President Trump also tried to punish or purge agencies that acted with independence.
Norm breaking was also evident at the state level. Among the most notorious cases was the 2003 Texas redistricting plan.
Just as divine-right monarchies required forbearance, so do democracies. Think of democracy as a game that we want to keep playing indefinitely. To ensure future rounds of the game, players must refra...
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...
Even well-designed constitutions cannot, by themselves, guarantee democracy. For one, constitutions are always incomplete.
Democracy is grinding work. Whereas family businesses and army squadrons may be ruled by fiat, democracies require negotiation, compromise, and concessions.
La muerte de la democracia es inmediata y resulta evidente para todo el mundo.
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...
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...
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.
Party gatekeepers failed at three key junctures: the invisible primary, the primaries themselves, and the general election.
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...
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.
As we noted earlier, the chief executive’s constitutional power to pardon is without limit,
Among the most important figures to emerge during this period was Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic Catholic priest whose fiery nationalist radio program reached up to forty million listeners a...
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.