AP/Alexei Nikolsky This article was originally published on The Conversation. How do you give democracy a bad name? You fail to deliver on its promise. People fighting for democracy want individual rights and freedoms, but they also want and expect economic prosperity. So every democratic movement that doesn’t produce both the political and economic rights people expect becomes a nail in the coffin of democracy. Russia’s experiment with democracy and market reforms started in 1991 but began to collapse with Vladimir Putin’s rise to power at the end of 1999.