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...
In an act without precedent in U.S. history, House Republicans had politicized the impeachment process, downgrading it, in the words of congressional experts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, to just a...
If democratic elections continued, political scientist V. O. Key observed, it would have been fatal to the status of black belt whites.
Governments may also use their control of referees to legally sideline the opposition media, often through libel or defamation suits.
For demogagues hemmed in by constitutional constraints, a crisis represents an opportunity to begin to dismantle the inconvenient and sometimes threatening checks and balances that come with democrati...
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.
The higher President Trump’s approval rating, the more dangerous he is.
It was not just time, however, that healed partisan wounds. Mutual toleration was established only after the issue of racial equality was removed from the political agenda.
But the world had changed by 2016. Now, in a radical departure from historical precedent Senate Republicans denied the president’s authority to nominate a new justice. It was an extraordinary instance...
In 1993, New York's Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former social scientist, made an incisive observation: Humans have a limited ability to cope with people behaving in ways that depart...
Another factor affecting the fate of our democracy is public opinion. If would-be authoritarians can’t turn to the military or organize large-scale violence, they must find other means of persuading a...