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American Exceptionalism Revisited provides a broad overview of the various features that signify American politics. These include the upholding of an exceptional political stability, involving a particular balance between legislative, executive and judicial powers, and the permanence of a unique party system. Furthermore, special traits in the electoral realm?e.g., voter turnout, the inflow of money, and the application of primaries?are targets of analysis. Through comparisons with conditions applying abroad, particularly in Europe and Latin America, Axel Hadenius reveals a number of new insights on American political life, both today and over time.

In the past thirty years, a number of nations around the world have democratized, yet in many others authoritarianism still persists. While a multi-party system is seen as a stepping-stone to the transition to democracy, observers have yet to understand why some multi-party authoritarian nations successfully undergo that transition and others do not. A possible explanation lies in the extent to which a regime in power can succeed in suppressing potential opposition. As examples of such suppression, the authors cite the regimes in Belarus, Singapore, and Tunisia. Authoritarian regime strength in these nations stands in sharp contrast to the situation in Taiwan, where opposition groups have managed to gain strength in recent years. The authors note that the key to the success of the opposition lies in its ability to develop a base of operation politically and economically independent of the regime in power. Adapted from the source document.

The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of current research on international democratization. I start by discussing the choice of empirical indicators. Given a set of indicators -- Freedom House & Polity, which stand out as the most useful ones -- I make a graphic representation of democratic tendencies in different regions in the world. In this survey one region, North Africa & the Middle East, comes out as exceptional; here no general improvements have been made since the early 1970s. I then make an account of explanatory conditions which have proved in large-n empirical studies to play a role for democratic progress (such as modernization, access to oil, popular demonstrations & the type of authoritarian regime). I end up in a puzzle, which regards the Muslim countries. We can establish, on the one hand, that these countries clearly under-perform democratically. But on the other hand, comparative research has not managed so far to point out why that is the case. We can see a pattern, but we cannot point out an empirically solid explanatory mechanism. Figures, References. Adapted from the source document.