Dictatorships. This type of government has no parliament with teeth, or a judiciary with bite. It’s a one-branch show run at the top by a dictator and his trusted yes-men. Corruption via overly complicated legislation runs rampant. Opposition parties are banned. Trade with the outside world is usually banned or heavily regulated. It’s an insult used in the West to hurl at electoral opponents. Blahblahblah. You know what a dictatorship is, and many scholars and journalists today are concerned that this form of government is flowering at the expense of the much-harder-to-maintain liberal democratic system. Vladimir Putin just won an “election” with 77 percent of the Russian vote. Viktor Orbán and his party in Hungary hold 133 out of 199 seats. Recep Tayy?p ErdoÄ?an is packing the Turkish judiciary with Islamists. Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki is, along with his party, working hard against the secular Western values of the European Union, which Poland voluntarily joined in 2004.
