October 2009, Volume 20, Issue 4
Tanzania’s Missing Opposition
The country's long-ruling party has never faced a serious electoral challenge—due not only to opposition weakness but also to a deliberate strategy of suppression.
2745 Results
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April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
Singapore: Does Authoritarianism Pay?
The same policies that fostered decades of prosperity in Singapore have also led to longer-term economic ills that might have been averted in a freer society.
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
Reading Russia: The Return of Personalized Power
Read the full essay here. In contrast to authoritarian power structures, which rest on a form of bureaucratic corporatism that makes the leader its hostage, the regime in Moscow rests on personalized power, something that signals a return to the traditional Russian political matrix. The regime has fused power and property in a manner that…
July 2024, Volume 35, Issue 3
Southeast Asia’s Toxic Alliances
What some elites in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand portray as “unity” is nothing more than a corrupt bargain meant to cheat voters of their right to decide their country’s political future before a single ballot is cast.
October 2008, Volume 19, Issue 4
Pakistan After Musharraf: The Media Take Center Stage
The military regime opened up the media sector to more competition and private broadcasters in 2002, and the ramifications turned out to be vast.
October 2008, Volume 19, Issue 4
Zimbabwe’s Long Agony
Once hailed as liberators, Zimbabwe’s ruling party now clings to power through violent repression. How did the country’s founding father become its dictator, and what patterns in his party’s past foretold such an outcome?
July 2008, Volume 19, Issue 3
The Remarkable Story of Somaliland
Emerging from one of the world’s most notorious failed states, Somaliland has become an oasis of relative democratic stability in the troubled Horn of Africa. What does its story teach us about democratic state-building?
April 2006, Volume 17, Issue 2
Azerbaijan’s Frustrating Elections
The 2005 elections were marked by massive fraud, but the democratic world mostly looked the other way. Azerbaijani society remains receptive to democracy, but the regime clearly has other plans—and will soon have massive oil wealth to fund them.
January 2006, Volume 17, Issue 1
Burundi’s Transition: Training Leaders for Peace
Burundi's leaders are learning to embrace a culture of discussion and consensus that offers a way out of the abyss of civil war.
January 2006, Volume 17, Issue 1
The Surprising Significance of African Elections
Data from Africa show that repeated elections, regardless of their relative freeness or fairness,appear to have a positive impact on the growth of civil liberties and democratic values.
January 2006, Volume 17, Issue 1
Measuring Public Integrity
Measurements that rely on perceptions of corruption can be misleading. What is needed is a method of gauging how well a country has set itself up to defend public integrity systematically and in all its dimensions.
October 2005, Volume 16, Issue 4
Babel in Democratization Studies
Recent works on regime types have led to confusion and a tendency to overstate the differences between established and newer democracies.
October 2004, Volume 15, Issue 4
The “Alteration Effect” in Africa
Surveys show that Africans’ commitment to democracy fades over time, but also that their support can be refreshed by alternations in power via elections.
April 2004, Volume 15, Issue 2
Change in Uganda: A New Opening?
The decision by Uganda’s leaders to abandon the country’s “movement” system and adopt multiparty pluralism creates a significant opportunity for democratic progress.
October 2003, Volume 14, Issue 4
Making Sense of the EU: Democracy in Europe and Europe’s Democratization
Europe faces a potentially dangerous “double bind”: The legitimacy of domestic democracy in the member states is waning, and citizens are increasingly unhappy with the EU’s lack of accountability—but the new draft Constitution fails to address the problem.
October 2003, Volume 14, Issue 4
Making Sense of the EU: Toward a Cosmopolitan Europe
The EU represents an opportunity not only to fashion a postnational welfare state capable of responding to a postnational economy, but to lay a groundwork that will ultimately make possible a global domestic policy.
July 2003, Volume 14, Issue 3
Why Post-Settlement Settlements?
The decaying trajectory of democratization in South Africa represents a kind of settlement failure, resulting for the main parties in the transition having come to the table with incompatible cultural paradigms of negotiation.
January 2003, Volume 14, Issue 1
China’s Changing of the Guard: The New Inequality
Class politics is an ever more important reality, but the growth of capitalism is not likely to produce pressures for democratization.
January 2003, Volume 14, Issue 1
Turbulence and Reform in Papua New Guinea
Holding regular, free elections may not be enough to stop turbulence that threatens both the quality of democracy and the coherence of the state.
January 2002, Volume 13, Issue 1
What Democracy Can Do for East Asia
The implicit social bargain that carried many East Asian countries through the Cold War has lost its currency. If the peoples of this region are to secure the blessings of peace, liberty, and prosperity in the century ahead, they will need to have a new and explicitly democratic bargain working for them.