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...
Scorched-earth tactics often erode support for the opposition by scaring off moderates. And they unify progovernment forces, as even dissidents within the incumbent party close ranks in the face of an...
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.
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.
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...
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...
To find comparable behavior in this hemisphere one must look at Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
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...
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:...
If democratic elections continued, political scientist V. O. Key observed, it would have been fatal to the status of black belt whites.
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...
Most recently, the Erdoğan government in Turkey used security crises to justify his tightening grip on power.
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...
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...
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.
The abdication of political responsibility by existing leaders often marks a nation’s first step toward authoritarianism.
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...
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...
At a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, for example, he attacked Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, declaring, If I become president, oh, do they have problems. They are going to have such problems.
Blatant dictatorships - in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule - has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold...
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