Husain Haqqani, Alfred Stepan, and Juan J. Linz write about Islamists and the "Arab Spring" in latest issue of the Journal of Democracy

April Issue also features articles on Latin America, Southeast Asia, Greece, and the EU.

WASHINGTON, April 15, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- "The real test of the Islamists' commitment to democracy will come not while they are in power for the first time, but when they lose subsequent elections," writes former Pakistani ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani in the April 2013 issue of the Journal of Democracy (JoD). It is only then, cautions Haqqani, that it will become clear whether the Islamist parties will sacrifice their core ideology in order to be full and permanent participants in democratization.

In their essay "Democratization Theory and the 'Arab Spring,'" Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz survey the Muslim-majority countries of Albania, Indonesia, Senegal, and Turkey, as well as Muslim-minority India—where a combined total of a half-billion Muslims live under democracy—for a better understanding of the relationship between democracy and the "twin tolerations." They also examine the nature of the old regimes in the Arab Spring countries for hints at what's to come.

Elsewhere in the issue, Takis S. Pappas unravels the story of how Greek democracy developed into a populist system, wherein both the government and opposition parties were populist. That, in turn, facilitated the nonstop exploitation of the state and its resources, and it partly explains "Why Greece Failed."

The April issue also features "Armies and Revolutions," in which Zoltan Barany provides assessment tools for predicting soldiers' likely response to a popular uprising; an analysis of Freedom House's 2012 survey of Freedom in the World; and a set of three essays on "Lessons from Latin America," which pay tribute to work of eminent Argentine political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell.

To see the complete table of contents, please visit our website at www.journalofdemocracy.org.

The Journal of Democracy is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October. Members of the press who wish to receive a complimentary copy of the current issue should contact Brent Kallmer at [email protected]. To subscribe to the Journal of Democracy, visit https://www.press.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/order.cgi?oc_id=32.  For more information, please visit the Journal of Democracy online or e-mail us at [email protected].

SOURCE National Endowment for Democracy