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 »
Authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China see two main uses for international organizations: protecting their regimes and undermining Western values. That’s why they try to control and then corrupt them as much as possible…. Read more »
The divisive nature of Central Europe’s quasi-authoritarian governments precludes consensus-building, and has so weakened academic freedom and independent institutions that creative policy responses to economic challenges are being stifled. As… Read more »
The line of least resistance to restoring democracy in Venezuela? Pay off the military, argues Michael Albertus, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and co-author… Read more »
How are we to understand the resurgence of authoritarianism? What form does it now take? What responsibility do elites bear for its success? These are among the most important questions… Read more »
Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, is often accused of promoting a form of ‘illiberal democracy’, where governance is rooted in the popular support of a majority of the country’s citizens,… Read more »
Western democracies need a long-term strategy to ramp up economic pressure on Putin’s Russia, argues Peter Harrell, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, who served… 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 »
With an alarming rise in anti-Semitism and attacks on press and academic freedom, Hungarian democracy had another bad year in 2018, notes Brookings analyst William A. Galston. More than 400… Read more »