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...
The plan was reminiscent of the Chávez government’s repeated moves to strip opposition-run city governments of their control over local hospitals, police forces, ports, and other infrastructure. Unlik...
The new leader’s threatening words often have a boomerang effect. If the media feels threatened, it may abandon restraint and professional standards in a desperate effort to weaken the government. And...
The device the founders came up with was the Electoral College. Article II of the Constitution created an indirect election system that reflected Hamilton’s thinking in Federalist 68:
Party gatekeepers were shells of what they once were, for two main reasons. One was a dramatic increase in the availability of outside money, accelerated (though hardly caused) by the Supreme Court’s...
Huq and Ginsburg recently warned that the constitutional and legal safeguards of [American] democracy…would prove to be fairly easy to manipulate in the face of a truly antidemocratic leader.
Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company. One of the richest men in the world in the early twentieth century, Ford was a modern version of the kind of extremist demagogue Hamilton had warned...
Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic.
Donald Trump, by contrast, has rarely exhibited forbearance in any context. The chances of a conflict occurring on his watch are also considerable. They would be for any president—the United States fo...
Despite their vast differences, Hitler, Mussolini, and Chávez followed routes to power that share striking similarities. Not only were they all outsiders with a flair for capturing public attention, b...
By the 2000s, married white Christians constituted barely 40 percent of the electorate, and they were now concentrated in the Republican Party.
A comparative approach also reveals how elected autocrats in different parts of the world employ remarkably similar strategies to subvert democratic institutions. As these patterns become visible, the...
In the 1950s, married white Christians were the overwhelming majority—nearly 80 percent—of American voters, divided more or less equally between the two parties.
But presidents have historically exercised it with great restraint, seeking advice from the Justice Department and never issuing pardons for self-protection or political gain.
There is a mounting perception that democracy is in retreat all over the world. Venezuela. Thailand. Turkey. Hungary. Poland.
The easiest way to deal with potential opponents is to buy them off. Most elected autocrats begin by offering leading political, business, or media figures public positions, favors, perks, or outright...
Rebuilding democratic norms after a civil war is never easy, and America was no exception. The wounds of war healed slowly; Democrats and Republicans only grudgingly accepted one another as legitimate...
Populists tend to deny the legitimacy of established parties, attacking them as undemocratic and even unpatriotic. They tell voters that the existing system is not really a democracy but instead has b...
Polarization can destroy democratic norms. When socioeconomic, racial, or religious differences give rise to extreme partisanship, in which societies sort themselves into political camps whose worldvi...