Category: Democratic institutions

Does democracy matter? Call for renewed conviction

     

Today’s publication of a new book on democracy support occurs as we approach the 35th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s Westminster Address – the founding text for the democracy assistance effort,… Read more »

Poll shows radical Islamization challenging Indonesia’s democracy

     

The Christian governor of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, lost a bitterly contested race on Wednesday that was widely seen as a test of religious and ethnic tolerance in the world’s… Read more »

Free expression advocates recognized

     

Efforts to promote free expression around the world were recognized at last night’s 2017 Freedom of Expression Awards. Index on Censorship presented awards in four categories: arts, campaigning, digital activism… Read more »

What the beginning of the end of democracy looks like

     

The United States has been the modern world’s most influential country and has promoted democracy passively by serving as a model and actively through its diplomatic efforts, aid, and even military and covert action… Read more »

Democratic backsliding: the perils of polarization

     

If democratic backsliding were to occur in the United States, it would not take the form of a coup d’état; there would be no declaration of martial law or imposition of single-party rule,… Read more »

To defend liberal order, democracy’s champions must act with more conviction

     

It has been another bad week for liberal democracy, the Brookings Institution’s William A. Galston (left) writes for the Wall Street Journal: In France a late surge by Jean-Luc Mélenchon… Read more »

Can populism help invigorate liberal democracy?

     

Although the revolutions of 1989 seemed to promise a new “post-ideological” era of liberal-democratic ascendancy, we have long been caught in a powerful authoritarian undertow that often goes by the… Read more »

Putin’s ‘formidable influence machine’ at work in French poll

     

Russia, or at least its state-controlled news media, has been interfering in the French presidential election, the New York Times reports: Cécile Vaissié, a professor of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet… Read more »

The End of the Postnational Illusion?

     

With the advance of modernization, nationalism was supposed to fade away. Yet even in advanced democracies, nationalism’s influence seems larger than ever. What did we get wrong? analyst Ghia Nodia… Read more »