After 1994 efforts were made to embed democracy. The focus was on policy and institution-building. What was missing was ensuring all South Africans were on board.
President Moïse is dead. Two politicians say they’re in charge. Parliament is suspended. A Haitian studies scholar explains Haiti’s power vacuum and says elections alone won’t restore democracy there.
Democracies degenerate because of cunning leaders. Democracies also crumble because of the people themselves – and the US founders believed education would be crucial to maintaining democracy.
The huge cuts to Australian journalism over the past decade have decimated mentoring in the industry. This is not easy to see with the naked eye but it has a huge impact on what gets produced.
In Ethiopia’s new and unsettled political space, there are issues related to the current electoral rules, the performance and strength of the opposition parties, and to campaigning.
Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t ousted just for typical political reasons, such as other politicians’ ambitions or grievances. He was thrown out because he was seen as a threat to democracy.
President Muhammadu Buhari’s Twitter shutdown will be hard to enforce and could have dire consequences for Nigeria’s fragile democratic institutions and economy.
El Salvador ‘is inching back toward its authoritarian past’ after President Nayib Bukele fired five supreme court justices and the attorney general – essentially the only checks on his power.
The Senate has a lot of rules, and its parliamentarian interprets what those rules allow – and what they don’t. That can mean a bill will face either huge obstacles, or very few obstacles to passage.
John M. Murphy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rep. Liz Cheney may have been exiled from her party’s leadership, but she’s after a bigger thing: the restoration of politically conservative values in the GOP and its voters.