Americans are more interested in the new democracies that have sprung up round the world.
In practice, new democracies have often begun because the previous regime had collapsed and there was no other way of establishing legitimacy.
And just as he exaggerates the downside of new democracies, so he tends to minimise the drawbacks of the slow process of incremental change.
Some are already serving in government but spoke about a need for more women to serve and to lead in forming new democracies in the Middle East.
Moreover, while Serbs have been making mayhem in the Balkans, other southern Slavs (Macedonians, Bulgars and Slovenes, among them) have been striving valiantly to nurture their new democracies.
The announced withholding of U.S. dues owed for 2011 will immediately affect our ability to deliver programmes in critical areas: achieving universal education, supporting new democracies and fighting extremism.
Outside the political class, many Portuguese would argue that if their country, like many other new democracies in Europe, is losing interest in ideology, that is probably no bad thing.
The U.S. hopes to realize the gains of freer and fairer trade and investment with every region, from the new democracies of the Middle East to the fast-growing economies in Africa and our own hemisphere.
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Europe has come a tremendous way over the last twenty years, and the lessons our Central and Eastern European allies and partners have learned are incredibly valuable as we seek to consolidate new democracies in the Middle East.
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Recently, it has become fashionable to play down that progress by pointing out that many of the new democracies have not gone beyond elections to build the other, essential, protections for liberty: an independent judiciary, equality before a well-enforced rule of law, and constitutional limits on the abuse of political power.
And in those countries, we are working to help those new governments consolidate their democracies, deal with security needs, and stabilize their economies.
Asia's democracies, new and old, need to answer that charge.
This is why the alliance of the democracies needs not only new members but also a new purpose.
Papua New Guinea and Fiji also use AV - but most democracies use versions of proportional representation or first-past-the-post.
But while we have survived foreign challenges in the past, even after the stumbling beginnings typical of democracies, those we face today are of a new and possibly more dangerous kind and raise a question as to whether the United States of 2008 still has the right stuff.
Some mature democracies, especially Britain and America, are seeing a new phenomenon: the rise of politics itself as a profession.
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However, the transition was difficult, and although some countries like the Czech Republic and Slovenia were able to overcome the early years of transition, becoming the prosperous democracies that they are now, some others eventually adopted new types of autocracies.
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But in democracies that bent can lead to silly policies such as the new government of Thailand's subsidized rice price, designed to aid farmers but imperiling a huge export market with artificially high supply costs.
I'll begin my trip by visiting Brazil to work with its new president, Dilma Rousseff, to strengthen the relationship between the hemisphere's two largest democracies and economies.
The haggling over what shape the new administration takes could be hard to stomach for a country unused to the back-room deals that democracies with proportional voting systems rely on to form governments.
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