Category: Democratic institutions

Post-Soviet Eurasia: What’s Gone Wrong?

     

After a quarter-century, the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union looks like a de-democratizing event. Leading up to that fateful year, Mikhail Gorbachev had been one of the world’s great… Read more »

A case for electoral reform

     

  There is an electoral system that improves upon the Anglo-American first-past-the-post (FPP) or plurality method of election, at least in surfacing second and third (and lower-order) preferences, argues Donald… Read more »

Global democratic recession – for now

     

The politicians who captured the spirit of the early 1990s were inspirational democrats such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia — and liberal reformers such as Mikhail… Read more »

Failed coup promotes Erdogan’s ‘narrative of an Islamist defense of democracy’

     

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has always had ambitions of surpassing Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, as the country’s most consequential figure. Now, a failed coup may allow… Read more »

Beware the ‘Isolationist Temptation’

     

It has been only a quarter-century since the end of the Cold War, but the U.S. is already in the midst of its second great foreign-policy debate of the post-Soviet… Read more »