Are dictators abusing formal institutions in a backlash against democracy, or are formal institutions increasingly restraining the discretionary power ...

There is a trend of democratic retrenchment across the African continent. Despite democratic gains in some states, the overall tendency over the past ...

While democracy is commonly believed to reduce corruption, there are obvious endogeneity problems in measuring the impact of democracy on corruption. ...

In Ethiopia, with 85% of the population in agriculture, most of them illiterate, democratisation has to work against adverse experience: Peasants can ...

While democracy is commonly believed to reduce corruption, there are obvious endogeneity problems in measuring the impact of democracy on corruption. This ...

The use of military tribunals to try civilians was one of the issues that made people rise against then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. This ...

This report analyses the growth of political Islam in South Asia (Pakistan, Afghanistan and India's Jammu and Kashmir Province). In Pakistan the failure ...

This report provides an overview of the political Islam in the Middle East, with a special emphasis on the Islamic resurgence in the Levant (Egypt, Israel, ...

Dominant executives, weak democratic institutions and shrinking space for critical deliberation and contestation of political power characterise most ...

This article assesses political developments in Ethiopia after its 2005 federal and regional watershed elections. Although an unprecedented liberalisation ...

Frøy Gudbrandsen (UiB) in conversation with Malawi activist Rafiq Hajat and Arne Tostensen (CMI)

Bangladesh has taken yet another turn on its downwards spiral from democracy to authoritarianism. On 8 February 2018, a Bangladeshi judge convicted opposition ...

There is growing psychological evidence that various processes differently contribute to our propensity to support or challenge the status quo; to embrace ...

The final chapter summarises some of the findings of the previous country analyses, against the background of the conceptual pair of extractive and power-preserving ...

In his new book, senior researcher Roberto Gargarella argues that many of the problems currently attributed to modern constitutional democracies, are not unfortunate "distortions" of a properly organized institutional design, but rather foreseeable effects of that framework.

This report places the 1997 elections in a longer-term historical perspective dating back to independence, with a view to assessing the democratisation ...

How can we make our democracy truly representative? Can participation be institutionalized? And who does the Maracanã stadium belong to?

CMI has got funding for four new research projects from the Research Council of Norway. The projects are all part of the NORGLOBAL programme.

In long-established western democracies, women have made inroads as judges only during the past few decades. In post-conflict and transitional developing ...

Violence against women has emerged as arguably the single most important focus for both gender programming and women’s rights activism in Afghanistan ...