China isn’t the only authoritarian regime to take advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to expand its sharp power in an effort to undermine democratic norms and institutions. Russia’s decade-long health… Read more »
Chinese officials claim that their “success” in containing the coronavirus outbreak and Western countries’ ongoing “failure” to do so attests to the superiority of the so-called China model of one-party… Read more »
Halfhearted reform in response to the COVID-19 crisis will simply renew the invitation to populists to take up arms against liberal democracy, a leading analyst suggests. A cautionary tale lies… Read more »
Open societies “are more likely to find answers (to the #covid19 crisis) more quickly” than authoritarian ones because they encourage “ creativity and cooperation, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) board… Read more »
It is almost 30 years since the demise of Encounter, the London-based monthly review of culture and politics, but no other magazine has since come close to matching its influence, Gerald Frost writes for… Read more »
Hungary’s parliament endorsed a bill on Monday giving nationalist premier Viktor Orban the sweeping new powers he says he needs to fight the new coronavirus pandemic. Critics at home and… Read more »
The picture for democracy and civil society was mixed across the European Neighbourhood in 2019, according to Jerzy Pomianowski, Executive Director of the European Endowment for Democracy (EED). Some of… Read more »
Pandemics are democratizing experiences and can also catalyze social change. The Atlantic’s Ed Yong writes: People, businesses, and institutions have been remarkably quick to adopt or call for practices that… Read more »
Seeing democratization after the Cold War as a troubled process of political imitation helps us understand three critical ways in which an unjustifiable over-idealization of capitalism and democracy helped bring… Read more »
Illiberals are neither fully committed to civil liberties – such as freedom of expression, assembly and association – and the rule of law, nor totally devoted to the institutions that… Read more »