1933 Results
April 2011, Volume 22, Issue 2
The past decade began at a high point for freedom but ended with freedom in peril. Yet the setbacks of the last five years do not outweigh the democratic gains of the last forty.
April 2011, Volume 22, Issue 2
Even before Argentina’s landmark gay-marriage law was passed in July 2010, a gay-rights revolution was well underway across Latin America. But do gay rights by law equal acceptance of gays in practice?
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.
April 2011, Volume 22, Issue 2
Once dismissed as an “overcrowded barracoon,” this Indian Ocean island nation has more recently been hailed as one of Africa’s “emerging success stories,” but the truth is that some troublesome shadings haunt this rosy picture.
January 2011, Volume 22, Issue 1
Striking the right balance between freedom and security is hard, especially in Latin America. Hybrid forces combining military and police elements may be the best means for meeting security challenges without imperiling freedom.
January 2011, Volume 22, Issue 1
Hugo Chávez has been running a bounded competitive-authoritarian regime for some time, but its ability to compete is now slipping. Will this tend to make it less authoritarian—or even more so?
October 2010, Volume 21, Issue 4
The lines between the development-aid and democracy-aid communities have been blurring, in terms of both organizational boundaries and activities on the ground, but the convergence is far from complete.
October 2010, Volume 21, Issue 4
Over the years, the Asian Barometer Survey has yielded some surprising results. A new typological analysis helps to make sense of them.
October 2010, Volume 21, Issue 4
Arabs express a clear preference for democracy, which they define in ways similar to citizens elsewhere in the world. But their authoritarian regimes are not listening.
July 2010, Volume 21, Issue 3
Must every state be a nation and every nation a state? Or should we look instead to the example of countries such as India, where one state holds together a congeries of “national” groups and cultures in a single and wisely conceived federal republic?
January 2010, Volume 21, Issue 1
The new electoral authoritarian regimes of the post–Cold War era have formally adopted the full panoply of liberal-democratic institutions. Rather than rejecting or repressing these institutions, they manipulate them.
January 2010, Volume 21, Issue 1
In the twenty years since 1989, acute excitement over democratic transition and consolidation gave way to symptoms of “democracy fatigue” and elite exhaustion; successful economic transition away from state socialism fell victim to a crisis of the free-market model; and the EU’s transformative power has reached its geopolitical limits. The nations of Central and Eastern…
January 2010, Volume 21, Issue 1
This is a central problem—perhaps the central problem—for classical liberal theory and its crucial distinction between the state of nature and the civil state. Which is better for liberty: nature or the state?
January 2010, Volume 21, Issue 1
The central problems now blocking democracy in Georgia and other parts of the former USSR are: 1) the use of power in order to gain wealth; 2) the absence of the rule of law; and 3) the passivity of citizens.
January 2010, Volume 21, Issue 1
The author analyses the confluence of several elements that helped to set Russia’s course: the influence of history; the challenges of the transformation process itself; the importance of leadership; and the role of the West.
October 2009, Volume 20, Issue 4
The recent global progress of democracy has been accompanied by increasing economic inequality. What are the implications for the quality of democracy and for its ability to endure?
October 2009, Volume 20, Issue 4
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 2009, Volume 20, Issue 4
Democracy in India remains robust, but the scope and intensity of the corruption that pervades the political system are steadily eroding public trust.
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
Read the full essay here. The twenty years since 1989 have brought two major developments in worker activism. First, whereas workers were part of the mass uprising in the Tiananmen Movement, there is today hardly any sign of mobilization that transcends class or regional lines. Second, a long-term decline in worker power at the point…
July 2009, Volume 20, Issue 3
Read the full essay here. Some of the many China stories to attract attention recently have involved NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) protests by largely middle class crowds gathering to demand a greater say in urban development plans. This article argues that such protests a) are a significant addition to the already complex landscape of…
