It is difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities gave up their dominant status without a fight.
In the early 1990s, Gingrich and his team distributed memos to Republican candidates instructing them to use certain negative words to describe Democrats, including pathetic, sick, bizarre, betray, an...
In Poland, the governing Law and Justice Party had several of its initiatives blocked by the Constitutional Tribunal—the country’s highest authority on constitutional matters—between 2005 and 2007. Wh...
In Mexico, after the losing presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, insisted that the 2006 election was stolen from him, confidence in Mexico’s electoral system declined.
Even well-designed constitutions cannot, by themselves, guarantee democracy. For one, constitutions are always incomplete.
By contrast, when the government’s approval rating is low, media and opposition grow more brazen, judges become emboldened to stand up to the president, and allies begin to dissent.
But are constitutional safeguards, by themselves, enough to secure a democracy? We believe the answer is no.
To entrench themselves in power, however, governments must do more—they must also change the rules of the game. Authoritarians seeking to consolidate their power often reform the constitution, the ele...
These reform measures effectively killed democracy in the American South. Even though African Americans constituted a majority or near-majority of the population in many states, and even though black...
These attacks can be consequential: If the public comes to share the view that opponents are linked to terrorism and the media are spreading lies, it becomes easier to justify taking actions against t...
The rhetoric wasn’t limited to Tea Party activists. Republican politicians also questioned President Obama’s Americanness.
In his two-volume masterpiece, The American Commonwealth (1888), British scholar James Bryce wrote that it was not the U.S. Constitution itself that made the American political system work but rather...
In addition, whereas a narrow (urban, secular, progressive) anti-Trump coalition would reinforce the current axes of partisan division, a broader coalition would crosscut these axes and maybe even hel...
Democracy is grinding work. Whereas family businesses and army squadrons may be ruled by fiat, democracies require negotiation, compromise, and concessions.
A second approach is containment. Republicans who adopt this strategy may back the president on many issues, from judicial appointments to tax and health care reform, but draw a line at behavior they...
The convention system was an effective gatekeeper, in that it systematically filtered out dangerous candidates. Party insiders provided what political scientists called peer review.
La muerte de la democracia es inmediata y resulta evidente para todo el mundo.
Under Perón, opposition leader Ricardo Balbín was imprisoned for disrespecting the president during an election campaign. Balbín appealed to the supreme court, but since Perón had packed the court, he...
To comply with the letter of the law as stipulated in the Fifteenth Amendment, no mention of race could be made in efforts to restrict voting rights, so states introduced purportedly neutral poll taxe...
Throughout his life, Washington had learned that he gained power from his readiness to give it up. Thanks to his enormous prestige, this forbearance infused many of the American republic’s other nasce...