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...

The Civil War broke America's democracy. One-third of American states did not participate in the 1864 election; twenty-two of fifty Senate seats and more than a quarter of House seats were left...

The erosion of basic norms expanded the zone of acceptable political action. Several years before shots were fired at Fort Sumter, partisan violence pervaded Congress. Yale historian Joanne Freeman...

There is a mounting perception that democracy is in retreat all over the world. Venezuela. Thailand. Turkey. Hungary. Poland.

Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic.

The police can crack down on opposition protest while tolerating acts of violence by progovernment thugs

To better understand how elected autocrats subtly undermine institutions, it's helpful to imagine a soccer game. To consolidate power, would-be authoritarians must capture the referees, sideline at...

Social policies that benefit everyone-Social Security and Medicare are prime examples-could help diminish resentment, build bridges across large swaths of the American electorate, and lock into place...

One way of tackling our deepening partisan divide, then, would be to genuinely address the bread-and-butter concerns of long-neglected segments of the population-no matter their ethnicity.

Seeking to diminish minority groups' influence in the party-and we cannot emphasize this strongly enough-is the wrong way to reduce polarization.

Challenges to President Obama's legitimacy, which had begun with fringe conservative authors, talk-radio personalities, TV talking heads, and bloggers, was soon embodied in a mass political movement:...

Donald Trump's first year in office followed a familiar script. Like Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, America's new president began his tenure by launching blistering...

This perception may explain the rise of a discourse that distinguishes "real Americans" from those associated with liberals and the Democratic Party.

When we agree with our political rivals at least some of the time, we are less likely to view them as mortal enemies.

Concerned about the court's history of striking down pro-labor legislation, Perón's allies in congress impeached three of the justices on the grounds of malfeasance {a fourth resigned before he could...

In his 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, historian Richard Hofstadter described the phenomenon of status anxiety, which, he believed, is most likely to emerge when groups' social...