Ford harbored serious presidential ambitions, he was born a century too soon. What mattered far more than public opinion was the opinion of party leaders, and party leaders soundly rejected him.
An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keep...
Primaries could lead to the appearance of extremist candidates and demagogues who, unrestrained by party allegiances, have little to lose by stirring up mass hatreds or making absurd promises.
To find comparable behavior in this hemisphere one must look at Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
This is precisely what happened, as we have already noted, in Paraguay in 2012 with the two-day quickie impeachment of Fernando Lugo, and in Ecuador in 1997 with the removal of Abdalá Bucaram on bogus...
The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social equality and economi...
Norms are the soft guardrails of democracy; as they break down, the zone of acceptable political behavior expands, giving rise to discourse and action that could imperil democracy.
In 1999, the Chávez government called elections for a constituent assembly that, in violation of an earlier supreme court ruling, awarded itself the power to dissolve all other state institutions, inc...
Governments that cannot remove independent judges may bypass them through court packing.
American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, inclu...
The abdication of political responsibility by existing leaders often marks a nation’s first step toward authoritarianism.
Protest should be viewed in a similar way. Public protest is a basic right and an important activity in any democracy, but its aim should be the defense of rights and institutions, rather than their d...
Political leaders have two options in the face of extreme polarization. First, they can take society’s divisions as a given but try to counteract them through elite-level cooperation and compromise. T...
Most recently, the Erdoğan government in Turkey used security crises to justify his tightening grip on power.
It was the Civil Rights Act, which Democratic president Lyndon Johnson embraced and 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater opposed, that would define the Democrats as the party of civi...
Challenges to President Obama’s legitimacy, which had begun with fringe conservative authors, talk-radio personalities, TV talking heads, and bloggers, was soon embodied in a mass political movement:...
Although Gingrich was succeeded as Speaker by Dennis Hastert, the real power fell into the hands of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Nicknamed the Hammer, DeLay shared Gingrich’s partisan ruthlessness...
The rise of right-wing media also affected Republican officeholders. During the Obama administration, Fox News commentators and right-wing radio personalities almost uniformly adopted a no compromise...
The USA PATRIOT Act, signed into law by George W. Bush in October 2001, never would have passed had the September 11 attacks not occurred the previous month.
Norms of forbearance are especially important in presidential democracies. As Juan Linz argued, divided government can easily bring deadlock, dysfunction, and constitutional crisis. Unrestrained presi...