January 2008, Volume 19, Issue 1
Senegal's 2000 presidential election marked the end of forty years of one-party rule. But the reign of President Wade has been a severe disappointment, dashing hopes for democratic consolidation. *This is a corrected text of the print and original online version of this essay, portions of which drew heavily on Tarik Dahou and Vincent Foucher's…
October 2007, Volume 18, Issue 4
The populist backlash against corruption, the CEE transition-era elites, and the liberal consensus has led to a democratic crisis, but does not portend systemic change.
October 2007, Volume 18, Issue 4
The paradox of East-Central Europe is that the rise of populism is an outcome not of the failures but of the successes of postcommunist liberalism. *This is a corrected text of the print and original online version of this essay, which lacked proper citation for some of its sources. This is the only version that…
October 2007, Volume 18, Issue 4
Observers who focus too much on elections have failed to grasp the maturation of Iranian civil society, even as hard-liners have come to dominate the government.
July 2007, Volume 18, Issue 3
Rising levels of wealth and schooling make it highly likely that China will be a "Partly Free" country by 2015 and a "Free" one ten years after that.
July 2007, Volume 18, Issue 3
No one should underrate the will and skill that the ruling Chinese Communist Party will put into keeping its grip on power.
July 2007, Volume 18, Issue 3
China is gradually changing. In the coming years, the pursuit of individual dignity and human rights will increasingly come to the fore.
July 2007, Volume 18, Issue 3
Sub-Saharan Africa has been traditionally depicted as a place where formal institutional rules are largely irrelevant-yet in the past fifteen years these rules have come to matter, and this trend is unlikely to reverse.
April 2007, Volume 18, Issue 2
About two-thirds of the world's Muslims live under governments chosen through competitive elections. The remaining third lives mostly in the Arab world, a region that poses the hardest challenges for democratization.
April 2007, Volume 18, Issue 2
India's courts have been playing a growing role in the country's political life. Yet even as judicial interventions have become more sweeping, the principles undergirding their legitimacy have become less clear.
April 2007, Volume 18, Issue 2
The Putin regime is plunging Russia into a deepening crisis. It is time to end the fiction that today's Russia is a democracy.
April 2007, Volume 18, Issue 2
There is a future for democracy in Russia, but it may have to wait until the people begin to feel the problems created by the current system.
April 2007, Volume 18, Issue 2
The Kremlin's ultimate need for democratic legitimacy, both at home and abroad, may be the key vulnerability of the Putin regime.
January 2007, Volume 18, Issue 1
Many critics of democracy promotion assert that the rule of law and a well-functioning state should be in place before a society democratizes, but this strategy of "sequencing" is based on a set of mistaken premises.
January 2007, Volume 18, Issue 1
Those who argue that democracy requires preconditions often cite the example of gradual unfolding set by the established democracies. A glance at history, however, shows that even today's most placid democracies have "backstories" as turbulent as anything found in the developing world today.
January 2007, Volume 18, Issue 1
The recent "color revolutions" in the former Soviet Union should lead us to reassess the idea of revolution and also to consider the weaknesses of the concept of "democratic transition.
October 2006, Volume 17, Issue 4
Progressive politics in Latin America inevitably draws from the legacies of socialism and populism, but these categories are not very useful today. Can we find better tools for differentiating Latin America's "multiple lefts"?
October 2006, Volume 17, Issue 4
Courts empowered to overturn legislative acts have spread rapidly in recent years. If carefully designed and limited, constitutional courts may aid democratic consolidation, but if not, they can become objects of political strife, impediments to democracy, and bad influences on legal development.
July 2006, Volume 17, Issue 3
The desire for freedom and self-government is written in human hearts everywhere; in this there can be no "clash of civilizations." Claims that Islam is inherently hostile to democracy represent an unwarranted surrender to fundamentalist arguments; we should engage with a broad spectrum of Muslim groups, but without compromising our commitment to freedom and democracy.
July 2006, Volume 17, Issue 3
Successfully fighting corruption in developing and postcommunist countries requires far more than instituting best practices from advanced democracies. Corruption first must be properly diagnosed; in some cases it can be effectively treated only by attacking the distribution of power itself.
