Democratic Erosion University Course Student Blog

Students enrolled in our course are encouraged to write for the course blog, and to read and comment on posts from students at other participating universities. The blog offers students the opportunity to analyze current events through the lens of the theory and case studies they engage with through the course.

Arresting Opposition and Squashing Protests: Democratic Backsliding in Turkey Under Erdoğan

Turkey has been inching towards autocracy under Erdoğan and the AKP for the last 22 years.

2025 Romanian Elections: An Election Redo and a Barred Candidate

Only two weeks out from Presidential Elections, Romanian voters face a tough decision in deciding on the next leader of their country. The latest opinion polls show that nearly 40% of voters are still undecided on who to vote for. After all, most voters already cast...

Why Protecting American Democracy Means Coming Together In Protest

In the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, the Democratic Erosion Consortium's very own professors Robert Blair and Steven Rosenzweig wrote an article in The Boston Globe urging readers to “Get ready to protest like democracy depends on it.” The article was in...

Democratic Erosion: Threats in the Philippine Democracy

Dec 16, 2022 | University of the Philippines, Diliman

Democratic Erosion (also known as Democratic Backsliding) is an unsettlingly prevalent phenomenon in which competitive elections are undermined, individuals lose the right...

Economic Instability in Turkey: An Attempt to Find a New Economic Model or Political Adventure

Dec 16, 2022 | Suffolk University

This story is about an autocrat who has been in big politics for 20 years. Under his rule, the exchange rate of the national currency has collapsed several times, prices...

Sanders and Trump, The peoples’ party?

Mar 23, 2020 | Georgia State University

https://medium.com/@marcushjohnson/bernie-sanders-and-donald-trump-are-two-sides-of-the-same-coin-a862b80762e7 Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders run on populist’s platforms that claim to be in...

Is There Still Value to Model United Nations?

Mar 21, 2020 | Suffolk University

Why do young people have the lowest voter turnout rates for all ages? Are school systems at fault? Should parents be doing more to educate their children? Nobody is necessarily at fault, but...

Gerrymandering Takes Part in Eroding Our Country’s Democracy

Mar 21, 2020 | Georgia State University

"Of all times to abandon the Court's duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court's role in that system...

How Attacks on Press Freedom in Bulgaria Spell Trouble for Democracy

Mar 19, 2020 | American University

On October 6th, 2018, Bulgarian journalist Viktoria Marinova was found murdered in a park along the Danube. 30-year old Marinova had been a television journalist on Bulgarian channel TVN whose final...

Trumpism and Stealth Authoritarianism in Mexico?

Mar 18, 2020 | Georgia State University

When looking at Mexico's current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO for short, one may confuse him with our current president Donald Trump. Current president AMLO undermines...

Policy and Plagues: Warning Signals for Gay Poland

Mar 18, 2020 | American University

In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a list of warnings. Four red flags that signal when anti-democratic politicians’ behavior has become so dangerous that a bipartisan...

How the Trump Administration is Eroding American Democracy

Mar 17, 2020 | Georgia State University

America has long been thought of by much of the world, and certainly by Americans, as the highest example of liberal democracy, a state governed by its people with overriding emphasis on individual...

The Disappointment of George Weah

Mar 13, 2020 | American University

The 2017 Liberian Presidential election had all the trappings of a major step in the process of democratization, but instead opened a period of democratic decay and tyranny. Since the end of the...

Bernie Sanders: Modern Day Robin Hood

Mar 10, 2020 | Suffolk University

Recently, Bernie Sanders held a rally in the Boston Commons to promote his presidential campaign in which he addressed issues such as affordable housing, healthcare, and childcare. Yet how can the...