National Endowment for Democracy | DemocracyWorks: A Blog of the National Democratic Institute

The good news about Ukraine – and why it deserves our support.

An NDI staff member votes in the March 31, 2019, presidential election, while accompanying international election observers as they observed opening, voting, counting, and tabulation processes in Kyiv and 13 other regions across the country.

Ukraine is all over the news these days, albeit not in a good way. That is unfortunate. The country deserves much more – and favorable – support for its democratic progress and remarkable resilience in the face of economic hardship and unrelenting Russian aggression. Five years after the Revolution of Dignity ushered in a new democratic moment in 2014, Ukraine’s people in fact are as unified as ever in their aspirations for a more democratic, peaceful and corruption-free society.

How can democracies remain committed to their values amid rising authoritarianism?

In this DemWorks crossover episode, NDI President Derek Mitchell talks to Chris Walker and Shanthi Kalathil from the National Endowment for Democracy (the NED) about the rise of authoritarian influence around the world. With a focus on China, they discuss how China’s Communist Party has survived since Tiananmen Square, the One Belt, One Road initiative, and the hard questions China’s rise poses to open societies’ most fundamental principles.

Kosovo Assembly Endorses the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness

The Declaration on Parliamentary Openness is a call to the world’s parliaments to increase their commitment to citizen engagement in legislative work. Collaboratively drafted by the global parliamentary monitoring community, the declaration has been endorsed by more than 180 civil society organizations (CSOs) in over 80 countries. Increasingly, parliaments are also signing on to the declaration. On May 4, the Assembly of the Republic of Kosovo formally endorsed the declaration, joining a small vanguard of parliaments around the world.

Votes without Violence: Strengthening Electoral Integrity

NDI’s domestic observation partner in Nigeria, TMG, reported that 1 in 4 election officials for the 2015 presidential and legislative elections were women.

There’s something new in the Gender, Women and Democracy (GWD) program at NDI. In evaluating existing programming within the democracy and governance community, the GWD team found a gap. As we examined the social, political, and economic barriers preventing women from participating fully in democratic governance, we found that one such barrier -- violence against women in elections (VAW-E) -- was absent from the conversation, largely because it had not been distinguished from wider studies of electoral violence. So, in partnership with NDI’s election team, and with funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, GWD is putting VAW-E on the map.

A Renewed Vision: DemTools 2.0

DemTools are a set of open-source solutions developed by NDI’s Technology for Democracy team (NDItech) to address some of democracy’s most common problems. The tools, which were released in August to NDI partners, the development community and general public, focus on scalability – providing advanced technologies to make their work more effective, while reducing maintenance and sustainability burdens. NDI recently received a renewed National Endowment for Democracy grant for the continued development and expansion of DemTools. In deciding where and how to allocate these funds, we reviewed current features and updated our roadmap for product development and version release timelines. We determined that better support, enhanced multilingual capacity and increased usability were priorities across all of the tools.