News and Scholarship

The United Nations Development Agency UNDP calls for a temporary basic income (TBI) to mitigate the effects of the Covid pandemic in developing countries and to slow the spread of the disease. In a study published yesterday, the agency identifies three policy options for a TBI that would guarantee a [...]

Sunday’s presidential elections in Poland have left a country deeply divided between rural and urban areas. President Andrzej Duda won a narrow victory, defeating Warsaw’s mayor Rafal Trzaskowski who ran on a liberal platform. Mr. Duda, on the other hand, ran a fierce homophobic campaign. Gay men and lesbians living in [...]

Protesters in Serbia took to the street a second night in a row on Wednesday. They are protesting what they perceive as an inconsistent policy of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic whose right-wing populist party emerged strengthened from recent elections. Dozens of police and protesters were injured. The police deployed armored [...]

The Coronavirus outbreak has disrupted elections in the Global North. In France, for example, fear of the virus was among the reasons cited for the near record-low turnout in Sunday’s second round of municipal elections. In the US, 16 states have delayed their primaries over contagion concerns. If rich economies [...]

Governments around the globe are increasingly leaning towards autocratic modes of governance and rhetoric. In an open letter, signed by more than 500 former world leaders and Nobel price winners, along with a number of organizations and institutions, the authors at IDEA, an intergovernmental organization for the promotion of democracy, [...]

The right-wing populist party of Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vucic claimed an overwhelming victory after Sunday’s parliamentary elections in the Balkan country.