2855 Results
January 2009, Volume 20, Issue 1
The opposition within Cuba has become more diverse as well as more unified, and the regime, despite its enduring capacity for repression, is showing signs of underlying weakness.
April 2024, Volume 35, Issue 2
Liberal societies are those which offer refuge from the very people they empower—through individual choice, mobility, and the possibility of exit. This is the form of liberty that most clearly elevates the liberal project.
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.
April 2025, Volume 36, Issue 2
Syrians rejoiced when Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell. After decades of dictatorship and civil war, Syrians must now rebuild their country while seeking justice for the victims of authoritarian rule.
April 2004, Volume 15, Issue 2
Constitution writers in ethnically or otherwise divided countries should focus on designing a system of power-sharing rules and institutions. Studies by political scientists point to a set of basic recommendations that should form a starting point for constitutional negotiations.
April 2025, Volume 36, Issue 2
Voters around the world are losing faith in democracy’s ability to deliver and increasingly turning toward more authoritarian alternatives. To restore citizens’ confidence, democracies must show they can make progress without sacrificing accountability.
Authoritarians are evolving — becoming more unconstrained and repressive at home, and more destructive on the global stage. The following essays unpack the authoritarians’ toolkit, revealing their strategies for taking power and upending the liberal world order.
April 2016, Volume 27, Issue 2
A review of Making Waves: Democratic Contention in Europe and Latin America Since the Revolutions of 1848 by Kurt Weyland.
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.
October 2021, Volume 32, Issue 4
Thirty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia is firmly in the grip of an autocrat. Where did Russia’s path go wrong?
October 2025, Volume 36, Issue 4
People are losing faith in democracy’s ability to deliver social progress. But are democracies better than autocracies at promoting economic growth, alleviating poverty, and creating healthier, more educated, and more peaceful societies? On all counts, the answer is yes.
The forces that brought Erdoğan to power may be his downfall in Turkey’s May 14 elections. Here are a selection of key Journal of Democracy essays from the last two decades of his rule.
January 2008, Volume 19, Issue 1
Findings from the Arab Barometer say little about whether there are likely to be transitions to democracy in the Arab world in the years ahead, but they do offer evidence that citizens' attitudes and values are not the reason that authoritarianism has persisted.
April 2024, Volume 35, Issue 2
Violence need not be lethal to pose a threat to democracy. Indeed, low-scale violence has proven to be a far more effective means of manipulating elections.
April 2004, Volume 15, Issue 2
Excerpts from a United Nations report on the feasibility of early elections and possible alternatives in Iraq; an inaugural address by Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili delivered in Tbilisi on January 25; a letter signed by more than 100 reformist Iranian parliamentarians criticizing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for approving the Guardian Council disqualification of more…
January 2014, Volume 25, Issue 1
A review of The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moisés Naím.
October 2015, Volume 26, Issue 4
East European communists inherited the Bolshevik obsession with repressing any genuinely independent civil society groups.
April 2023, Volume 34, Issue 2
Although Saddam fell twenty years ago, the politicians who have come after him still think like Baathists. But a new generation has begun making itself heard. It believes in Iraq as a nation and it understands democracy as more than a source of spoils to be divided among groups.
July 2018, Volume 29, Issue 3
For countries emerging from communism, the post-1989 imperative to “be like the West” has generated discontent and even a “return of the repressed,” as the region feels old nationalist stirrings and new demographic pressures.
