Democracy and Governance

BY ALEXANDER W. SMITH Greece now stands at the edge of an economic and political precipice. By allowing the country to miss a €1.55 billion loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras demonstrated that he is no longer negotiating for Greece’s future. He is gambling with it. Greece’s effective default is […]

A lot of things have evolved since the 2011 elections when Nigerian youth celebrated social media as a tool for successful elections. Technology has continued to foster government accountability, as well as active citizen participation in the country. During the 2015 elections, young Nigerians, who make up 70 percent of the country’s 177 million population, […]

As Israelis flocked to the polls in last week’s elections, the West Bank remained calm. The 4.1 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza do not have the right to vote. Life went on as usual while only kilometers away, Israelis elected leaders who will determine policy affecting the Palestinians’ fate. Here are […]

Six weeks after a controversial postponement, the Nigerian presidential and National Assembly elections are set for March 28th, with the governorship and State House of Assembly elections scheduled to take place on April 11th. In spite of the volatile security environment, government officials have indicated that Nigerian citizens will be able to vote this Saturday, […]

As the Nigerian elections come around, the broadcast is out again and every pundit on Africa especially the western ones are on, once more, about Nigeria disintegrating.  This alarm and concern for Nigeria by outsiders seems to me not so much about caring but about perpetuating the myth of Africa’s failure in governing itself. In my […]

ABSTRACT The Ibrahim Prize, the largest annually awarded prize given in the world, is meant to incentivize African heads of state to become better democratic leaders. The Ibrahim Index of African Governance, IIAG, a composite measurement, is used in a ranking order of African heads of States. This paper affirms the hypothesis- no consistent correlation […]

Commentary All the heads of state or government who participated in the last three Summits of the Americas were democratically elected. This situation was unprecedented in the hemisphere; the past twenty-five years have become the most prolonged period of democracy in the Western hemisphere since independence. Democracy begins with free and fair elections. However, there […]

Abstract Democracy is deepening across much of Latin America, especially in Mexico and Brazil, the two major countries. In a region once plagued by bloody coups and military interventionism, free and fair elections are now the norm. Significant economic and social advances, including a sharp decline in poverty levels and even in inequality in some […]

Commentary When my administration began in 2002, many analysts said that Colombia was a failed state. Every year, the country faced thirty-thousand homicides and almost three-thousand kidnappings, and more than three-hundred municipalities lacked the presence of their mayors due threats made against their lives. Investment rates were low, unemployment was climbing, and poverty levels were […]

BY MITCHELL ALVA Will history judge the 2014 midterm elections a Congressional wave year? The election certainly felt like a repeat of 2006 and 2010. After all, in all three elections, the party of an unpopular sitting President suffered significant losses in both the House of Representatives and the Senate with one chamber of Congress […]

Tunisia’s parliamentary elections, held on October 26, resulted in Nidaa Tounes garnering 39.71% of the vote and Ennahda receiving 31.79%, robbing the Islamists of their leading seat. Nidaa Tounes’s victory has been widely hailed in the media as a victory of secularism over Islamism. This discourse fits neatly into Western conceptions of modernization and secularization […]

For all the calls for change in U.S. politics, the most likely scenario for the 2016 presidential election presents two familiar family names: Clinton vs. Bush. For a country supposedly based on meritocracy, this is a curious turn of events.  It is also bewildering how no one questions the legitimacy of this postulation as nepotism.  […]