Democracy's Past and Future

Denigrating intellectuals and eliminating people that stands out against the ruling government for a public interest cause has deep roots in the old time human behavior tendency to hold power. Personally I have hard time to accept that during our days such concepts and practices are still generalized in the civilized countries. Remainders of the old communist and dictatorial regimes isolated tendencies are possible to linger around. We can aim towards a sustainable development only by reaffirming the democracy, the social contract and the fundamental law protecting the Human Rights. If not absolutely nothing makes sense. Full Article: http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-743320

China-CEE Institute, 2022

Two important anniversaries are commemorated in the Czech Republic on November 17 the closure of the Czech universities and repressions against students in 1939, and a police crackdown on protestors against the communist regime in 1989. The briefing sums up the events on November 17, 2022, including an opposition manifestation against both the ruling government and the liberal democratic regime. Drawing upon recent sociological surveys, the analysis goes on to the question of people´s attitudes towards liberal democracy, the communist past and related issues, showing that there is increasing disillusionment with the post-1989 development.

2012

Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft

Democratization, 2004

Hardly any other subject in the last quarter of the twentieth century has influenced the research agenda of political science more than the transform-ation of authoritarian and 'totalitarian' political regimes into pluralist democ-racies. However, to the same extent that the third wave of ...

Journalism and Mass Communication, Jan.-Feb. 2019, Vol. 9, No. 1, 33-52. , 2019

In the last three decades of the 20th century, important political changes occurred in all regions of the world, making the institutions of many existing political systems closer to the ideals of democracy. But as happened in other moments of history, those processes of democratization, even when successful, always occurred through advances and retreats. Thus, contemporary political practices, procedures, and institutions embody democratic ideals only partially. In many nations, in the present, the rule of law, civil, and political rights, and institutional mechanisms for citizens’ control of governments remain ineffective or underdeveloped. Thus, a double concern prevails among analysts: on the one hand, the regression to authoritarianism in some countries after the processes of political changes—Russia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Turkey being the paradigmatic examples; the emergence of semi-democracies, i.e., hybrid or illiberal regimes, which have provoked a new interest in the study of patterns of institutional design, the critical role of civil society, different political-cultural developments, authoritarian legacies in the context of the new democracies, competitive authoritarianism and new dictatorships. On the other hand, the acknowledgement of intrinsic limits of the historical development of the democratic regime even in the case of old democracies, i.e., the fact that political equality, active citizen participation, and effective control of abuse of power have never been fully realized in practice. This is the general context in which many analysts and part of the public opinion sustain that there is a crisis of democracy. The general diagnosis refers to the decreasing trust in political elites, political parties, parliaments, governments, and to the dissatisfaction with the regime among democrats; it refers also to the weaker and sometimes erratic performance of democratic institutions and particularly to the failure of the representative system. The picture is completed with the growing rates of partisan misalignment, electoral volatility, and declining civic participation. All this seems to indicate that democracy is inconceivable without crisis. This chapter discusses this scenario. The crisis of democracies is examined from a critical perspective, and the main objective is to understand the different dimensions of its nature and its consequences. Keywords: democratization, crisis, quality of democracy, semi-democracy, illiberal regime, authoritarianism, populism

2019

Supplemental material, cps_-_online_appendix for The Authoritarian Wager: Political Action and the Sudden Collapse of Repression by Branislav L. Slantchev and Kelly S. Matush in Comparative Political Studies

The Future of the State: Philosophy and Politics , 2020

2021

Pacific Historical Review, 2021

This article examines the aftermaths of four murders: those of anti–Ferdinand Marcos activists Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, and Kuomintang critics Chen Wen-Chen and Henry Liu. These murders all occurred during the Ronald Reagan presidential administration and relied upon the transnational reach of foreign governments into the United States. I explore how activists responded to these murders, focusing on the Committee for Justice for Domingo and Viernes, the Committee on Political Freedom, which was formed by Chen’s colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Committee to Obtain Justice for Henry Liu. I argue that, in contrast to those radicals who saw oppression as flowing outward from the United States toward the Third World, these critics saw the transnational murders as symbolizing the growing convergence between domestic and foreign repression.