January 2016, Volume 27, Issue 1
Ethiopia: Silencing Dissent
Ethiopia’s ruling party has long been tightening its grip, using antiterrorism laws and harsh restrictions on media and civil society to silence voices critical of the regime.
3203 Results
January 2016, Volume 27, Issue 1
Ethiopia’s ruling party has long been tightening its grip, using antiterrorism laws and harsh restrictions on media and civil society to silence voices critical of the regime.
January 2009, Volume 20, Issue 1
Change may be caused more by the frailty of the regime than the strength of the opposition, but in such cases the outcome is often less democratic.
January 2025, Volume 36, Issue 1
The country’s outgoing president relentlessly attacked Mexico’s democratic institutions, taking it to the brink of authoritarianism. His successor is poised to push its democracy over the edge.
April 2007, Volume 18, Issue 2
A tribute in remembrance of the life of Seymour Martin Lipset (1922–2006).
April 2017, Volume 28, Issue 2
A review of What Is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller.
January 2022, Volume 33, Issue 1
President Kais Saied’s power grab has crushed Tunisian democracy, returning the country to the old playbook of Arab dictators past and present.
January 2013, Volume 24, Issue 1
Although Olivier Roy and others argue that current circumstances will push ascendant Islamist parties in a democratic direction, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood remains committed to the revolutionary goals that have animated it since its beginnings.
October 2023, Volume 34, Issue 4
Almost no one expected a little-known candidate to defeat the ruling antidemocratic regime at the ballot box. But the Guatemalan opposition, backed by the international community, exploited the criminal oligarchy’s fissures to halt the country’s authoritarian slide.
October 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4
Read the full essay here. The Russian system of personalized power is growing ever more dependent on the same strategies that proved useless in sustaining the USSR. While the system still has the potential to limp along, its survival tactics render the it progressively more dysfunctional. Among the circumstances weighing against the system’s survival are…
April 2017, Volume 28, Issue 2
Since the 1970s, the U.S. presidential-nomination system has become more democratic, making primary elections crucial, reducing the influence of political parties, and making it easier for outsiders to win.
July 2010, Volume 21, Issue 3
A tribute to Václav Havel, Czech playwright and former dissident, who became not only president but the symbol of the “velvet revolutions.”
April 2025, Volume 36, Issue 2
Delivery matters, but so do leaders’ actions. Why have so many, in both strong and weak economies, been pushing against democratic constraints on their power, and why have those constraints failed to contain them?
April 2018, Volume 29, Issue 2
The Chinese Communist Party has been using New Zealand as a testing ground for its strategy of building influence through “united front work.”
July 2003, Volume 14, Issue 3
Like liberals in the British East India Company more than a century ago, European and international officials have become stewards of a people's fate. The intentions are good, but will self-government result?
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
The image of Putin’s Russia as an authoritarian oil state attracts many Western analysts because it seems to carry a promise that falling oil prices will bring regime change. Thus, many were convinced that a major economic crisis would force the Kremlin either to open up the system and allow more pluralism and competition, or…
July 2023, Volume 34, Issue 3
Some autocracies are dominated by their militaries, while others hold the generals in check. The key is this: If an autocratic regime did not create its military, it will struggle to control it.
April 2020, Volume 31, Issue 2
A grim narrative of the years since 1989 has buoyed Eastern and Central Europe’s populist parties in their rise to power. To win back voters, liberals must tell a more compelling story of the postcommunist era—and offer a stronger vision of the years to come.
October 2018, Volume 29, Issue 4
Less than two years after an extremely close presidential election, the supporters of Keiko Fujimori took advantage of a corruption scandal to cut short the presidency of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.
April 2010, Volume 21, Issue 2
A Central American military once again returned to the political center stage in 2009, but this had less to do with power-hungry generals than with warring civilian elites whose respect for liberal-democratic principles proved to be questionable at best.
January 2010, Volume 21, Issue 1
Another coauthor of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule questions whether his former collaborator is underrating the current dangers to democracy.