How This Mirrors History

In 1973, Chile transitioned from a vibrant, though polarized, democracy into a military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet, who seized power in a violent coup d'état that overthrew the democratically elected socialist president Sal...

The collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime offers one of the clearest examples of how legal institutions, democratic norms, and public trust can be subverted from within. Germany transitioned from a fragi...

Hungary's democratic backsliding under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has become one of the clearest examples of electoral authoritarianism in a European Union member state. After rising to power in 2010, Orbán and his Fidesz party leveraged t...

Elected in 1990 as a political outsider, Alberto Fujimori capitalized on widespread dissatisfaction with economic crisis, guerrilla violence (notably from the Shining Path), and political gridlock to launch what became known as the autogolp...

Ferdinand Marcos was elected President of the Philippines in 1965 and re-elected in 1969, but his most consequential move came in 1972, when he declared martial law and suspended democratic institutions. Citing communist threats and social...

Russia under Vladimir Putin has evolved from a flawed post-Soviet democracy in the 1990s into a centralized authoritarian state where democratic institutions exist largely as formalities. Since assuming the presidency in 2000, Putin has pro...

Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan represents a textbook case of electoral authoritarianism, where a democratically elected leader dismantled democratic checks and balances while maintaining the formal structure of elections. Rising to power...

Venezuela's descent from democracy into authoritarianism under Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro is one of the most prominent examples of democratic erosion through populism, legal manipulation, and institutional capture in the 2...