Category: Democratic institutions

Yet another regime using Covid pandemic to tighten its grip

     

Egypt’s military-backed government is using the coronavirus pandemic to tighten its grip on the country, human rights activists say. In recent weeks, authorities have ordered up punishments, including prison terms,… Read more »

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 »

How to resist the authoritarian surge

     

In 2019, Brookings Institution senior fellow Robert Kagan authored a long-form essay in the Washington Post in which he argued that the era of the strongman is back. Authoritarianism is once again… 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 »

Great Power Competition: Will pandemic give democracies advantage?

     

Democracy was in retreat, and autocrats were on the march, before the coronavirus appeared, notes analyst Ruchir Sharma. To contain it, leaders of all political styles have assumed previously unthinkable… Read more »

Geopolitics after Covid-19: A pandemic turning point?

     

COVID-19 is deepening the “democratic recession,” Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Freeman Spogli Institute, told a Hoover virtual policy briefing, the Stanford Daily’s Anna Milstein… Read more »

How to counter China’s strategy for ‘hollowing out’ Hong Kong

     

Beijing’s top political office in Hong Kong has called protesters a “political virus” and said the semi-autonomous city will never be calm until “poisonous” and “violent” black-clad demonstrators are eliminated, 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 »

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 »