Russell Bova is associate professor of political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He has written widely on Soviet and postcommunist politics and is currently at work on a book on democratization in Russia.
Europe in the Middle Ages was hardly democratic, but it did have law-based institutions that could and did stay the hands of kings, laying a crucial basis for future state-building and…
Politics in the Arab Middle East is often a matter of powerholders first liberalizing — and then "deliberalizing" — public life in order to first maintain their rule. But this…