Autocratic and illiberal forces arise when there is a vacuum of power and authority, say two leading analysts. The refugee and immigration crisis emanating from Central America, for example, is… Read more »
Nearly fifty years after the Soviet empire’s collapse, the few remaining states adhering to the Stalinist model hold little allure, notes Gabriel Schoenfeld, the author of, among other books, Necessary… Read more »
Conventional wisdom has long held that democratic consolidation is a one-way street and that democratic states, once reaching a certain level of GDP per capita, are immune to democratic breakdown…. Read more »
The world offers more lessons about how democracies grow weak and brittle than how they can be revived, but it should at least be possible to figure out a systematic… Read more »
In our work on hybrid or competitive authoritarian regimes, we show how democracy can be fundamentally compromised even without obvious civil liberties violations or electoral fraud, say analysts Lucan Ahmad Way and… Read more »
An Illiberal International is now advancing and one of the first to sound the alarm was Yascha Mounk, the author of The People vs Democracy (2018) and a lecturer on government at… Read more »
Poland represents the gravest illiberal challenge to European democracy, says the Economist: Since taking office in 2015 the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party has stacked the courts, skewed… Read more »
Plenty of critics have adopted “illiberal democracy” as a description not just of Hungary, but of redesigned political systems in countries as different as Poland and Turkey. Yet “illiberal democracy”… Read more »
Many scholars and pundits have recently declared that democracy is in crisis. According to analyses that draw on data from the Varieties of Democracy Project, the average level of democracy across the world has not necessary declined,… Read more »
Polish President Andrzej Duda, who fell out with the ruling party last month over judicial reform, risked escalating tension by blocking army appointments proposed by the NATO member’s government, Bloomberg… Read more »