3205 Results
July 2023, Volume 34, Issue 3
Behind today’s authoritarian wave are democratically elected leaders who use and abuse institutions to undermine the system that brought them to power. But with the right strategies, opposition forces can slow or stop these would-be autocrats.
October 2021, Volume 32, Issue 4
Indonesia’s president claims he is curbing democracy today to save it later. If he is wrong about his long-term wager, democratic institutions may not survive.
April 2010, Volume 21, Issue 2
Once touted as a regional success story, Mozambique has been backsliding toward one-party-dominant rule, and has now slipped off the Freedom House list of electoral democracies. How and why did this happen?
January 2004, Volume 15, Issue 1
It has been claimed in the pages of this journal that a homogeneous society is an advantage when it comes to democratization. How might this suggestion be empirically tested, and with what (perhaps preliminary) results?
April 2021, Volume 32, Issue 2
The military could not bear Aung San Suu Kyi’s enduring popularity and her party’s continued success at the polls. But the generals may have miscalculated how much the people detest them.
July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3
Read the full essay here. This article reviews the state of India’s two major national parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC or Congress party), seventy years after independence in 1947 and three years after the BJP won a majority in the 2014 national election. The article looks at whether…
July 2004, Volume 15, Issue 3
As 2004 began, Afghanistan approved a new constitution that represents a key step forward in its political reconstruction. But it is not yet clear whether this new constitution will enable the country to surmount the many challenges that lie ahead.
October 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4
After a presidential corruption scandal sparked peaceful mass protests leading to the impeachment and removal of the incumbent, South Koreans went to the polls to choose her successor. Was this drama a window on the troubles of South Korean democracy, or a testament to its strength and resilience?
Less than a year after a bitter loss, the opposition dealt Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling party their largest electoral defeat in decades. The question is whether they can now build on their success.
April 2003, Volume 14, Issue 2
The claim that ethnic minorities have a moral and legal right to secede from states is a dangerous fiction with perilous implications for divided societies.
January 2018, Volume 29, Issue 1
In July 2017, Timor-Leste held its third parliamentary elections since independence. The party-centered campaign featured both enduring legacies of the revolutionary struggle and a distinct form of political patronage.
April 2012, Volume 23, Issue 2
Vietnam and its smaller neighbors Laos and Cambodia remain bastions of illiberalism and one-party rule despite rapid economic growth and falling poverty. What will it take to reform their elitist political cultures and curtail the use of public office for private ends?
January 2010, Volume 21, Issue 1
In some countries, democratic competition is undermined less by electoral fraud or repression than by a skewed playing field—unequal access to state institutions, resources, and the media.
October 2004, Volume 15, Issue 4
Since most of the world’s sovereign states are now democracies, there is a growing scholarly focus on “good” or “better” democracy, and on how improvements can not only be measured, but encouraged.
October 2003, Volume 14, Issue 4
Is the EU an international organization, an emerging federal state, something in between, or something altogether different? So far it has managed to survive and prosper depite all the disagreements about its true nature, but for how long can it continue to do so?
July 2005, Volume 16, Issue 3
For the Shi'ite majority and its senior religious leader, the January elections played out against the background of a longing for justice that has deep spiritual sources as well as more recent sociopolitical roots.
April 2000, Volume 11, Issue 2
With Austria’s and Switzerland’s leading political parties having “rigged the political marketplace” by forming Grand Coalitions, voters have turned to the radical right as the only available alternative.
October 2018, Volume 29, Issue 4
Public-opinion data from Pew Research Center show that global support for representative democracy is widespread, but often thin. Amid rising economic anxiety, cultural unease, and political frustration, citizens are increasingly open to alternative systems of government.
July 2014, Volume 25, Issue 3
The year 2013 featured unprecedented strides for gay rights in some parts of the world, particularly in Western Europe and the Americas, but also startling setbacks elsewhere, as in Russia and some countries in Africa.
January 2018, Volume 29, Issue 1
The worldwide popularity of runoff rules for presidential elections has grown strikingly in recent decades. In Latin America, contrary to scholarly expectations, this shift has had important benefits for democracy.
