3273 Results
October 2013, Volume 24, Issue 4
Popular uprisings have occurred only in some Arab states and in even fewer have authoritarian rulers been overthrown. What factors allow us to predict whether an authoritarian regime will be vulnerable?
January 2009, Volume 20, Issue 1
While the belief in democracy has spread around the world, it has begun to crumble in some of the West’s finest academic institutions.
January 2007, Volume 18, Issue 1
A review of China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy by Minxin Pei.
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July 2014, Volume 25, Issue 3
Russia has witnessed a growing rapprochement between some of its nationalists and some of its democrats, but this trend is threatened by divisions over the annexation of Crimea.
October 2004, Volume 15, Issue 4
A ket to “modern representative political democracy” is accountability, but the task of assessing it must be carefully thought through.
October 2012, Volume 23, Issue 4
The “Arab Spring” has been very hard on autocratic presidents but so far has left the Arab world’s monarchies intact. How and why have Arab royals been able to resist the tide of protest?
April 2007, Volume 18, Issue 2
Closely fought elections are often fraught with conflict, splitting societies asunder. How can democracy survive such rough and close contests?
October 2019, Volume 30, Issue 4
The results of the May 2019 elections to the European Parliament—and particularly the growing influence of the populist radical right—reflect a deep transformation of European politics that can largely be traced to the “refugee crisis” of 2015–16.
October 2005, Volume 16, Issue 4
The June 2005 presidential ballot marks the culmination of the regime’s effort to dominate even the limited powers of the popularly elected offices.
January 2006, Volume 17, Issue 1
Evidence from the postcommunist countries shows that the strength of the legislature may be the institutional key to democratic consolidation.
July 2019, Volume 30, Issue 3
Election officials made strides toward secure voter identification, and a two-party system appears to be emerging, but the 2019 elections revealed continuing problems with vote-buying and violence.
April 2019, Volume 30, Issue 2
Spain’s system of Autonomous Communities had functioned fairly smoothly for decades following the country’s democratic transition, but events in Catalonia are putting it under unprecedented strain.
April 2012, Volume 23, Issue 2
Does recourse to the ballot box spur violence and instability in the world’s poorest countries? Despite the worries of modernization theorists such as Paul Collier, the evidence indicates that, over time, elections are not associated with higher levels of political violence.
July 2013, Volume 24, Issue 3
The Arab world’s old autocracies survived by manipulating the sharp identity conflicts in their societies. The division and distrust that this style of rule generated is now making it especially difficult to carry out the kind of pact-making often crucial to successful democratic transitions.
April 2011, Volume 22, Issue 2
Having only recently emerged from a prolonged and remarkably bitter civil war, Sri Lanka is now slipping steadily under the hardening authoritarian control of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his family.
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
After a nearly two-year interlude of authoritarian rule, Bangladeshis voted decisively for democracy, a secular approach to politics, and the center-left. The challenge now is to show that parliamentary democracy can deliver stability and socioeconomic progress.
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…
New works on China, Russia, political philosophy, English history, and much more graced our shelves this year. Here are the JoD staff’s favorite books of the year.
April 2017, Volume 28, Issue 2
Rising populism in the U.S. and beyond is calling into question the liberal-democratic bargain that has defined the postwar era. What led to Americans’ present revolt against elites, and what are its implications?
