October 2016, Volume 27, Issue 4
Peru’s economic boom is over and newly elected president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski faces a Congress dominated by opposition parties, putting him in a more precarious position than his predecessors.
October 2016, Volume 27, Issue 4
What political consequences can we expect when aging dictators die while in power? A fifth of the world’s autocracies are facing such a possibility, but the evidence shows that this may not augur well for democracy.
October 2016, Volume 27, Issue 4
A review of The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
Is democratic deconsolidation underway in the United States and Europe? In recent years, support for democracy, especially among millennials, has been dwindling in a number of established democracies.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
The evidence presented by Foa and Mounk is troubling, but it does not mean that democracy is now in long-term decline.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
A quarter-century after the Soviet breakup, democracy has hardly fared well across the vast Eurasian landmass. Why has this seemingly promising gain for freedom produced such disappointing results?
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
The interplay between elections, popular protests, and international pressures has a profound effect on the behavior of African autocrats and their ability to stay in power even after their time is up.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
As more and more African presidents attempt to remove or circumvent constitutional term limits, African populations increasingly are mobilizing en masse, at great risk, to defend their constitutions.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
There is strong empirical evidence to support the correlation between effective term limits and the quality of democracy.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
A number of countries in East-Central Europe are facing a grave crisis of constitutional democracy. As their governments seek to undermine the institutional limits on their power, constitutional courts have become a central target.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
Far from being a reformer, as some had hoped, President Xi Jinping has launched the most sweeping ideological campaign seen in China since Mao. Xi is mixing nationalism, Leninism, and Maoism in ways that he hopes will cement continued one-party Communist rule.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
Over the last decade or so, Bolivia has made great progress at wider political and social inclusion, but at some cost to civil liberties and horizontal accountability.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
One of the first Latin American countries to make a democratic transition as the 1970s ended, Ecuador struggled in its search for political stability. Now it appears to have more stability, but that stability appears more authoritarian than democratic.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
Latin America’s largest country has managed vastly to enlarge the share of its citizens who can take part in politics and need no longer live in poverty, and has robust horizontal accountability to boot. Vertical accountability, however, has suffered.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
Delegative presidencies have not been a problem in post-Pinochet Chile, but the rise of mass protest movements suggests that the country’s new democracy has gone too far in the direction of demobilizing society.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
President Alvaro Uribe’s time in office was marked by disturbing trends that included a spike in extrajudicial killings and an attempt to overthrow term limits, but the country’s institutions of horizontal accountability proved remarkably resilient.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
After spending the 1990s coping with an overweening president, Peru settled into a more sedate style of politics, but it is one in which parties barely exist, voters feel unhappy with their elected chief executives despite strong economic growth, and technocracy rather than democracy is the key mode of decision making.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
Latin America has not been witnessing a general trend toward authoritarianism, but accountability—whether horizontal, vertical, or both—has suffered in some countries, and at times has done so as a side-effect or unexpected cost of what must be considered signal democratic advances toward noble goals such as greater social and political inclusion.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
Long a standout example of consensus-based politics, prosperous Switzerland has now become a mixed democracy with a good deal of polarization and uncertain prospects.
July 2016, Volume 27, Issue 3
A review of Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard
