Governments that cannot remove independent judges may bypass them through court packing.
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...
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.
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...
The higher President Trump’s approval rating, the more dangerous he is.
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...
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...
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...
Governments may also use their control of referees to legally sideline the opposition media, often through libel or defamation suits.
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...
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