October 2024, Volume 35, Issue 4
The People’s Republic of China has entered a new age, abandoning the ideological openness of the reform era and the socialist legacy of the revolutionary period. Under Xi Jinping, regime stability trumps all — and the PRC is weaker and less stable as a result.
October 2024, Volume 35, Issue 4
Alongside democratic backsliding is another, more pernicious phenomenon: dictatorial drift, where “soft” authoritarian regimes are opting to become highly repressive dictatorships. The West must develop new strategies to defend democracy across the globe.
July 2024, Volume 35, Issue 3
If democracies did a better job “delivering” for their citizens, so the thinking goes, people would not be so ready to embrace antidemocratic alternatives. Not so. This conventional wisdom about democratic backsliding is seldom true and often not accurate at all.
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.
July 2023, Volume 34, Issue 3
People obsess over where Russia’s democracy went wrong. The truth is it did not fail: Russia’s democratic transition never got off the starting blocks.
July 2023, Volume 34, Issue 3
To say that Indian democracy is backsliding misunderstands the country’s history and the challenges it faces: A certain authoritarianism is embedded in India’s constitution and political structures.
April 2023, Volume 34, Issue 2
Vladimir Putin’s reputation as a skillful leader was buoyed by years of economic good fortune. But when his regime faltered, his rule quickly descended into the fearful, repressive, and paranoid state we see today.
April 2023, Volume 34, Issue 2
The regime’s ill-fated policy to eliminate covid from China spurred the largest protests in a generation. It also made Xi Jinping’s challenge of maintaining authoritarian control over Chinese society even harder.
April 2023, Volume 34, Issue 2
Oppositions in monarchies don’t have to stage revolutions to win freedom: Monarchies are as compatible with democracy as they are with autocracy. The challenge for those who would remove a king is not to fall for the promises of reform that never come.
January 2023, Volume 34, Issue 1
When Vladimir Putin launched a massive invasion of Ukraine, he expected an easy victory. Instead, the world has witnessed an object lesson in how a corrupt Russian regime crippled its own military power.
October 2022, Volume 33, Issue 4
Beijing is bent on deploying mass surveillance to eliminate threats to its rule. It is terrifying—and the latest example of its determination to remold society.
July 2022, Volume 33, Issue 3
The more determined democracies are to avoid war, the greater the risk that autocracies will wage it.
July 2022, Volume 33, Issue 3
Why did Russia invade Ukraine? And why are Russian forces fighting so poorly? The internal logic of its personalist dictatorship is to blame.
July 2022, Volume 33, Issue 3
More than window dressing, public-opinion surveys and elections provide a crucial insight into the Russian people’s relationship with their regime.
July 2022, Volume 33, Issue 3
The first two months of the war alone turned the Russian clock back decades, undoing thirty years of post-Soviet economic gains and reducing the country to an international pariah state.
July 2022, Volume 33, Issue 3
The case of Hungary shows how autocrats can rig elections legally, using legislative majorities to change the law and neutralize the opposition at every turn, no matter what strategy they adopt.
July 2022, Volume 33, Issue 3
Xi Jinping undercut China’s political norms to cement his own power and brand of rule. But in so doing the “Chairman of Everything” has introduced new vulnerabilities for the regime.
July 2022, Volume 33, Issue 3
The Kremlin wields food as a weapon and a shield against Western interference. But Putin’s push for food autarky could backfire, driving up prices and turning Russians against the regime.
April 2022, Volume 33, Issue 2
Why are authoritarian regimes championing gender equality? Modern dictators want to appear progressive, liberal, and democratic, while distracting from their worst abuses.
April 2022, Volume 33, Issue 2
The same technologies that are making traffic flow faster, cities run better, and ad-targeting more precise are also helping authoritarian governments to crush protests, hunt dissidents, and control their populations.
April 2022, Volume 33, Issue 2
It was no secret Daniel Ortega was bent on dismantling his country’s democracy. But by the time his opponents joined forces, it was too late. A cautionary tale for all democrats.
January 2022, Volume 33, Issue 1
With the new National Security Law, the Chinese Communist Party has honed its more sophisticated tool for hollowing out the city, whose rights and freedoms Beijing had once promised to respect.
October 2021, Volume 32, Issue 4
Thirty years after the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia is firmly in the grip of an autocrat. Where did Russia’s path go wrong?
October 2021, Volume 32, Issue 4
Turkey’s ruling party has developed a new tool: When its local candidates lose, it dismisses them and appoints its own choice under a guise that maintains the veneer of democracy. It is an autocratic innovation that may soon spread.
July 2021, Volume 32, Issue 3
Nayib Bukele has developed a blend of political tactics that combines populist appeals and classic autocratic behavior with a polished social-media brand. It poses a dire threat to the country’s democratic institutions.
July 2021, Volume 32, Issue 3
It is not easy to build a stable hybrid regime. Elected autocrats may try, but comparing Bolivia, Brazil, and Venezuela shows how difficult it is to succeed.
July 2021, Volume 32, Issue 3
Is Russia formidable? The answer, two new books argue, lies in the highly centralized inner workings of Putin’s autocracy.
April 2021, Volume 32, Issue 2
China’s fast economic rise has not dented its dictatorship, but Xi Jinping’s neo-Stalinist strategy has unleashed new challenges and tensions for the Communist Party’s long-term prospects for survival.
April 2021, Volume 32, Issue 2
With brutal resolve, the ruling party sought not merely to win an election, but to annihilate the opposition. Now, with President John Magufuli gone, that strategic rationale will likely only grow stronger.
April 2021, Volume 32, Issue 2
While many blamed President John Magufuli for throwing the country off its democratizing track, the truth is that the party that has ruled Tanzania for six decades has always been authoritarian.
April 2021, Volume 32, Issue 2
Democracies rarely begin with a blank slate. Relics of authoritarian rule typically persist after democratic transitions, and these vestiges are not always harmful to people’s newfound freedom.
January 2021, Volume 32, Issue 1
A decade ago, Arab peoples stood up and sought to replace their rulers with a more democratic political project. But Arab autocrats have a project of their own. Can the people gain ground in the struggle for self-government, or will their rulers bear it away?
October 2020, Volume 31, Issue 4
Well-organized demonstrations are rocking the 26-year-old dictatorship of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Inside the movement and why it rose when it did.
October 2020, Volume 31, Issue 4
In a country where opposition forces were long marginalized and dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka faced little serious threat to his rule, Belarus’s 2020 antirevolutionary protest movement has changed the game.
October 2020, Volume 31, Issue 4
Liberty flourished in Hong Kong, but the Chinese Communist Party has crushed it. Beijing wants “capitalism without freedom” in the city, but can there be one without the other?
July 2020, Volume 31, Issue 3
For all the concern over authoritarianism’s advance, the competence of governance may be what determines the next chapter in the struggle between democracy and dictatorship.
July 2020, Volume 31, Issue 3
His regime has hung onto power despite setbacks that would have toppled most democratic governments. Besides pure repression, Maduro has developed new autocratic tools that have kept Venezuela’s authoritarian state afloat.
July 2020, Volume 31, Issue 3
The Islamic Republic is in a volatile, even prerevolutionary situation, hammered by foreign opposition and sanctions from the outside, and the disillusionment and discontent of its own people from within. But a catalyst needs to appear.
April 2020, Volume 31, Issue 2
The coronavirus outbreak has exposed the corrupt and rotten core of the Chinese Communist Party’s dictatorial rule over China. It is a moment of revelation. Can it also become one that leads to change?
April 2020, Volume 31, Issue 2
In 2019, the global democratic recession deepened, while protest movements proliferated around the world, fighting largely without leaders or support from major democracies.
January 2020, Volume 31, Issue 1
Lacking any ideas for shoring up Russian society, Putin has settled on picking a fight with Ukraine.
January 2020, Volume 31, Issue 1
To grasp why post-Mao China’s remarkable economic development has not aided democracy, we must look first at the policies of top Chinese leaders.
January 2020, Volume 31, Issue 1
Why do East and Southeast Asia’s autocracies enjoy more support from their publics than do the region’s democracies?
October 2019, Volume 30, Issue 4
Amid mass protests, the personalist autocracy of longtime Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir fell to an April 2019 coup. With the country now being governed by a council composed of both opposition leaders and powerful security-service coupmakers, prospects for democratization remain uncertain.
October 2019, Volume 30, Issue 4
A trio of national ballotings in 2019 tell a tale of waxing authoritarianism in Southeast Asia, but things could have turned out worse.
October 2019, Volume 30, Issue 4
In 2011–13, the undemocratic political outlook of both secular and Islamist actors helped to ensure the failure of democracy in Egypt. Today, the populace appears to have backed away from democratic demands, yet pockets of resilient activism offer a basis for hope.
July 2019, Volume 30, Issue 3
The military-backed regime of President al-Sisi seems secure, but study of the Egyptian internet reveals that the regime has failed to win over the young.
April 2019, Volume 30, Issue 2
In May 2018, the people of Malaysia transcended distinctions of class, religion, and ethnicity in order to vote for democracy and reform against a long-ruling party riddled with corruption.
April 2019, Volume 30, Issue 2
Xi reads Tiananmen as a cautionary tale, and he has sought to centralize power and reverse years of ideological atrophy. By controlling the past, he is trying to determine how the Chinese will view their present and future.
April 2019, Volume 30, Issue 2
The CCP’s strategies for delivering economic and social benefits without democracy are proving deeply flawed. A particular threat to China’s stability is posed by the country’s restless single males.
April 2019, Volume 30, Issue 2
The Chinese Communist Party wields highly effective means to quash dissent, but Chinese intellectuals and interest groups continue to push for change.
April 2019, Volume 30, Issue 2
Key democratic norms remained under threat in 2018, but there were also unexpected breakthroughs in Armenia, Malaysia, and Ethiopia.
January 2019, Volume 30, Issue 1
There is a growing sense today that democrats worldwide are in a race against time to prevent cyberspace from becoming an arena for surveillance, control, and manipulation.
January 2019, Volume 30, Issue 1
Not so long ago, the internet was being lauded as a force for greater freedom and democracy. With the rise of intrusive and addictive social media, however, a discomfiting reality has set in.
January 2019, Volume 30, Issue 1
Democracies must grapple not only with the proliferation of AI to authoritarian and illiberal regimes, but also with the temptation that AI poses for democratic governments themselves.
January 2019, Volume 30, Issue 1
Chinese authorities are wielding facial-recognition software, big-data analytics, and other digital technologies to control China’s citizens by monitoring and assessing their activities, both online and off.
January 2019, Volume 30, Issue 1
A crackdown on the opposition, followed by sham parliamentary elections in July 2018, has deepened and extended the decades-long personalist dictatorship of Hun Sen.
October 2018, Volume 29, Issue 4
Taking advantage of broad global respect for regionalism, authoritarian regimes are using their own regional organizations to bolster fellow autocracies. These groupings offer a mechanism for lending legitimacy, redistributing resources, and insulating members from democratic influences.
July 2018, Volume 29, Issue 3
Embracing a new model of capitalist authoritarianism, a number of nondemocratic regimes have made startling gains in state capacity, posing a new challenge to the appeal and advance of liberal democracy.
July 2018, Volume 29, Issue 3
When nonviolent mass protests occur under authoritarian regimes, the military plays a key role in determining the outcome: the hardening of the dictatorship, a new authoritarian regime, or a transition to democracy.
April 2018, Volume 29, Issue 2
The Editors’ introduction to “China in Xi’s ‘New Era.'”
April 2018, Volume 29, Issue 2
After Mao, Deng Xiaoping tried to institutionalize collective leadership, but this did not stop Xi Jinping from grasping all the levers of power.
April 2018, Volume 29, Issue 2
A review of Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed by Misagh Parsa.
January 2018, Volume 29, Issue 1
Central African autocrats are using their stolen money to outmaneuver their opponents and deflect international criticism.
January 2018, Volume 29, Issue 1
Russia’s ruling elite have used corruption not only to line their own pockets, but also as a tool of domestic political control and global power projection.
October 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4
Under Vladimir Putin, Russia’s ruling class again claims to represent a superior alternative to liberal democracy. How can we theorize this regime? Putinism is a form of autocracy that is conservative, populist, and personalistic. Its conservatism means that Putinism prioritizes maintaining the status quo and avoiding instability. Conservatism also overlaps with Putinism’s populism in crowd-pleasing broadsides against gay rights and feminism, but gives…
October 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4
Read the full essay here. “The pursuit of national glory,” which M. Steven Fish counts among the features of Vladimir Putin’s “populism,” is emerging as central to the regime’s legitimation. Unlike previous instances of patriotic mobilization (around the Second Chechen War and the 2008 Georgia war), the current one appears to have evolved into a…
October 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4
Read the full essay here. This essay argues that the sources of the current revival of Russian authoritarianism lie in the country’s economic and political history. Among the major factors behind President Putin’s rise and consolidation of power, it cites an ideological overemphasis on the state that fosters hostility toward human rights and liberties; deeply…
October 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4
Read the full essay here. The Kremlin’s ability to maintain power and popularity despite an aging leader, an ailing economy, a rallying opposition, and many other domestic and international challenges is puzzling given current theories of authoritarianism. These theories focus on some combination of material interests, institutional engineering, and the charisma and skill of the…
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…
October 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4
More Russians are rejecting the Kremlin’s corruption and authoritarianism. They—and not the regime—are Russia’s future.
October 2017, Volume 28, Issue 4
A review of China’s Eurasian Century? Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative by Nadège Rolland.
July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3
Since Tanzania’s 2015 elections, rising repression and opposition protest have displaced an older dynamic of comparatively restrained and unchallenged dominance by the ruling party.
July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3
Turkmenistan’s authoritarian president Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov attempted to use sham democratic elections in February 2017 to bolster his legitimacy both at home and abroad.
July 2017, Volume 28, Issue 3
A review of Dictators Without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia by Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw.
April 2017, Volume 28, Issue 2
In 2016, established democracies figured prominently on the list of countries experiencing declines in freedom, while emboldened autocracies stepped up their repression at home and interference abroad.
April 2017, Volume 28, Issue 2
Two of the Arab world’s more liberal regimes, the kingdoms of Jordan and Morocco, are sometimes said to be evolving toward democracy. Is this true, and what are the longer-term prospects for these two monarchies?
April 2017, Volume 28, Issue 2
With the ruling FSLN’s one-sided triumph in the November 2016 elections, Nicaraguan democracy underwent further erosion. The emerging authoritarian party-state, far from being a leftist revolutionary government, is becoming a neopatrimonial dictatorship in an older Latin American style.
January 2017, Volume 28, Issue 1
Political scientists have long assumed that “democratic consolidation” is a one-way street, but survey evidence of declining support for democracy from across the established democracies suggests that deconsolidation is a genuine danger.
January 2017, Volume 28, Issue 1
When parts of the Turkish military attempted a coup in July 2016, the competitive authoritarian AKP regime was able to bring both its competitive and its authoritarian features to bear, stopping the coup and launching a crackdown.
October 2016, Volume 27, Issue 4
Evidence from social science and history suggests that China is entering a “transition zone” that will threaten its capacity to maintain both authoritarian rule and high levels of economic growth.
October 2016, Volume 27, Issue 4
Once the poster child for successful postcommunist transitions to democracy, Poland is now governed by populist nationalists. What happened?
October 2016, Volume 27, Issue 4
The crisis of liberal democracy is Europe-wide, but it has assumed an especially intense form in Central and Eastern Europe.
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.
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
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.
April 2016, Volume 27, Issue 2
Ten of the world’s twelve largest countries are “electoral democracies.” Yet a look at politics beneath the national level reveals patterns of illiberalism that mark out a new frontier for democratic research and activism.
January 2016, Volume 27, Issue 1
China’s government looks to Singapore, the only country in the region to modernize without liberalizing, in hopes of finding the key to combining authoritarian rule with economic progress and “good governance.”
January 2016, Volume 27, Issue 1
Although the leading authoritarian regimes are today integrated in many ways into the global system, they have not become more like the democracies; instead, they have been devising policies and practices aimed at blocking democracy’s advance.
January 2016, Volume 27, Issue 1
While “autocracy promotion” presents a real danger, its influence so far has been limited. Because authoritarian regimes are concerned first with furthering their own interests, their interventions often have contradictory effects, sometimes even inadvertently fostering greater pluralism.
January 2016, Volume 27, Issue 1
The ruling EPRDF and its allies won every single seat in parliament in Ethiopia’s May 2015 elections, signaling a hardening of the regime’s authoritarian rule.
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.
October 2015, Volume 26, Issue 4
East European communists inherited the Bolshevik obsession with repressing any genuinely independent civil society groups.
October 2015, Volume 26, Issue 4
Once widely celebrated, civil society today is regarded as a threat by many governments, leading them to restrict its funding and activities.
October 2015, Volume 26, Issue 4
The Kremlin is now bringing to the rest of the world the kind of propaganda and conspiracy theories it has been churning out at home.
October 2015, Volume 26, Issue 4
China is aggressively working to reshape its image, touting the “Chinese Dream” and its desire for a peaceful rise to power on the international stage.
July 2015, Volume 26, Issue 3
A few years ago, Europe’s most important intergovernmental human-rights institution, the Council of Europe, crossed over to the dark side. Like Dorian Gray, the dandy in Oscar Wilde’s story of moral decay, it sold its soul. And as with Dorian Gray, who retained his good looks, the inner decay of the Council of Europe remains hidden from view.
July 2015, Volume 26, Issue 3
Favored by global conditions that lean their way, authoritarians have been busy over the last decade coming up with new and inventive ways to thwart the global advance of democracy and human rights.
July 2015, Volume 26, Issue 3
Rosy assumptions once held that the Internet would inevitably undermine unfree regimes. A look around the world today, however, indicates that something very different and far more disturbing is going on.
July 2015, Volume 26, Issue 3
How are trends in global democratization likely to be shaped by the distribution of such key structural factors as income, ethnic or religious diversity, and the quality of the state?
