Category: Democratic Governance

Democratic resilience: explaining stability and fragility

     

Democracies are better equipped to cope with crises like the current Covid-19 pandemic and at less risk of institutional breakdown than many commentators believe, new research suggests. Comparisons of the… Read more »

Who is undermining democracy in CEE & Eurasia? Stalinization of Russia’s historical propaganda.

     

Hungary was the first democratic victim of the coronavirus. It may not be the last, Boise State’s Steven Feldstein writes for Foreign Policy. China’s foreign policy has increasingly weakened democratic… Read more »

Post-Covid era: 1945 or 1918?

     

An astonishing 71% of Europeans are now in favor of introducing a universal basic income, according to an opinion poll designed by my research team at Oxford University. In Britain, the… Read more »

‘Dropping the Democratic Facade’:  Nations in Transit 2020

     

In its latest report, Nations in Transit 2020: Dropping the Democratic Facade, Freedom House warns of a “stunning democratic breakdown” across Central Europe, the Balkans, and Eurasia as many leaders… Read more »

Post-Covid world ‘already here’? Illiberal plague tests democratic resilience

     

In human history, national emergencies, whether caused by war, invasion, financial crisis, or an epidemic, have often been the occasions for major political reform. It takes a huge external shock… Read more »

Democracy’s place in a new post-Covid world order

     

International orders seldom change in noticeable ways, according to Edward Fishman, a former member of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an… Read more »

Democracy ‘waking from Covid-19 hibernation’ or ‘dangers much greater than opportunities’?

     

“Overall, the dangers are much greater than the opportunities” in terms of the pandemic’s impact on liberty and democracy, says Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama. “I do think there are opportunities… Read more »

Democracies vulnerable to crisis: Covid exacerbates weaknesses, says BTI

     

The COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate the very weaknesses that have marked the democratic erosion of the last decade in most of the 137 developing and transformation countries examined in the… Read more »

Quality of democracy reaches new low – but ‘glimmers of hope’

     

The quality of democracy, market economy and governance reached its lowest level since 2004 when the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index (BTI) was first published, it reported today. Limits on freedom… Read more »