Constitutional Hardball and the United States Supreme Court
In their seminal work How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt identify two principal constitutional guardrails that, they argue,...
Universities
The End of Nicaraguan Democracy
In 1984, Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) won the presidency after having overthrown the almost ten-year...
The Threat Against Democracy in the Era of “Fake News”
In 2016, American trust of mass media was at an all-time low. Gallup found that of 1,020 adult Americans surveyed, 32% reported having a “great...
The Fourth Estate: Democracy, Journalism, and the Social Media Age
According to James Carey, "without journalism there is no democracy, but without democracy there is no journalism either.” In other words, the...
Conservative Gatekeeping of the United States Supreme Court
Right wing, conservative senators are gatekeeping the Supreme Court, in a way that they failed to during the political rise of President Donald...
The Case of Alexei Navalny: A Study in Mutual Tolerance, Non-Political Crimes, and Surveillance
At the end of August, while returning from campaigning for local elections in the Siberian city of Tomsk, Russian opposition figure and...
Takes Two to Tango: How the Democratic Elites Have Fueled Trump’s Fire
The 25th amendment, allows for a sitting President’s powers to be suspended if they become unfit for office. Section 4, which can suspend...
An Attack on Democracy in the Name of Bipartisanship
It is clear that increasing partisanship correlates with democratic erosion. Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik, in a candidate-choice experiment,...
Covert Erosion in the Czech Republic
Andrej Babiš outwardly does not appear to have the firmest grasp on power in the Czech Republic. The embattled billionaire Prime Minister has...