 12, Issue 3
Women and Democracy: Cultural Obstacles to Equal Representation
A country’s level of female political representation cannot be explained solely in terms of socioeconomic factors and political institutions. The evidence shows that political culture also matters.
July 2000, Volume 11, Issue 3
Russia Under Putin: Can Electoral Autocracy Survive?
Vladimir Putin soon must make a fundamental choice: whether to hold on to monolithic power or to adopt a reformist course that could leave him at the center of a battle without any guarantee of success.
July 2000, Volume 11, Issue 3
Russia Under Putin: Reintegrating “Post-Soviet Space”
The debate over Russia’s likely course of development under Putin has paid surprisingly little attention to his openly stated goal of reintegrating Russia with other former Soviet republics.
October 2007, Volume 18, Issue 4
Documents on Democracy
Excerpts from: a communiqué adopted at a postelection Nigerian civil society summit; a report from Abuja from IFES Deputy Director Nathan Dusen; an open letter issued by Chinese human rights defenders before the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games.
January 2008, Volume 19, Issue 1
Documents on Democracy
Excerpts from: a Washington Post op-ed written by U Gambira, a pseudonym for the leader of the All-Burma Monks Alliance; remarks by Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, accepting the W. Averell Harriman Democracy Award; the keynote address given by Indonesian president Dr. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the 40th Annual Conference of the International Association of Political…
October 2008, Volume 19, Issue 4
Pakistan After Musharraf: The Burden of History
Since its founding out of the partition of British India in 1947, Pakistan has labored in the shadow of critical choices made at that time.
January 2013, Volume 24, Issue 1
Regime Types and Democratic Sequencing
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 2007, Volume 18, Issue 4
Understanding Democracy: Data from Unlikely Places
Some skeptics have asked whether ordinary people possess an understanding of democracy that allows them to evaluate it as a form of government. Our research yields three generalizations about popular understanding of democracy.
January 2021, Volume 32, Issue 1
Mainstream Parties in Crisis: The Antiestablishment Challenge
Faced with the rise of extreme and illiberal political players, mainstream parties have employed strategies of banning, marginalization, and cooptation. Yet to truly heal the underlying democratic ailment, establishment parties will need to look inward.
January 2021, Volume 32, Issue 1
The End of the Backsliding Paradigm
Like the “transition paradigm” before it, the concept of democratic backsliding threatens to flatten our perceptions of complex political realities. Examples from East-Central Europe illustrate the ambiguous dynamics at play in many troubled democracies.
April 2020, Volume 31, Issue 2
The Pushback Against Populism: Why Ecuador’s Referendums Backfired
Populists have often turned to referendums to dismantle a democracy. Democrats should be wary of turning to the same tool to rebuild what was lost. It may only pave the way for populism’s return.
October 2019, Volume 30, Issue 4
Southeast Asia’s Troubling Elections: Democratic Demolition in Thailand
The military junta that seized power in 2014 finally organized an election in 2019, but with the goal of preventing rather than facilitating a return to civilian rule.