Suchergebnisse

In a last-minute attempt to grow voter presence at the booths on the 15th of October, Poland's ruling party announced it would be combining the upcoming parliamentary elections with a referendum vote on not one, but four issues. This provides the governing powers with an additional electoral campaign just for them – misnamed as the referendum – to draw public attention to the questions asked. After all, they were drafted by those seeking reelection and focus on matters most used in their political agenda.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is once again proposing the dissolution of the National Electoral Institute. Mass protests in Mexico City have called the constitutional reform a threat to democracy.

Laws governing electoral issues (hereinafter electoral laws) are vital to representation in a democracy and its existence. This short post outlines why and how electoral laws should be subject to higher approval requirements and heightened judicial review.

As Ghana prepares for the upcoming 2024 general election, the importance of ensuring a free and fair democratic process has never been more critical. Since 2020, across the Sahel, seven countries have experienced coups d’etats, forming what some analysts label a "coup belt." Despite this trend, Ghana has a relatively enduring democracy, but showing signs […]
The post Pioneering Partnership for Change: Collaborative Electoral Dispute Resolution appeared first on International Republican Institute.

It is hard to imagine a stable democracy having to confront the legal challenges presented by Donald Trump's bid for reelection. Courts have found him to be responsible for sexual assault, defamation and fraud, all in relatively quick succession. Taken together with repeated acts of demagogy and cruelty, the various legal proceedings reinforce the sense that Trump simply does not belong within the bounds of legitimate democratic contestation. But the charges against him thus far are civil claims that have no formal bearing on his bid for office. Nor do they seem to affect public opinion as the polarized electoral environment has little intermediate play that might be swayed by scandal, legal condemnation, or even the sense that enough is enough.

Introduction Once the reformation of suffrage (see Reform #1) is accomplished – laying down the foundation of enlightened democracy –, the transformation of the united Europe's (henceforward Republic of the United Europe or RUE) political system is the next priority. As any political system is complex and their institutions are interconnected, I am going to […]
The post Reform #2: Political system (vol. 1) – European electoral system appeared first on Enlightened Europism.

Last week, a five-judge bench of the Indian Supreme Court delivered a significant verdict adjudicating the constitutionality of the Electoral Bond Scheme ("EBS"). The EBS introduced a novel method of making 'anonymous' donations to Indian political parties, both by individuals and a body of individuals. The judgment makes a democracy-enabling jurisprudential step in extending the right to information of voters to the details of political funding received by political parties in an effort to cement transparency and accountability as the central values of the electoral exercise.

What if we harnessed the collective wisdom of the crowds and delegated democratic leadership to the masses?

In her book "Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century", Yale political scientist Hélène Landemore proposes a radically new vision for "what genuine democratic representation means and how we could open up our narrow electoral institutions to ordinary citizens, including via [what she calls] open mini-publics." Drawing from ancient Athenian democracy of the past and the promise of harnessing digital technologies of the future, she joins Bethany and Luigi to talk through this vision of participatory democracy. They discuss how to best harness human nature for agency and impact, ensure transparency to provide accountability in the face of private vested interests, and ultimately its implications for market capitalism.

Dhaka, Bangladesh – From October 8 to 11, 2023, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) deployed a bipartisan, international delegation to provide an independent and impartial assessment of electoral preparations in advance of Bangladesh’s upcoming 12th Parliamentary Elections; examine factors that could affect the integrity and viability of the electoral […]
The post Upcoming Elections a Litmus Test for Bangladesh Democracy appeared first on International Republican Institute.

Shehbaz Sharif was sworn in as Pakistan's new prime minister Sunday amid a swirl of accusations that his party, in concert with the Pakistani military, rigged the elections.Earlier this month, voters in Pakistan woke up to what initially appeared to be an overwhelming victory to former Prime Minister Imran Khan's party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and a strong rebuke to the powerful military-backed government in the country's parliamentary elections. Instead, the election was ultimately called for the military's preferred candidate, Sharif, of the conservative Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) party.Early results, broadcast widely by the Pakistani media, had shown a landslide victory for PTI. After the election was called for Sharif's party, nonpartisan observers like the Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN) found that there were election law violations at over two-thirds of polling sites, which almost certainly helped change the outcomes.This was in addition to unprecedented efforts by the Pakistani military to discourage voter turnout and intimidate candidates running with the populist PTI, including forcing PTI-aligned candidates to run as independents, banning the PTI's iconic cricket bat symbol from the ballot in a country where a significant number of illiterate voters rely on those symbols to identify candidates, and widespread mobile outages.Late in the evening of the election, after an unusual gap in media coverage, constituencies where televised results and hard documentation (known as "Form 45s") had shown PTI-backed candidates with commanding leads were suddenly showing "official" results in which PML-N candidates had surged to improbable leads, in some cases with PTI-backed candidates losing votes. A high-ranking elections official in Rawalpindi, a city housing the military headquarters abutting the capital Islamabad, later confessed to flipping 13 constituencies against PTI-aligned candidates and accused the Election Commission of Pakistan and military leadership of orchestrating electoral theft. In spite of these efforts to ostensibly skew the results in the PMLN's favor, official results still showed the PTI with 93-seat plurality, eclipsing the PMLN's 75 seats. But reducing the potentially-enormous PTI mandate into a bare plurality left the party incapable of overcoming a coalition of the PMLN and the PPP — Pakistan's other dynastic political party — and forming a government. Members of the U.S. Congress from across the political spectrum have come out with statements sounding the alarm on the Pakistani military's election interference, vote rigging, and fraud. A number of lawmakers are specifically calling on the State Department to refuse to recognize the results of Pakistan's election until there is an independent investigation into the vote rigging and fraud. Growing pressure from Congress, advocates, and Pakistani-Americans, many of whom support PTI, has forced the State Department to think carefully about its next moves. House Foreign Affairs Committee members like Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.) and Rep. John James (R-Mich.) were among the lawmakers stressing the importance of making sure the U.S. does not recognize an illegitimate government in Pakistan. "Now is the time for the international community to stand on the side of the people of Pakistan," Rep. Wild said. "We cannot recognize a new government until it is clear that democracy has prevailed." Progressives, establishment Democrats, and even Republicans have spoken out in recent days to express support for the right of the Pakistani people to a democratically elected government. More than two dozen lawmakers, led by Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), sent a letter to the Biden administration on Wednesday demanding it withhold recognition of the new government until there's an investigation. The State Department's response, on the other hand, has been mixed. Not long after military and police forces moved to suppress the election results, Biden's State Department put out a statement calling for an investigation into the election fraud. "Claims of interference or fraud should be fully investigated," spokesperson Matthew Miller said. However, he added, "the United States is prepared to work with the next Pakistani government, regardless of party." Pressure from activists and lawmakers like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) likely compelled the State Department to issue a recent call on Pakistan's government to restore access to X (formerly known as Twitter) during an extensive blackout in the country.It remains a question how committed the State Department is to seeing this through. At a press briefing earlier this month, Miller said the U.S. wants to see the vote rigging investigated by "Pakistan's legal system." It is widely known, however, that Pakistan's legal system is an arm of the regime. Courts in Pakistan have already thrown cases out, and it was the Supreme Court that essentially banned PTI candidates from running in the election when it ruled they could not use their party symbol on ballots. When Intercept reporter Ryan Grim pressed Miller on this fact, pointing to growing congressional calls for an independent investigation, Miller replied: "I don't know what body they're proposing." But the State Department has had no problem assessing elections and suggesting actions against them in the past. They just appear stronger and more categorical. In July 2023, the State Department declared that the Cambodian national elections "were neither free nor fair." When Uganda saw its government undermine the 2021 general election with violence, intimidation, and other suppression tactics, Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the actions and announced visa restrictions "on those believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, undermining the democratic process in Uganda." On Sunday, the State Department condemned the "sham parliamentary elections" in Belarus. "Impossible to hold free and fair elections in a climate of fear and with 1400+ political prisoners," Miller said in a tweet. Anyone familiar with recent U.S. foreign policy knows well that Washington is never shy about condemning purportedly undemocratic behavior abroad, even using it as justification for military interventions and sanctions regimes.A chorus for an election audit is growing domestically in Pakistan. Election monitors with varying degrees of independence from officials in Islamabad, ranging from FAFEN to the Pattan Development Organization, have called the results into question and demanded action from the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). Pattan officials have gone even further in their assessment of electoral fraud and have demanded an investigation of motives: "Since Pattan had observed and analysed the whole electoral process of the election, we are confident to note that rigging at each step of the election was likely to be part of a grand strategy. Therefore, it appears necessary to investigate the role of its authors, the implementors and who are the possible beneficiaries." Pressure is growing from the halls of the U.S. Congress on the State Department to endorse such an audit before recognizing any PMLN-PPP coalition government formed under fraudulent terms. Senior Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) is among the latest and most significant of those voices, addressing his message to the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S.: "Pakistani authorities must fully investigate the allegations of fraud and electoral interference. Without a credible investigation, a new government will struggle to bring the Pakistani people together." Sen. Van Hollen also invoked the specter of Pakistan's looming IMF negotiations, a challenge that has plagued the country's fragile governments and economy for years and one that has similarly been raised by Imran Khan in his own letter asking the IMF not to extend a loan to an undemocratic Pakistani government.The coming weeks will be a crucial moment in the future of Pakistan's fragile democracy.

For our weekly 'Ideas on Europe' editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we have the pleasure to welcome Dr Theofanis Exadaktylos, from the University of Surrey, in the UK.       1. Why now? The term in office of the New Democracy government under PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis that started in […]
The post Electoral Law Games in Search for a Majority Government: The Greek Election of 21 May in Seven Questions appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

“To read the headlines, one could be forgiven for thinking that democracy is in terminal decline around the world. Yet for all the challenges we face, 2024 is set to be a historic year for elections. Nearly 100 countries are scheduled to hold electoral contests, and more than half the global population lives in countries that […]
The post The Free World Should Celebrate 2024 as a Landmark Year for Democracy appeared first on International Republican Institute.

On February 21, the Federal Supreme Court of Iraq ruled on a set of cases pertaining to the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) electoral law. The Court declared that the 11 parliamentary reserved seats for minorities were unconstitutional. So too was the KRG's single electoral district model. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) officials and their […]

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Chilean President Salvador Allende and ushered in a particularly brutal and bloody dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, which lasted until 1990.
The role of the CIA in preparing the conditions for the coup, as well as subsequent U.S. support for the dictatorship, contributed heavily to the perception in Latin America and beyond that Washington, despite its claims to champion democracy, preferred "friendly" authoritarian regimes over the possibility that non-aligned or democratically elected left-leaning governments could take power in regions that it considered to be within its sphere of influence.
Investigations in the mid-1970s into the U.S. role in Chile also led to unprecedented legislation — sometimes enforced, sometimes not – designed to ensure greater Congressional oversight of U.S. covert operations and to curb U.S. military and other assistance to governments and armies that abuse fundamental human rights.
To note the 50th anniversary, RS spoke with Peter Kornbluh, the veteran director of the Chilean Documentation Project of the non-governmental National Security Archive, whose work has resulted in the declassification of thousands of previously secret government documents related to U.S. relations with Chile from the 1960's through the Pinochet dictatorship.
A prize-winning author, Kornbluh published "The Pinochet Files: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability," which the Los Angeles Times selected as a "best book" of 2003. As director of the NSA's Cuba Documentation Project, Kornbluh has also written several books on U.S.-Cuban relations.
Kornbluh spoke with RS from Chile, where he is participating in the country's observance of today's anniversary. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
RS: You are the most distinguished researcher on the coup and, in particular, the U.S. role. Briefly, can you say what support the U.S. lent to the coup both before and after?
Kornbluh: You know, it doesn't have to be me saying it. We can just simply quote Henry Kissinger briefing Richard Nixon five days after the coup. He [said], "The Chilean thing was getting consolidated." And Nixon expresses his slight preoccupation about whether the U.S. role is going to be exposed. Nixon says, "Our hand doesn't show on this, does it though?" Kissinger's response is a three-sentence summary of what the U.S. role was. First, he says, "We didn't do it." And he's referring to the fact that the United States was not on the ground 50 years ago today, with agents driving the tanks, supplying the intelligence, piloting the planes that bombed the [presidential] Moneda Palace. The United States did not stand side by side that day with the Chilean military as they destroyed Chile's long democratic tradition.
And then Kissinger continues, "I mean, we helped them. Blank" — a word that is omitted, which you can fill in — "created the conditions as best as possible." And that's an accurate summary of what the U.S. role was. Starting almost the day after Allende's election [in 1970] but weeks before he actually was inaugurated as President of Chile, it was the U.S. goal and mission to foment a coup in Chile, to create what the CIA referred to as a "coup climate" and maximize the likelihood that Allende's model would be a model of failure. And if that also, at the same time, created the conditions, "as best as possible for a military coup," so be it. It was the political goal of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon to assure that Allende did not have a successful model of electoral socialist change that other countries in the world might want to emulate, and the United States [intervened] through both an invisible economic blockade, a cut off of multilateral credits, and a five-pronged covert operations effort that targeted the military. The U.S. funneled a bunch of money into El Mercurio, which was kind of, in those days, the Fox News of Chile, openly pushing for a coup against the Allende government. Those were the operations that helped, as the CIA itself put it, set the stage for the September 11,1973, coup.
So it wasn't that the United States had a direct role on the ground here. It wasn't that the Chilean military were puppets of the United States of America. It was that the United States contributed to a set of conditions that would enhance the likelihood that there would be social pressure for the military to move, and the military did move.
RS: What was the reaction by the Nixon-Kissinger government, if we can put it that way, in the years that followed the coup?
Kornbluh: You can start with the hours that followed. Tomorrow will be September 12th, the 50th anniversary of Kissinger calling what was known as the Washington Special Action Group together and mobilizing everybody to help the Pinochet military regime consolidate. It's quite explicit. And as part of this gathering, one US. official says to Kissinger, "I guess our policy on Allende worked pretty well." And Kissinger jokes to everybody, "President Nixon is worried that we might want to send somebody to Allende's funeral." Kissinger says, "I told him we didn't plan to do that." And then another official in the meeting pipes up and says, "Only, of course, if you want to go, Secretary Kissinger." So they're joking around literally 24 hours after the coup about how successful they were.
Nixon and Kissinger just after the coup are commiserating. They want the credit for having overthrown Allende, and they're commiserating about what Nixon calls the "liberal crap" in the U.S. newspapers, and Kissinger says the newspapers are "bleating" because Allende has been overthrown and has died. Nixon says, "isn't that something?" And Kissinger basically says they should be celebrating. And he tells Nixon, "In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes." That conversation took place five days after the coup. By then, Kissinger had reconfigured U.S. policy almost overnight.
It had been a policy to destabilize Allende's ability to govern. Almost overnight after the coup, the policy had a complete reversal. It's now a policy to help the new military regime consolidate, and that policy continues all the way through the first three years of the Pinochet regime. It was that first year when the spigots of economic aid and military support to Pinochet [began] opening, including helping Pinochet build what became the most sinister and repressive secret police agency in all of Latin America, the DINA [Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional].
That policy starts to change after the September 1976 act of terrorism in Washington DC that took the lives of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. By the second term of the Reagan administration, the United States has had enough of Pinochet's megalomania, his terrorism. The United States eventually abandons him, but it's a long and incredible history.
RS: You had congressional committees in the mid 1970s that expressed considerable shock about U.S. covert operations, and Chile was among the most important. Do you see Congress as assuming its responsibilities or failing to do so in regard to Pinochet's Chile? And how much of a precedent, if any at all, did that create or help create?
Kornbluh: The scandal of Chile broke in September of 1974 in an article done by that intrepid reporter, Seymour Hersh, where he had gotten hold of secret testimony that CIA Director William Colby had given to the House Armed Services Committee in which he had discussed the whole destabilization program. The scandal was immediate.
After the Hersh story ran, the U.S. Senate reconvenes. Frank Church was named head of another special committee, which became the famous Church committee, and Congress did its very first investigation of the CIA covert operations in general and a case study of Chile in particular. The House Committee under Congressman Otis Pike also started to look at Chile. That whole process was a lot less organized and a lot more chaotic. The Church committee reports really shook the foundations of Americans' perception of their own government. It became quite clear that their own government — in their name and without their knowledge — was intervening to overthrow a democratically elected government and bolstering a murderous, ruthless military regime.
Congress moved very quickly, not just because of the Church Committee investigation but because of a moral reaction of disbelief that our government didn't give a damn about human rights violations and was continuing to embrace this murderous regime. It was because of Chile that heroic senators and congressmen — Edward Kennedy in the Senate, Congressman Tom Harkin from Iowa — got together and drafted the first human rights amendments to U.S. laws governing military and economic aid abroad. Those laws were inspired by and directed initially at Henry Kissinger, who was just basically — can I say kissing Pinochet's ass? Kissinger was telling his own staff not to say anything to him anymore about human rights. These laws were passed, and, for the first time, human rights became an institutionalized criterion of U.S. foreign policy. Congress stepped up and represented the values of the American people in pushing those laws forward.Some people here in Chile at the time of the coup, including a Methodist minister named Joe Eldridge, luckily got out. He returned to Washington so outraged that the United States was supporting the atrocities that were taking place that he founded the Washington Office on Latin America, and, with Amnesty International, almost single handedly created the modern human rights movement in Washington as we know it today. He sought to create a different U.S. foreign policy, one that better reflected the values of the American people.RS: As you look back, this was Congress's high point, and it drew certain lessons from there, some of which have stuck, not necessarily all. But how has this affected long-term U.S.-Latin American relations? The U.S. intervention covert intervention there and its support for Pinochet, what kind of effect do you think it's had on U.S.-Latin American relations over the past 50 years?
Kornbluh: The U.S. role in Chile became a horrendous stain on any credible argument that the United States supported democracy, opposed military dictatorships, opposed human rights violations — all the things that the United States supposedly wanted to claim that it stood for. And even though presidents later, starting with Carter, have stood for those things, and the United States still is supposed to stand for those things, the history of the U.S. role in Chile has made it very difficult for that argument, even 50 years later, to be credibly presented.
One way to understand what the United States did in Chile is to compare it today to what Russia is doing to Ukraine. The Russian intervention in Ukraine was essentially inspired by the same issues that Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon feared with the election of Allende. [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky had been popularly elected. Ukraine was turning to the West. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin saw that as an affront to his hegemony in the region. In the case of Chile, it's not an open war, but it was a similar type of effort to control the region, to undermine a model that might change the broader influence of the United States if other countries emulated Allende's electoral model of change.
We're not really talking about the past. So many countries, including the United States of America, are facing the deterioration of democratic institutions and the onslaught and threat of authoritarian rule not just in the United States and Chile, but also in Spain, Sweden, Italy, etc. You have a situation where democracy and its meaning are slipping, and the forces of dictatorial rule are growing. Chile is a reminder of the extreme dangers to all of us if that process continues. Chileans have already lived through it once. They don't want to live through it again. That's why the resounding slogan at the official ceremony today from Chilean President Gabriel Boric was "nunca mas." Never again.

Quotes from Josep Colomer:Constitutional Polarization. A Critical Review of the U.S. Political SystemRoutledge, 2023.  CLICK to purchaseA collection of 6 posts. 1 - Why a Federation? The aim of the Convention in Philadelphia was not to experiment with democracy in a large territory, but to create a "stronger", "firmer" government able to defend the new independent states from the British and other foreign troops still over the continent. The priority was to create a standing army, to pay the debt for the War for Independence, and to introduce the subsequent federal taxes. The basic institutions were the states-appointed Senate and the mighty President with war powers.Some delegates warned that in the new and independent United States, people would not accept, again, taxation without representation. That's why the House of Representatives was embodied as the democratic component of the government. Then, the delegates responded to its perils by designing a series of "filters" and "checks" to prevent the House from prevailing over the other components. The separation of powers and their institutional checks were a cap, intended to tame and temper democracy. NOT A DEMOCRACYMadison warned against "the amazing violence and turbulence of the democratic spirit," and stated, "democratic communities may be unsteady, and be led to action by the impulse of the moment." Later, in the campaign to ratify the Constitution in New York, he would hold that, in the past, democracies "have ever been found spectacles of turbulence and contention … and as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."Alexander Hamilton would allege that "the zeal for the rights of the people has been a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government." In his view, democracies are manipulated by people who "commence as demagogues and end being tyrants."Gouverneur Morris was an influential delegate from Pennsylvania who is credited as the main redactor of the final text of the Constitution. He also cautioned against "the turbulence, the precipitation, changeableness, and excess" of democratic assemblies.Other delegates in the Convention referred to "the fury" and "the folly" of democracy. One confessed, "It's the anarchy, or rather worse than anarchy of a pure democracy, which I fear." Another simply stated, "democracy, the worst of all political evils." DIVINE HANDAbout the divine hand guiding the constituents, see, for example:     "America felt that the hand of providence was on the young republic … There can be little question that the hand of providence has been on a nation which finds a Washington, a Lincoln or a Roosevelt when it needs him," Seymour M. Lipset, American Exceptionalism, W. W. Norton, 1997, pp. 13–14.    "I can't wait to go to Heaven and meet the Framers and tell them the work that you did in putting together our Constitution is a work of genius. Thank you. It was divinely inspired," Mike Pence, Vice-President of the United States in December 2020. Reported by Gregory Jacob, Counselor of the Vice-President, to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, June 16, 2022. 2- An elected MonarchyMONTESQUIEUIn the imaginary Constitution of England described by Montesquieu, the powers of the three institutions were so challenged and limited by mutual checks that the most likely result would be governmental paralysis. He held that in order to prevent abuses, "Power should stop ["arrête" in French] power"; brake, not just "check" as it was sloppily translated. In Montesquieu's words, with these rules, "these three powers should naturally form a state of repose or inaction." In the perhaps unlikely or infrequent case that public affairs required some action, he conceded that the three powers should be "forced to move, but still in concert." Madison would only ambiguously paraphrase, "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."   There was a problem: Montesquieu had misunderstood how the British system actually worked. What he described was closer to an old-fashioned, outdated model that, in the best of cases, could be identified with a transitory, provisional past period in England's history. It did not correspond with the political system in motion when he visited London, and even less with practices contemporary to the Framers gathered in Philadelphia several decades later. By following Montesquieu's obsolete account, the authors of the US Constitution misunderstood the source.MONARCHYThe monarchical proposal was most explicitly presented by Alexander Hamilton. He did not attend most of the Convention sessions, but on June 18, he showed up, took the floor, and delivered a prepared speech for more than five hours, no break for lunch, that left the delegates flabbergasted. Hamilton proposed a president that would be chosen by electors and serve for life. Such an "elective Monarch" would appoint the state governors and could veto state laws. At the federal level, the president would also be the arbiter for expected regular conflict between the Senate also appointed for life and the popular House: "This check is a Monarch," he suggested, "capable of resisting the popular current." The president, with absolute veto over congressional legislation, would be "a salutary check upon the legislative body." According to Ron Chernow, his biographer, Hamilton had written in his personal notes for his Convention speech that the president would not only be appointed for life but also "ought to be hereditary and to have so much power that it will not be his interest to risk much to acquire more." Yet, probably sensing the audience's reluctance to his already delivered proposals, he skipped that part.    Adams, who would become the US' first vice president and the second president, was suspected of having monarchist leanings. He would propose calling George Washington "His Majesty the President," thought hereditary rule inevitable, and, after Washington's childless tenure prevented it, he would be the first to make his son run for president.3-The Founders' Portraits in WashingtonWhat one can see and guess about these characters by looking at eight portraits,  the first five by Gilbert Stuart and the next two by John Trumbull at the National Gallery of Art, and the eighth by Joseph Siffred Duplessis at the National Portrait Gallery.             4- How the System Actually Works CHECKS AND GRIEVANCESAlexander Hamilton clearly lay on the side of scant congressional legislation. He said, "The injury that may possibly be done by defecting a few good laws will be amply compensated by the advantages of preventing a number of bad ones." It was like fasting for the sake of not being poisoned; the result is anemia, not good political health.In practice, there are checks but no balances. The existing blockingmechanisms in the US constitutional system do not produce balances in favor of a few good laws. They are largely unbalanced in favor of the Presidency and its powers, which is aggravated by the biases of the presidential elections.The US constitutional plan, instead of relying upon positive institutionalincentives, such as the expectation of sharing power in the Cabinet, countedon politicians' virtuous behavior. Yet, absent our better angels' motivations, the system of negative checks becomes a machine for sustained conflict. PRESIDENTIALISMThe greatest increase in presidential power has derived from wars. From General George Washington, leader of the Revolutionary War for Independence, through Theodore Roosevelt, a high-level combatant in the Spanish-American War in the Caribbean, eleven of the first twenty-five presidents were war men. Whether as generals, national heroes, or upper-echelon military officers, Andrew Jackson, William Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley fought in the wars against the British, the Indians, the Mexicans, or, in the Civil War, other Americans, and their military feats helped them to be elected.Alexander Hamilton had already identified the management of foreign affairs as the main way to expand executive powers: "It is of the nature of war to increase the executive, at the expense of the legislative authority." Discussing rates of presidents, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed that war "made it easier for a president to achieve greatness.            5- No Parties, But PolarizationNO PARTIESThe Framers were confident about the future of the republic because they miscalculated that in a great, expanding, and diverse Union with multiple institutional checks, it would be unlikely that nationwide parties could be created. They expected that the best individuals with "enlightened views and virtuous sentiments" would lead the new politics against "the pestilential influence of party animosities" and "the pestilential breath of faction," as scorned by both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, respectively. Currently, the two major political parties in the US encompass a range of policy proposals and ideological orientations comparable to the typical European system with multiple parties: There are liberals and socialists within the Democratic Party, and conservatives and populists within the Republican Party, with the minor Greens and Libertarians flanking each side. However, the political competition is polarized by two parties or candidates because of the electoral system and the election of the president.POLITICAL, NO SOCIAL POLARIZATION The polarization of parties and candidates is more politically consequential than the polarization of voters. Generally, parties can lead and carry voters in their direction, either to closeness or to distance from each other, but to a limited extent. That is because it is less difficult to coordinate and mobilize a few thousand politicians than millions of voters. If parties and political leaders move to radicalize their positions and provoke polarization, voters may follow and become more polarized in their preferences, but usually less than the politicians and parties come to be. If, conversely, parties moderate and converge in their positions, voters may also moderate themselves but less than the partisan politicians do.FEAR AND NATIONAL FERVOR During the Cold War, many citizens developed a sense of unity, love of patriotic values, and pride in the American way of life. They trusted the rulers, who appeared as their protectors and providers of security. Challenging the government in the middle of a war would have been regarded as treason. In parallel, the ruling officials were able to keep many state secrets, their policy performances were not seriously evaluated, they enjoyed discrete privacy from the media, and gained support and devotion from the public.After the Cold War, without the threat of a nuclear war, the public lost their fear. There was a new openness to indiscretion and transgression. The new political atmosphere became the opposite of the previous period: a general mistrust of government, close scrutiny of corrupt practices, leaks of confidential plans and messages, frequent scandals about politicians' business or private affairs, and loud calls for more transparency and accountability. After the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the "peace dividend" that appeared to be a potential source of domestic progress led instead to domestic mayhem. With just a little exaggeration, one could say that, over the years, the international Cold War was replaced with a domestic cold war.          6- Towards the 2024 ElectionPRIMARIESThe primaries mechanism is a substitute for the formation of multiple parties. To build a majority, in Europe and other democracies, a coalition of multiple parties must be formed after the election; in the US, a coalition of multiple factions within a party must be formed before the election. In European parliamentary systems with multiple parties, the mess comes after the election; sometimes, the formation of a coalition in parliament for the choice of a prime minister takes months. In the US, the mess is before the election; the process of simplifying the pluralistic setting to only two major presidential candidates starts more than a year before Election Day. These alternative experiences both confirm that, in the absence of a traditional monarch, simplifying a complex society to one single executive leader is always a challenging endeavor.The main drawback of the system of partisan primaries is that it may not produce a majority in support for the winning candidate but it can result in the nomination of an extreme or unqualified demagogue who would be rejected by a majority of voters.The turnout in the presidential primaries has increased to nearly 50% of the party voters in the general election since the 2010s. However, the number of primary candidates within each party has also increased, up to double digits in recent seasons, which reduced the support for the winner. In 2016, Donald Trump was voted in the primaries by only 22% of his voters in the general election; Hillary Clinton, by 26% of her votes in the general election; and in 2020, Joe Biden by only 23%.SPLITTING CANDIDATESIf popular participation increases, partisanship becomes more compact, and the potential political pluralism of the country is not well articulated by the party system, third and further candidates reappear. They indirectly made a winner by splitting partisan support in at least four of the first eight presidential elections after the Cold War. The independent Ross Perot split Republican voters twice, in 1992 and 1996, and twice produced a Democratic winner with a minority of popular votes. The other way around, the Green Party's Ralph Nader split Democratic voters in 2000 and produced a Republican winner with a minority of popular votes. Also, the Greens and other candidacies absorbed potential Democratic voters in 2016 and helped make a Republican candidate the winner with a minority of popular votes.CAN TRUMP RETURN?There are also precedents of traitors who persisted in politics, ran for office, were elected, and provoked further turmoil. At least two former presidents joined the Confederacy during the Civil War. Former Whig President John Tyler, who had replaced William Harrison at his death one month after entering office, was first elected to and chaired the Virginia Secession Convention, and during the Civil War, he was elected first to the Provisional Confederation Congress and then to the Confederate House of Representatives. Former Democratic President Franklin Pierce collaborated closely with Confederacy President Jefferson Davis. Also, former President Andrew Johnson was elected senator on an anti-Reconstruction platform.Collection:1- Why a Federation2- An Elected Monarchy3- Psychological Portraits of the Founders and Framers4– How the System Actually Works5- No Parties, But Polarization6- Towards the 2024 Election