Project MUSE®: Journal of Democracy - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Democracy.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1990) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of DemocracyTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Democracy1086-32141045-5736Latest articles in Journal of Democracy. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Limits of Authoritarian AI
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986016
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Artificial intelligence is often called a silver bullet that helps authoritarian rulers by making repression cheaper, faster, and more precise. This is not necessarily wrong, at least in the short run. Digital surveillance can chill speech, identify opponents, and help regimes to scale up coercion. But the strongest claim about AI’s political power—the promise of predictive, preemptive, large-scale control—runs into a binding constraint.Any system that deals in probabilities must decide how easy or hard it should be for a person, a behavior, or a message to be labeled “risky.” Lower the threshold and the regime reduces false negatives and catches more potential challengers, but it also raises false positives
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallThe Limits of Authoritarian AI2026-04-01text/htmlen-USThe Limits of Authoritarian AI2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®511262026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01The Rise of Authoritarian Middle Powers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986017
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The current worldwide wave of autocratization poses one of the most serious tests to the global architecture long thought to structure international politics: the liberal rules-based international order that, since 1945, helped coordinate cooperation on everything from trade to climate to security. Concerns about the erosion—and potential collapse—of this framework have intensified in recent years in response to the increasingly unilateral and coercive conduct of powerful states. Actions such as Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, U.S. president Donald Trump’s public threats to assert control over Greenland, alongside China’s growing use of economic coercion and territorial pressure in regions such as the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallThe Rise of Authoritarian Middle Powers2026-04-01text/htmlen-USThe Rise of Authoritarian Middle Powers2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®676092026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01Democracy’s Troubles Should Be No Surprise
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986018
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Hard to believe today, but barely a generation ago democratic optimism reigned. The end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries marked a period of dramatic democratic expansion. In 1987, roughly 28 percent of the world’s countries were democratic; by 2005, more than 60 percent were. Democracy appeared to be advancing not just empirically, but intellectually and morally as well.Political leaders and intellectuals across the ideological spectrum converged on the view that democracy was both normatively superior and historically inevitable.1 In a 2003 address before the U.S. Congress, the then U.K. prime minister Tony Blair insisted that democracy and freedom were “not Western values . . . but
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallDemocracy’s Troubles Should Be No Surprise2026-04-01text/htmlen-USDemocracy’s Troubles Should Be No Surprise2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®690782026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01Why Elected Leaders Subvert Democracy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986019
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No longer is the military coup the chief source of democratic instability in the world. In the twenty-first century, it is democratic erosion driven by elected leaders that presents the principal challenge to democracy. In the past quarter-century, presidents and prime ministers in two-dozen countries have risen to office in free and fair elections and then set about undermining their country’s public institutions. Such leaders threaten and censor the press, install loyalist judges, fire professional civil servants, weaponize independent agencies into tools of the executive, harass nonprofit organizations, and impose their authority on universities.Why is this happening? Researchers have offered incisive
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallWhy Elected Leaders Subvert Democracy2026-04-01text/htmlen-USWhy Elected Leaders Subvert Democracy2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®672262026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01How Courts Undermine Democracy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986020
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Because democratic backsliding increasingly occurs through legal means,1 courts are central actors. Elected political leaders have clashed with the judiciary in numerous cases of democratic erosion—from Brazil, Israel, and Mexico to Hungary, India, Poland, Turkey, and the United States. Conventional wisdom holds that when courts are independent of the elected government, they act as “bulwarks” against democratic backsliding.2 Alexander Hamilton, a key architect of the U.S. Constitution, wrote that the judiciary is “an excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions” of elected politicians.3 Building on this long intellectual tradition, scholars lionize independent judiciaries as “defenders of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallHow Courts Undermine Democracy2026-04-01text/htmlen-USHow Courts Undermine Democracy2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®487172026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01When Populism Can Be Good
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986021
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Even in places where democracy was once thought impregnable, it appears to be in retreat.1 In some of the world’s oldest and wealthiest democracies, populist appeals have empowered political leaders who would undermine free and fair elections. Denunciations of corrupt elites and appeals to a disregarded “true” people have proven effective rallying cries against such institutional pillars of democratic competition as press freedom, the rule of law, and judicial constraints on executive power.Is populism—the mobilization of mass sentiment against an ostensibly corrupt elite—necessarily bad for democracy? What if populist politics and democratic backsliding need not always go together? What is often called populism
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallWhen Populism Can Be Good2026-04-01text/htmlen-USWhen Populism Can Be Good2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®525302026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01How To Secure Venezuelan Democracy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986022
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After U.S. forces removed dictator Nicolás Maduro from the Venezuelan presidency on 3 January 2026 and jailed him in New York City on narcoterrorism charges, U.S. president Donald Trump dismayed many by brushing aside Venezuela’s democratically legitimate leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado. Trump told the press that he thought Machado—who had led the Venezuelan opposition to a landslide victory in the July 2024 presidential election—lacked the “support” and “respect within the country” that would be needed to lead the transition.1 Secretary of State Marco Rubio was already in contact with Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s appointed vice-president, who was promising cooperation with U.S. objectives. The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallHow To Secure Venezuelan Democracy2026-04-01text/htmlen-USHow To Secure Venezuelan Democracy2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®546252026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01Pluralism, Polarization, and Political Voyeurism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986023
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On 27 December 2016, Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known as “Ahok”) delivered a speech to a gathering of constituents in North Jakarta, Indonesia, imploring them not to be deceived by Islamic religious leaders who were using Koranic verse to call for his ouster. With his 2017 reelection campaign underway, Ahok had been dogged by his Christian faith—a fact that made him a religious minority in Indonesia, where nearly 90 percent of the population adheres to Islam. Doctored videos of his speech, made to appear heretical, later circulated online: Ahok was shown criticizing the text of the Koran itself, rather than the religious leaders interpreting it.1 He was accused of blasphemy. Over the next several months
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallPluralism, Polarization, and Political Voyeurism2026-04-01text/htmlen-USPluralism, Polarization, and Political Voyeurism2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®631512026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01How Global Illiberalism Damages Democracy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986024
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In May 2023, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who was president of Mexico at the time, denounced the U.S. Agency for International Development for “promoting a form of coup.”1 When newly reelected U.S. president Donald Trump dramatically slashed USAID’s budget less than two years later, AMLO’s successor and political heir President Claudia Sheinbaum welcomed the move, saying “just shut it down.”2 The party that AMLO led and Sheinbaum now leads, the populist, left-of-center National Regeneration Movement (known as Morena), dominates Mexican politics.3That popular and aggrandized executives such as AMLO and Sheinbaum celebrate the loss of USAID funding by domestic anticorruption and human-rights watchdogs
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallHow Global Illiberalism Damages Democracy2026-04-01text/htmlen-USHow Global Illiberalism Damages Democracy2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®667812026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01Georgia: Between Democracy and Autocracy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986025
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Political developments in Georgia this decade—and especially since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022—have come as a shock to many. How did a country where democracy was admittedly raw and struggling but whose people consistently showed devotion to the ideas of freedom and joining the West sink so quickly toward autocracy? And more importantly, can the decline be reversed?The new autocratic regime that seeks to dominate this nation of 3.7 million at the eastern end of the Black Sea has not yet fully consolidated, and a significant segment of Georgian society continues to resist it. The story is not over, and things may still go in a different direction.For now, however, autocratization is the trend that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallGeorgia: Between Democracy and Autocracy2026-04-01text/htmlen-USGeorgia: Between Democracy and Autocracy2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®599112026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01Honduras’s Missed Opportunity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986026
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In November 2021, Honduras’s political opposition, led by Xiomara Castro and the left-wing Freedom and Refoundation (Libre) party, won an election that unseated the ruling National Party (PN). This was a major blow against the country’s competitive authoritarian regime. Libre overcame severe institutional disadvantages by staying committed to peaceful elections as the path to power, by strengthening its party networks, and by forging a broad coalition.1 Castro earned a majority (51.1 percent) of the valid votes, while Libre emerged as the biggest single party in the unicameral, 128-member National Congress, controlling fifty seats to the PN’s forty-four.2 Observers hailed this win as a new dawn with the potential
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallHonduras’s Missed Opportunity2026-04-01text/htmlen-USHonduras’s Missed Opportunity2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®592392026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01Pakistan’s New Military Tutelage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986027
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Pakistan has long oscillated between nominally democratic governments and periods of direct military rule. Since 2018, the country has “inhabited the wide and foggy zone [of hybridity] between liberal democracy and closed authoritarianism.”1 While formally accountable to voters, elected leaders have remained in fact answerable to the military. Generals have retained veto power over key domains such as national defense, internal security, foreign policy, and even the terms of political competition.2Prime Minister Imran Khan’s ouster by an April 2022 parliamentary no-confidence vote touched off a crisis that seemed at first to challenge hybrid rule. What ensued, however, was a series of political and institutional
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallPakistan’s New Military Tutelage2026-04-01text/htmlen-USPakistan’s New Military Tutelage2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®613892026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01Why We Elect Former Dictators and Their Children
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986028
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We live in an age of democratic breakdown at the hands of democratically elected leaders. This “democrat-to-dictator” path has become the main way that democracies die today, with the fate of countries such as Venezuela, Hungary, and Turkey spawning a large and growing literature.1 Less well known is that the “dictator-to-democrat” path is also common: Since the onset of the “third wave” of democratization in 1974, at least ten countries have sent former dictators back to power in democratic elections. In Nigeria, it has happened not once but twice: in 1999, with the election of former military dictator Olusegun Obasanjo (1976–79), and again in 2015, with the election of former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallWhy We Elect Former Dictators and Their Children2026-04-01text/htmlen-USWhy We Elect Former Dictators and Their Children2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®530802026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01The Ghosts of Weimar
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986029
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The Weimar Republic, which governed Germany from 1918 until the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, gets some of history’s worst press. It is generally written off as a disaster since it ended in Hitler and with him, the Holocaust and World War II. Critics have focused especially on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which gave the Reichspräsident (federal president) power to rule by emergency decree in the name of “public security and order” and led to the July 1932 dissolution of the elected government of Prussia, one of Germany’s largest states, which in turn paved the way for the transfer of power to Adolf Hitler and the rise of his Third Reich.Volker Ullrich, the distinguished German historian and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallThe Ghosts of Weimar2026-04-01text/htmlen-USThe Ghosts of Weimar2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®110402026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01Documents on Democracy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986030
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On 16 November 2025, at Rappler’s Social Good Summit in Manila, the Ukrainian human-rights lawyer and civil society leader Oleksandra Matviichuk delivered a speech conveying the strength of the Ukrainian people in the face of Russian aggression. Her remarks are excerpted below.I’m a human rights lawyer and I’m applying the law to defend people and human dignity for many years. But now I’m in a situation when the law doesn’t work. Russia broke the UN charter and launched the war of aggression against Ukraine. Russian troops are deliberately hitting residential buildings, schools, churches, museums, and hospitals. They’re attacking evacuation corridors. They’re torturing people in filtration camps. They’re forcibly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/98/image/coversmallDocuments on Democracy2026-04-01text/htmlen-USDocuments on Democracy2026-04-012026TWOProject MUSE®227372026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-01