What we can learn from the playbook that defeated Orbán

B. Godihal is one of the thousands of communities in Karnataka that have worked to hold clean elections, stirred by a confluence of awareness campaigns by nongovernmental organizations and rising public frustration with candidates’ broken promises.

In the U.S. the electorate skews white, wealthy, and old because such demographics are more likely to vote. Creating mandatory voting laws would increase voter turnout and thus increase voting equity.

In the U.S., arrests for the inability to pay fines increase incarceration rates and discriminate against the poor. Many countries make fines proportional to an offender's ability to pay, lowering recidivism and saving the government money.

El Poder del Consumidor is an organization fighting Coca-Cola's power over health care decisions in Mexico. The organization tried many tactics but only found success after finding friends with enough money to compete with the beverage industry giants.

The media could help countries still affected by Ebola by focusing on Nigeria, where they defeated the virus through effective public institutions that protected the public interest, such as rejecting cash but accepting much needed health workers.

Big money has big lobbyists - but small lobbyists can also bring about big changes. Groups like Results and the Citizens Climate Lobby train ordinary people to approach and make arguments to politicians and journalists.

In Iowa, the “redistricting” of the state’s legislative and congressional boundaries is done by mapmakers who abide by nonpartisan metrics that all sides agree are fair — a seemingly revolutionary concept in the high-stakes decennial rite of redistricting.

Arab governments have expended a lot of energy keeping politics of any stripe out of the public sphere. With a few hundred volunteers and hardly any money, an upstart campaign called Beirut Madinati — “Beirut Is My City” — is challenging the status quo, displaying the kind of savvy civic politics promised by the Arab Spring.

The Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies provides a "blueprint" for peaceful and democratic revolution, busting myths about the process of nonviolent revolt and helping dissidents in countries around the world to accomplish political goals, such as fighting corruption or protecting the environment.

Two columns on how Iran is treating its massive epidemic of injecting drug use by tackling it as a health problem, effectively lowering H.I.V. rates among drug users using an approach to drugs known as harm reduction.