Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Indian prime minister, this week mocked Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, as a "self-annointed king .Yet Pakistan was holding elections of its own on October 10th.
Such pressure appeared to succeed, a few years ago, in shaming some autocracies into, for example, holding elections of a kind.More recently, however, the political tide appears to have flowed back against reform.
Some mayoral offices and some city legislatures sometimes hold elections of sorts.
Almost every sub-Saharan country has held elections of some kind in the past ten years.
This allows it to hold elections of a kind, but bans opposition to the monarchy, forbids political parties, and denies women the right to own land.
From "soft" authoritarianism in Singapore and Japan to "hard" authoritarianism in China, these stable, high-performing economies were never predicated on establishing liberal democratic systems, though they all hold elections, of a kind.
And this month, for the first time, the digital republic known as Facebook held elections of a sort: it offered users a chance to vote on the way the site is governed, including how the company deploys its users' data.
If African governments want the cash, they have to listen.Since the mid-1980s, every African country bar the inaptly named Democratic Republic of Congo has held elections of some sort, and even Congo is due to go to the polls within a couple of years.
Also that he has not heard from his mother since March and now fears for her life.In December 2014 Uzbekistan is to hold elections of some kind to its rubber-stamp parliament and then, a few weeks later, to the presidency.
What with Planet Earth being a tinder box of political disaffection, it's interesting that 2014 is set to be the biggest ever year for electoral democracy – with over 40percentt of the world preparing to hold elections of some kind.
The general assembly shall have power from time to time to regulate all matters relating to the judges, time, place, and manner of holding elections for senators and delegates, and of making returns thereof, and to divide the several counties into election districts, for the more convenient holding of elections, not affecting their terms or tenure of office.
