Democracy is a form of government in which the people have the authority to deliberate and decide legislation, or to choose governing officials to do so. Who is considered part of "the people" and how authority is shared among or delegated by the people has changed over time and at different rates in different countries. Features of democracy often include freedom of assembly, association, property rights, freedom of religion and speech, inclusiveness and equality, citizenship, consent of the governed, voting rights, freedom from unwarranted governmental deprivation of the right to life and liberty, and minority rights.
Democratization, or democratisation, is the transition to a more democratic political regime, including substantive political changes moving in a democratic direction. It may be a hybrid regime in transition from an authoritarian regime to a full democracy, a transition from an authoritarian political system to a semi-democracy or transition from a semi-authoritarian political system to a democratic political system.
New Democracy was a political party in Sweden. It was founded in 1991 and elected into the Riksdag in the 1991 Swedish general election. It lost all its seats in the Riksdag in the subsequent election in 1994, and its subsequent decline culminated in bankruptcy in February 2000, at which time it retained only one city council post. Local factions of New Democracy reformed into minor parties such as Sjöbopartiet, which faced mixed success.
Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and a partial reading of Max Weber, and were strongly influenced by the writings of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, then went into a deep eclipse. It made a comeback after 1991, when Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of the Cold War as confirmation on modernization theory and more generally of universal history. But the theory remains a controversial model.
Barrington Moore Jr. was an American political sociologist, and the son of forester Barrington Moore.
Juan José Linz Storch de Gracia was a Spanish sociologist and political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Yale University and an honorary member of the Scientific Council at the Juan March Institute. He is best known for his work on authoritarian political regimes and democratization.
Adam Przeworski is a Polish-American professor of political science specializing in comparative politics. He is Carroll and Milton Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics of New York University. He is a scholar of democratic societies, theory of democracy, social democracy and political economy, as well as an early proponent of rational choice theory in political science.
The Journal of Democracy is a quarterly academic journal established in 1990 and an official publication of the National Endowment for Democracy's International Forum for Democratic Studies. It covers the study of democracy, democratic regimes, and pro-democracy movements throughout the world.
Gerardo L. Munck is a political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California.
Alfred C. Stepan was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He was the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University, where he was also director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion. He is known for his comparative politics research on the military, state institutions, democratization, and democracy.
The mass media in Ghana, includes television, radio, internet publishing and newspapers.
John F. Clark is a professor of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University, Miami and former Fulbright scholar. He specializes in state-society relations of African polities and the international relations of sub-Saharan Africa.
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting. Political scientists have created many typologies describing variations of authoritarian forms of government. Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military. States that have a blurred boundary between democracy and authoritarianism have some times been characterized as "hybrid democracies", "hybrid regimes" or "competitive authoritarian" states.
General elections were held in Nicaragua on 4 November 1984, to elect a president and parliament. Approximately 1.2 million Nicaraguans voted, representing a 75% turnout, with 94% of eligible voters registered. Impartial observers from international groupings such as the European Economic Community, religious groups sent to monitor the election, and observers from democratic nations such as Canada and the Republic of Ireland concluded that the elections were generally free and fair.
Philippe C. Schmitter is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is Emeritus Professor of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute.
A hybrid regime is a mixed type of political system often created as a result of an incomplete transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one. Hybrid regimes are categorized as a combination of autocratic features with democratic ones and can simultaneously hold political repressions and regular elections. Hybrid regimes are commonly found in developing countries with abundant natural resources such as petro-states. Although these regimes experience civil unrest they may be relatively stable and tenacious for decades at a time. There has been a rise in hybrid regimes since the end of the Cold War.
Democratic backsliding, also called autocratization, is the decline in the democratic characteristics of a political system, and is the opposite of democratization. Democracy is the most popular form of government, with more than half of the nations in the world being democracies according to a study examining 165 countries determined that 98 of them were democracies in 2020. Since the 2010s, the world has grown more authoritarian, with one quarter of the world's population under democratically backsliding hybrid regimes into the 2020s.
The V-Dem Institute is an independent research institute founded by Professor Staffan I. Lindberg in 2014 that studies the qualities of government. The institute is funded by a number of government organizations, World Bank and several research institutions. The headquarters of the project is based at the department of political science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Ghana–Turkey relations are the foreign relations between Ghana and Turkey.
Democratic backsliding has been ongoing in the United States since the late 2010s. The V-Dem Institute's electoral democracy index score for the United States peaked in 2015 and declined sharply after 2016, for which year it was also downgraded to "flawed democracy" by the Economist Intelligence Unit in its annual Democracy Index report. Both V-Dem and Freedom House downgraded the United States in 2018. Beyond the national level, democratic backsliding has occurred in American states under unified Republican Party control while Democratic Party-controlled and divided states have become more democratic.
