Category: Democratic Governance

How to take authoritarian anti-corruption seriously

     

Life for Isabel dos Santos appears to be an endless round of international conferences, meetings with celebrities and the run-of-the-mill experiences of the average billionaire philanthropist, although  critics claim that she… Read more »

Personalization of power puts democracies in danger

     

By abruptly revoking the special, constitutionally protected status of Jammu and Kashmir, India has become the latest major democracy to act against a minority community for short-term political popularity. Carefully maintained… Read more »

Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown: What went wrong?

     

Poland’s anti-constitutional breakdown triggers three major questions: what exactly has happened, why it has happened, and what are the prospects of a return to liberal democracy? These answers are formulated… Read more »

How nationalism’s ‘social solidarity’ bolsters democracy

     

By the end of World War Two, nationalism had been thoroughly discredited. Critics charged that national self-interest had prevented democratic governments from cooperating to end the Great Depression, and that… Read more »

The New Conspiracism’s assault on democracy

     

GONE ARE the days when conspiracy-mongers had to find shards of evidence and contort it to convince people. Now, just their malevolence is needed. If a concocted scenario can’t be… Read more »

Illegitimacy: Why new autocrats are weaker than they look

     

Whereas scholars used to hope that it was only a matter of time until some of the world’s most powerful autocracies would be forced to democratize, they now concede too… Read more »

8 ways to counter adversarial narratives: A new model for disinformation

     

China is deploying information operations through the placement of paid media articles as part of a broader campaign to burnish its image in the Taiwanese media, Reuters reports: Reuters has… Read more »

The biggest impediment to democratic governance is……?

     

Erosion in public confidence in the media could embolden African leaders with autocratic tendencies, says Jeff Conroy-Krutz, Associate Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University. It could also provoke violence… Read more »

Misplaced market dogma behind democracies’ legitimacy crisis?

     

Misplaced faith in markets lies behind liberal democracies’ legitimacy crisis, according to Sebastian Mallaby, the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and… Read more »

Renovating democracy in the face of paralysis and polarization

     

The populist uprisings in the US and throughout Europe are not the cause of the West’s crisis of governance but rather have exposed the ways in which liberal democracies have… Read more »