Teaching Comparative Government

The author of this opinion piece is John Keane, Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and author of ‘The Life and Death of Democracy’. Are his arguments reasonable? Should we join in creating a new category of democratic governance: phantom democracy? Phantom democracy: a puzzle at the heart of Chinese politics As China rapidly moves to the centre of the international order, the question that’s becoming increasingly pertinent is: what kind of a political system is this new global power? In the booming business of China watching, the standard answer is that it is an “authoritarian” regime, with qualifiers such as “soft authoritarianism”, “hard authoritarianism” and “authoritarian capitalism” commonplace. But by all accounts, China is reckoned the antithesis of a “liberal democracy” defined by open competition among freely formed political parties. Some Chinese observers celebrate the advantages of this “authoritarianism” and welcome the triumph of a “post-democracy” freed fr...

It was only 16 years ago that Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man , a best selling book that celebrated the "victory" of democracy. Things look different in this part of the 21st century. What accounts for the changes? After decades of triumph, democracy is losing ground The world has grown far more democratic since the second world war. In 1941 there were only a dozen democracies; by 2000 only eight states had never held a serious election. But since the financial crisis of 2007-08, democracy has regressed. Most watchdogs concur. The latest survey by Freedom House, an American think-tank, is called “Democracy in Crisis”. In 2017, for the 12th consecutive year, countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains… According to the Democracy Index from The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, 89 countries regressed in 2017; only 27 improved… What these indices measure is not simply democracy (ie...