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Democracy

January 18, 2023

🌊 Interest groups in Central and Eastern Europe have become an endangered species

Rafael Labanino Illiberal governments in Central and Eastern Europe are following a conscious strategy of hollowing out interest representation and stifling or co-opting civil society organisations. Rafael Labanino explains how the authoritarian playbook works – and how interest groups adapt or fight back Read more
January 16, 2023

Saving democracy: three (r)evolutionary remedies

Łukasz Wordliczek Democratic malaise, deconsolidation, backsliding, illiberalism, decline, erosion, rupture, decay, or simply: crisis. This 'conceptual bazaar' shows that democracy does not necessarily keep up with today’s challenges. Łukasz Wordliczek suggests three possible remedies Read more
January 10, 2023

🦋 Recentring the demos in the measurement of democracy

Seema Shah Seema Shah argues for putting the lived experiences of historically marginalised communities at the centre of democracy measurement. By doing so, she says, we can meaningfully reshape our understanding of democracy as a practice Read more
January 6, 2023

♟️ Authoritarian practices with adjectives in China

Abbey Heffer Authoritarian regimes are not centralised monoliths. In China, authoritarian responses to protest can differ dramatically across localities. Abbey Heffer argues that research on regime-level authoritarianism often overlooks decentralisation. Studying aspects of authoritarianism, such as protest repression and concessions, requires a practice-based approach that reconciles national and localised authoritarianism Read more
January 5, 2023

Is the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index little more than a joke indicator?

Nicolás Palomo Hernández The public and the media increasingly use Democratic Global Performance Indicators (GPIs). But how good are these indicators at measuring democratic health? Nicolás Palomo Hernández looks at the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index as an example. He argues that the index has methodological and ideological biases, yet significant impact nonetheless Read more
December 27, 2022

🦋 Democracy’s total texture and the search for its narrative truth

Simone Belko Simone Belko invites us to imagine research into democracy as an 'artful science'. Without mediation by experts or representatives, but only through open civic intelligence, we can together determine the total texture of democracy from the bottom up. This self-referential poetics has the potential to define democracy in still untold ways Read more
December 23, 2022

♟️ Let’s not overlook classic authoritarians! Understanding Thailand's political regime

Thareeat Laohabut The fashion for seeing all authoritarian regimes through the lens of ‘democratic backsliding’ or ‘autocratisation’ has overshadowed our understanding of the strategies of classic authoritarians. Thareerat Laohabut uses the case of Thailand to illustrate this problem, showing how civil-millitary relations supporting the regime have been inadequately understood Read more
December 19, 2022

🦋 We must rethink our understanding of democratic trends

Alex Prior The ‘total texture’ of democracy exists, and we can observe it, argues Alex Prior. This is possible through a conceptualisation of this ‘texture’ as fractal: being complex and self-referential at every scale. Through this perspective, we can problematise long-standing – but nevertheless incomplete – analogies of democracy and democratisation Read more

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