[The country’s Constitution was once the standard-bearer for the
world. Today, many other countries have much fairer systems for
electing their leaders and passing laws.]
[[link removed]]

HOW AMERICAN DEMOCRACY FELL SO FAR BEHIND  
[[link removed]]


 

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
September 5, 2023
The Atlantic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The country’s Constitution was once the standard-bearer for the
world. Today, many other countries have much fairer systems for
electing their leaders and passing laws. _

, Matt Chase

 

In the spring of 1814, 25 years after the ratification of America’s
Constitution, a group of 112 Norwegian men—civil servants, lawyers,
military officials, business leaders, theologians, and even a
sailor—gathered in Eidsvoll, a rural village 40 miles north of Oslo.
For five weeks, while meeting at the manor home of the businessman
Carsten Anker, the men debated and drafted what is today the world’s
second-oldest written constitution.

Like America’s Founders, Norway’s independence leaders were in a
precarious situation. Norway had been part of Denmark for more than
400 years, but after Denmark’s defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, the
victorious powers, led by Great Britain, decided to transfer the
territory to Sweden. This triggered a wave of nationalism in Norway.
Unwilling to be traded away “like a herd of cattle,” as one
observer at the time put it
[[link removed]],
Norwegians asserted their independence and elected the constitutional
assembly that met at Eidsvoll.

Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment and the promise of
self-government, Norway’s founders viewed the American experience as
a path to follow. A few decades earlier, the Americans had done what
the Norwegians now aspired to do: become independent from a foreign
power. The Norwegian press had spread news
[[link removed]] of
the American experiment, casting George Washington and Benjamin
Franklin as heroes. Although the press didn’t always get the story
right (it described the American president as a “monarch,”
reported that Washington had been “appointed dictator of the United
States for four years,” and referred to the vice president as a
“viceroy”), many of the men at Eidsvoll were quite familiar with
the workings of the American system. Christian Magnus Falsen, a
prominent independence advocate who took a leading role in the
constitution-writing process, even christened his son George Benjamin,
after Washington and Franklin. Falsen was deeply influenced by Madison
and Jefferson, too, later declaring that parts of the Norwegian
constitution were based “nearly exclusively” on the American
example.

Despite its flaws, the U.S. Constitution was a pioneering document.
America became the first large nation to rule itself without a
monarchy and instead fill its most important political offices via
regular elections. Over the next century, the American Constitution
served as a model for republican and democratic-minded reformers
across the world.

The United States no longer seems like a good model today. Since 2016,
America has experienced what political scientists call “democratic
backsliding.” The country has seen a surge in political violence;
threats against election workers; efforts to make voting harder; and a
campaign by the then-president to overturn the results of an
election—hallmarks of a democracy in distress. Organizations that
track the health of democracies around the world have captured this
problem in numerical terms. Freedom House’s Global Freedom Index
gives countries a score from 0 to 100 each year; 100 indicates the
most democratic. In 2015, the United States received a score of 90,
roughly in line with countries such as Canada, France, Germany, and
Japan. But since then, America’s score has declined steadily,
reaching 83 in 2021. Not only was that score lower than every
established democracy in Western Europe; it was lower than new or
historically troubled democracies such as Argentina, the Czech
Republic, Lithuania, and Taiwan.

The causes of America’s crisis are not simply a strongman and his
cultlike following. They are more endemic than that. Over the past two
centuries, America has undergone massive economic and demographic
change—industrializing and becoming much larger, more urban, and
more diverse. Yet our political institutions have largely remained
frozen in place. Today, American democracy is living with the
destabilizing consequences of this disjuncture.

Indeed, the problem lies in something many of us venerate: the U.S.
Constitution. America’s founding document, designed in a
pre-democratic era in part to protect against “tyranny of the
majority,” has generated the opposite problem: Electoral majorities
often cannot win power, and when they win, they often cannot govern.
Unlike any other presidential democracy, U.S. leaders can become
president despite losing the popular vote. The U.S. Senate, which
dramatically overrepresents low-population states by giving each state
equal representation regardless of population, is also frequently
controlled by a party that has lost the national popular vote. And due
to the Senate’s filibuster rules, majorities are routinely blocked
from passing normal legislation. Finally, because the Supreme
Court’s composition is determined by the president and Senate, which
have often not represented electoral majorities in the 21st century,
the Court has grown more and more divorced from majority public
opinion. Not only does the Constitution deliver outsize advantages to
partisan minorities; it has also begun to endanger American democracy.
With the Republican Party’s transformation into an extremist and
antidemocratic force under Donald Trump, the Constitution now protects
and empowers an authoritarian minority.

America was once the standard-bearer for democratic constitutions.
Today, however, it is more vulnerable to minority rule than any other
established democracy. Far from being a pioneer, America has become a
democratic laggard. How did this come to pass?

Consider what happened in Norway. Though inspired by the American
experience, Norway’s founding 1814 constitution was hardly
revolutionary. The country remained a hereditary monarchy, and kings
retained the right to appoint cabinets and veto legislation. Members
of Parliament were indirectly elected by regional electoral colleges,
and voting was limited to men who met certain property requirements.
Urban elites also gained a powerful built-in advantage in Parliament.
Norway was overwhelmingly rural in 1814: About 90 percent of the
electorate lived in the countryside. Because many peasants owned land
and could therefore vote, wealthy urbanites feared being overwhelmed
by the peasant majority. So the constitution established a fixed
2-to-1 ratio of rural to urban seats in Parliament—a ratio that
dramatically overrepresented cities, because rural residents actually
outnumbered urban residents by 10 to one. This was the so-called
Peasant Clause. Majority rule was further diluted by bicameralism:
Norway adopted an upper legislative chamber elected not by the people
but by the lower house of Parliament.

Like America’s 1789 Constitution, then, Norway’s 1814 constitution
included a range of undemocratic features. In fact, early 19th-century
Norway was considerably less democratic than the United States was.

Over the next two centuries, however, Norway underwent a series of
far-reaching democratic reforms—all under its original constitution.
Parliamentary sovereignty was established in the late 19th century,
and Norway became a genuine constitutional monarchy. A 1905
constitutional reform eliminated regional electoral colleges and
established direct elections for Parliament. Property restrictions on
voting were suspended in 1898, and universal (male and female)
suffrage came in 1913.

After 1913, Norway was a democracy. However, one major
counter-majoritarian institution remained: the Peasant Clause. By the
mid-20th century, urbanization had reversed the nature of the
malapportionment caused by the Peasant Clause. With half of the
population now living in cities, a fixed 2-to-1 rural-to-urban seat
ratio had come to overrepresent _rural _voters. Like the U.S.
Senate, then, the Peasant Clause threatened majority rule by inflating
the political power of sparsely populated areas—to the benefit of
conservative parties. Unlike in the United States, however, the major
political parties negotiated a constitutional reform that eliminated
the Peasant Clause in 1952. Norway took additional steps toward
majority rule when it reduced the voting age to 18 in 1978 and
eliminated its upper chamber of Parliament in 2009.

But Norway didn’t stop democratizing. As Norwegian society and
global norms changed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries,
constitutional and democratic rights were expanded in new ways.
Indigenous minorities, for example, gained new protections in a 1988
constitutional amendment. A 1992 constitutional amendment guaranteed
Norwegians the right to a healthy environment. In 2012, the
constitution was amended once again, this time to abolish Norway’s
official religion and guarantee equal rights to “all religious and
philosophical communities.” And in 2014, Norway adopted a set of
sweeping constitutional human- and social-rights protections,
including the right of children to “respect for their human
dignity,” the right to education, and the right to subsistence
(through work or, for those who could not support themselves,
government assistance). In total, Norway’s constitution was amended
316 times from 1814 to 2014.

Two centuries of reform transformed Norway into one of the most
democratic countries on Earth. On Freedom House’s Global Freedom
Index, most established democracies received a score above 90 in 2022.
A handful of countries, including Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, and
Uruguay, received a score above 95. Only three countries received a
perfect score of 100: Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Freedom House
scores countries on 25 separate dimensions of democracy. Norway got a
perfect score on all of them.

Norway’s story of transformation is particularly impressive, but
its general trajectory is not unusual. Other European political
systems started in an equally undemocratic place, with numerous
institutions designed to thwart popular majorities. Most of them, like
Norway, were ruled by monarchies. With few exceptions, only men with
property could vote. Voting was usually indirect: Citizens voted not
for candidates but for local “notables”—civil servants, priests,
pastors, landowners, or factory owners—who in turn selected members
of parliament. And in Latin America, where founding leaders took the
U.S. Constitution as a model after gaining independence in the early
19th century, all presidents were indirectly elected, via electoral
colleges or legislatures, prior to 1840.

In addition, early electoral systems were skewed to favor wealthy
landowners. Cities—home to Europe’s growing working classes—were
often massively underrepresented in parliament compared with rural
districts. In Britain’s notorious “rotten boroughs,” a few dozen
voters sometimes had their very own representative.

Most countries also had extensive legislative checks on popular
majorities, including undemocratic bodies with the power to veto
legislation. In Britain, the House of Lords, an unelected body
composed of hereditary peers and appointees, had the authority to
block most legislation. Canada also created an appointed Senate after
it gained independence in 1867. Most 19th-century European political
systems possessed similar upper chambers, composed of hereditary
members and appointees from the crown and the Church.

Parliaments everywhere thus offered excessive protection to minority
interests. An extreme example was Poland’s 18th-century Parliament,
in which each deputy in the 200-member body possessed individual veto
power over any bill. The French political philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau regarded Poland’s _liberum veto_ (Latin for “I freely
object”) as, in the words of one legal analyst, a “tyranny of the
minority of one
[[link removed]].” The
system’s defenders characterized it as a “privilege of our
liberty.” But it brought political life to a grinding halt. From
1720 to 1764, more than half of Poland’s parliamentary sessions were
shut down by individual vetoes before any decisions were made. Unable
to conduct government business or raise public funds for defense,
Poland fell prey to military interventions by neighboring Russia,
Prussia, and Austria, whose armies dismembered its territory,
literally erasing Poland from the map for more than a century. (The
dysfunctionality of the liberum veto was not lost on America’s
Founders, including Alexander Hamilton, who cited Poland as an example
of the “poison” of “giv[ing] a minority a negative upon the
majority.”)

Although other countries steered clear of the liberum veto, states
across Europe lacked rules to halt parliamentary debate, allowing
small minorities to routinely scuttle legislative majorities. This
filibuster-like behavior grew so widespread in Europe that the German
legal theorist George Jellinek warned
[[link removed]] in
1904 that “parliamentary obstruction is no longer a mere intermezzo
in the history of this or that parliament. It has become an
international phenomenon which, in threatening manner, calls in
question the whole future of parliamentary government.”

Across the West, then, early political systems placed elections and
parliaments beyond the reach of popular majorities, ensuring not just
minority rights but outright minority rule. In that world of
monarchies and aristocracies, America’s founding Constitution, even
with its counter-majoritarian features, stood out as comparatively
democratic.

Over the course of the 20th century, however, most of the countries
that are now considered established democracies dismantled their most
egregiously counter-majoritarian institutions and took steps to
empower majorities. They did away with suffrage restrictions.
Universal male suffrage first came to France’s Third Republic in the
1870s. New Zealand, Australia, and Finland were pioneers of female
enfranchisement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By 1920,
virtually all adult men and women could vote in most of Western
Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Indirect elections also disappeared. By the late 19th century, France
and the Netherlands had eliminated the powerful local councils that
had previously selected members of parliament; Norway, Prussia, and
Sweden did the same in the early 20th century. France experimented
with an electoral college for a single presidential election in the
late 1950s, but then dropped it. Electoral colleges gradually
disappeared across Latin America. Colombia eliminated its electoral
college in 1910; Chile did so in 1925; Paraguay in 1943. Brazil
adopted an electoral college in 1964 under military rule but replaced
it with direct presidential elections in 1988. Argentina, the last
country in Latin America with indirect presidential elections, dropped
its electoral college in 1994.

Most European democracies also reformed their electoral systems—the
rules that govern how votes are translated into representation.
Countries across continental Europe and Scandinavia abandoned
first-past-the-post election systems when they democratized at the
turn of the 20th century. Beginning in Belgium in 1899, Finland in
1906, and Sweden in 1907, and then diffusing across Europe, coalitions
of parties from across the spectrum pushed successfully for
proportional representation with multimember districts (meaning
multiple members of parliament are elected from a single district) to
bring parties’ share of the seats in parliament more closely in line
with their share of the popular vote. Under these new rules, parties
that won, say, 40 percent of the vote could expect to win about 40
percent of the seats, which, as the political scientist Arend Lijphart
has shown, helps ensure that electoral majorities translate into
governing majorities. By World War II, nearly all continental European
democracies used some variant of proportional representation, and
today 80 percent of democracies with populations above 1 million do
so.

Undemocratic upper chambers were tamed or eliminated beginning, in the
early 20th century, with Britain’s House of Lords. Britain
experienced a major political upheaval in 1906 when the Liberal Party
won a landslide election, displacing the Conservatives (or Tories),
who had governed for more than a decade. The new Liberal-led
government launched ambitious new social policies, which were to be
paid for with progressive taxes on inherited and landed wealth.
Outnumbered by more than two to one in Parliament, the Conservatives
panicked. The House of Lords, which was dominated by
conservative-leaning hereditary peers, came to the Tories’ rescue.
Inserting itself directly into politics, the unelected upper chamber
vetoed the Liberal government’s all-important tax bill of 1909.

By convention, the House of Lords could veto some legislation, but not
tax bills (fights over taxation had sparked the English Civil War in
the 1640s). The House of Lords nonetheless voted down the ambitious
budget bill, breaking all precedent.

The Lords justified this unusual move by claiming that their chamber
was a “watchdog of the constitution.” The Liberal chancellor of
the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, the main author of the budget bill,
dismissed this, calling the House of Lords a plutocratic body—“not
a watchdog” but rather the “poodle” of the Conservative Party
leader. In a speech to a roaring crowd in London’s East End, the
sharp-tongued Lloyd George ridiculed the aristocrats who inherited
their seats in the House of Lords as “500 ordinary men, accidentally
chosen from among the ranks of the unemployed,” and asked why they
should be able to “override the deliberate judgment of millions.”

Facing a constitutional crisis, the Liberals drew up the Parliament
Act, which would strip the House of Lords of its ability to veto any
legislation at all. If the House of Lords lost its veto, its
Conservative members warned, political apocalypse would follow. It
wasn’t just taxes they feared. They worried about other items on the
Liberal-led majority’s agenda, including plans to grant Catholic
Ireland greater autonomy, which Conservatives viewed as a fundamental
affront to their traditional (Protestant) vision of British national
identity.

Ultimately, the bill passed not only the House of Commons but also the
House of Lords. It took some hardball. The Lords were persuaded after
the Liberal government, with the King’s support, threatened to swamp
the House of Lords by appointing hundreds of new Liberal peers to the
body if it did not relent. With the bill’s passage, the House of
Lords lost the ability to block laws passed by the elected House of
Commons (although it could delay them). One of Britain’s most
powerful counter-majoritarian institutions had been substantially
weakened. And rather than trigger a crisis, the reform paved the way
for the construction of a fuller, more inclusive democracy over the
course of the 20th century.

Several other emerging democracies abolished their aristocratic upper
chambers outright after World War II. New Zealand eliminated its House
of Lords–like Legislative Council in 1950. Denmark abolished its
19th-century upper chamber in 1953 via referendum. Sweden followed
suit in 1970. By the early 21st century, two-thirds of the world’s
parliaments were unicameral. The result was not—as defenders of
upper chambers frequently warned—political chaos and dysfunction.
New Zealand, Denmark, and Sweden went on to become three of the most
stable and democratic countries in the world.

Another way to democratize historically undemocratic upper chambers is
to make them more representative. This was the path taken by Germany
and Austria. In Germany, following World War II, West Germans wrote a
new democratic constitution under the watchful eye of American
occupying forces. One of the main tasks facing Germany’s
constitutional designers was to revamp the country’s 19th-century
second chamber, which historically was composed mostly of appointed
civil servants. They considered several options. Despite the outsize
role played by American occupying forces, they rejected the U.S.
Senate model of equal representation for federal states. Instead,
representation in the Bundesrat would be based roughly on states’
populations. So Germany’s second chamber remained in place but was
made more representative. Today, the smallest German states each send
three representatives to the Bundesrat, medium-size states send four
representatives, and the largest states send six representatives. With
this structure, Germany’s postwar framers combined principles of
federalism and democracy.

Most 20th-century democracies also took steps to limit minority
obstruction within legislatures, establishing a procedure—known as
“cloture”—to allow simple majorities to end parliamentary
debate. The term _cloture_ originated during the early days of the
French Third Republic. In the 1870s, the provisional government of
Adolphe Thiers faced daunting challenges. France had just lost a war
to Prussia, and the new Republican government had to contend with the
revolutionary Paris Commune on the left and forces seeking to restore
the monarchy on the right. The government needed to show it could
legislate effectively. However, the National Assembly was renowned for
its marathon debates and inaction on pressing issues. Pushed by
Thiers, the assembly created a cloture motion through which a
parliamentary majority could vote to rein in an otherwise endless
debate.

Britain carried out similar reforms. In 1881, Liberal Prime Minister
William Gladstone pushed through a “cloture rule” that allowed a
majority of members of Parliament to end debate so that Parliament
could move to a vote. The Australian Parliament adopted a comparable
cloture rule in 1905. In Canada, opposition minorities in Parliament
had filibustered several important bills, including the Naval Aid Bill
introduced by the Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden in 1912.
The bill aimed to respond to the rise of German sea power by
bolstering Canada’s navy but was filibustered by the opposition
Liberals for five months. The debate took a physical toll on the prime
minister, who developed such severe boils that he was forced to take
the floor with his “neck swathed in bandages.” The ordeal led the
government to push through a cloture rule—allowing a simple majority
to end debate—in April 1913.

The trend of eliminating filibusters and other supermajority rules has
continued in recent decades. For much of the 20th century, Finland’s
Parliament had a delaying rule under which a one-third minority could
vote to defer legislation until after the next election. The rule was
abolished in 1992. Denmark still has a rule in which a one-third
parliamentary minority may call a public referendum on nonfinancial
legislation, and if 30 percent of the adult population votes against
(a high bar given low voter turnout), it is blocked. However, this
rule has not been used since 1963. Iceland’s Parliament (known as
the Althingi) long had an old-fashioned talking filibuster. The
secretary-general of the Althingi, Helgi Bernódusson, described
[[link removed]] it
as “deeply rooted in the Icelandic political culture.” Efforts to
curb the filibuster were met with considerable resistance because they
were viewed as threatening the “freedom of speech” of members of
Parliament. In 2016, Bernódusson declared, “There are no
indications at present that it will be possible to curb filibustering
… The Althingi is stuck in the filibuster rut.” Three years later,
however, after a record-breaking 150-hour filibuster on a European
Union energy law, the Parliament curbed the filibuster through new
limits on speeches and rebuttals.

Amid this broad pattern of reform is one area in which many
democracies moved in a more counter-majoritarian direction in the 20th
century: judicial review. Prior to World War II, judicial review
existed in only a few countries outside the United States. But since
1945, most democracies have adopted some form of it. In some
countries, including Austria, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, new
constitutional courts were created as “guardians” of the
constitution. In other countries, including Brazil, Denmark, India,
Israel, and Japan, existing supreme courts were given this guardian
role. One recent study
[[link removed]] of
31 established democracies found that 26 of them now possess some type
of judicial review.

Judicial review can be a source of what we call “intergenerational
counter-majoritarianism”—when judges appointed decades ago
routinely strike down legislation backed by present-day majorities.
Democracies across the world have attenuated this problem by replacing
life tenure with either term limits or a mandatory retirement age for
high-court justices. For example, Canada adopted a mandatory
retirement age of 75 for Supreme Court justices in 1927. The law was a
response to two aging justices who refused to retire, including one
who became inactive in court deliberations and another whom Prime
Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King described in his diary as
“senile.”

Similarly, Australia established a retirement age of 70 for High Court
justices in 1977, after the 46-year tenure of Justice Edward McTiernan
came to an inglorious end. McTiernan had been appointed to the court
in 1930, and by the 1970s, the octogenarian’s voice was often
“difficult for counsel to understand
[[link removed]],”
In 1976, McTiernan broke his hip swatting a cricket with a rolled-up
newspaper at the Windsor Hotel in Melbourne. In an apparent effort to
nudge him into retirement, the chief justice refused to build a
wheelchair ramp in the High Court building, citing costs. McTiernan
retired, and when Parliament took up the issue of establishing a
retirement age, there was little opposition. Members of Parliament
argued that a retirement age would help “contemporize the courts”
by bringing in judges who were “closer to the people” and held
“current day sets of values.”

Every democracy that has introduced judicial review since 1945 has
also introduced either a retirement age or term limits for high-court
judges, thereby limiting the problem of long-tenured judges binding
future generations.

In sum, the 20th century ushered in the modern democratic era—an age
in which many of the institutional fetters on popular majorities that
were designed by pre-democratic monarchies and aristocracies were
dismantled. Democracies all over the world abolished or weakened their
most egregiously counter-majoritarian institutions. Conservative
defenders of these institutions anxiously warned of impending
instability, chaos, or tyranny. But that has rarely ensued since World
War II. Indeed, countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, France,
Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the U.K. were both more
stable and more democratic at the close of the 20th century than they
were at the beginning. Eliminating counter-majoritarianism helped give
rise to modern democracy.

America also took important steps toward majority rule in the 20th
century. The Nineteenth Amendment (ratified in 1920) extended voting
rights to women, and the 1924 Snyder Act extended citizenship and
voting rights to Native Americans—although it was not until the 1965
Voting Rights Act that the United States met minimal standards for
universal suffrage.

America also (partially) democratized its upper chamber. The U.S.
Senate, which has been provocatively described as
[[link removed]] “an
American House of Lords,” was indirectly elected prior to 1913. The
Constitution endowed state legislatures, not voters, with the
authority to select their states’ U.S. senators. Thus, the 1913
ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, which mandated the direct
popular election of senators, was also an important democratizing
step.

Legislative elections became much fairer in the 1960s. Prior to this,
rural election districts across the country contained far fewer people
than urban and suburban ones. For example, Alabama’s Lowndes County,
with slightly more than 15,000 people, had the same number of state
senators as Jefferson County, which had more than 600,000 residents.
The result was massive rural overrepresentation in legislatures. In
1960, rural counties contained 23 percent of the U.S. population but
elected 52 percent of the seats in state legislatures. In
state-legislative and national-congressional elections, rural
minorities frequently governed urban majorities. In 1956, when the
Virginia state legislature voted to close public schools rather than
integrate them in the wake of the 1954 _Brown v. Board of
Education_ ruling, the 21 state senators who voted for closure
represented fewer people than the 17 senators who voted for
integration.

From 1962 to 1964, however, a series of Supreme Court rulings ensured
that electoral majorities were represented in Congress and state
legislatures. Establishing the principle of “one person, one
vote,” the court rulings required all U.S. legislative districts to
be roughly equal in population. Almost overnight, artificial rural
majorities were wiped out in 17 states. The equalization of voting
power was a major step toward ensuring a semblance of majority rule in
the House of Representatives and state legislatures.

A final spurt of constitutional reforms came in the 1960s and early
’70s. The Twenty-Third Amendment (ratified in 1961) gave Washington,
D.C., residents the right to vote in presidential elections; the
Twenty-Fourth Amendment (1964) finally prohibited poll taxes; and the
Twenty-Sixth Amendment (1971) lowered the age to vote from 21 to 18.

But America’s 20th-century reforms did not go as far as in other
democracies. For example, whereas every other presidential democracy
in the world did away with indirect elections during the 20th century,
in America the Electoral College remains intact.

America also retained its first-past-the-post electoral system, even
though it creates situations of minority rule, especially in state
legislatures. The United States, Canada, and the U.K. are the only
rich Western democracies not to have adopted more proportional
election rules in the 20th century.

The country’s heavily malapportioned Senate also remains intact. The
principle of “one person, one vote” was never applied to the U.S.
Senate, so low-population states like Wyoming continue to elect as
many senators as populous states like California. As a result, states
representing a mere 20 percent of American voters can elect a Senate
majority. America’s state-level “rotten boroughs” persist.

America also maintained a minority veto within the Senate. Much like
in legislatures in France, Britain, and Canada, the absence of any
cloture rule led to a marked increase in obstructionist tactics
beginning in the late 19th century. And as in Canada, the filibuster
problem took on added urgency in the face of German naval threats in
the run-up to World War I. But Canada, like France and Britain, put in
place a majoritarian 50 percent cloture rule, while the U.S. Senate
adopted a nearly insurmountable super-majoritarian 67-vote cloture
rule. The threshold was lowered to three-fifths in 1975, but it
remains highly counter-majoritarian. America thus entered the 21st
century with a “60-vote Senate.”

Finally, unlike every other established democracy, America did not
introduce term limits or mandatory retirement ages for Supreme Court
justices. Today, on the Supreme Court, the justices effectively serve
for life. It’s an entirely different story at the state level. Of
the 50 U.S. states, 46 imposed term limits on state-supreme-court
justices during the 19th or 20th century. Three others adopted
mandatory retirement ages. Only Rhode Island maintains lifetime tenure
for its supreme-court justices. But among national democracies,
America, like Rhode Island, stands alone.

The united states, once a democratic innovator, now lags behind. The
persistence of our pre-democratic institutions as other democracies
have dismantled theirs has made America a uniquely
counter-majoritarian democracy at the dawn of the 21st century.
Consider the following:

* America is the only presidential democracy in the world in which
the president is elected via an electoral college, rather than
directly by voters. Only in America, then, can a president be
“elected against the majority expressed at the polls
[[link removed]].”
* America is one of the few remaining democracies that retains a
bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber, and it is one of
an even smaller number of democracies in which a powerful upper
chamber is severely malapportioned because of the “equal
representation of unequal states”
[[link removed]] (only
Argentina and Brazil are worse). Most important, it is the world’s
only democracy with both a strong, malapportioned Senate and a
legislative-minority veto (the filibuster). In no other democracy do
legislative minorities routinely and permanently thwart legislative
majorities.
* America is one of the few established democracies (along with
Canada, India, Jamaica, and the U.K.) with first-past-the-post
electoral rules that permit electoral pluralities to be manufactured
into legislative majorities and, in some cases, allow parties that
garner fewer votes to win legislative majorities.
* America is the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure
for Supreme Court justices. All other established democracies have
either term limits, a mandatory retirement age, or both.

One reason America has become such an outlier is that, among the
world’s democracies, the U.S. Constitution is the hardest to change.
In Norway, a constitutional amendment requires a supermajority of
two-thirds support in two successive elected Parliaments, but the
country has no equivalent to America’s extraordinarily difficult
state-level ratification process. According to the constitutional
scholars
[[link removed]] Tom
Ginsburg and James Melton, the relative flexibility of the
constitution allows Norwegians to “update the formal text in ways
that keep it modern.” Americans are not so fortunate.

Of the 31 democracies examined by the political theorist Donald Lutz
in his comparative study of constitutional-amendment processes
[[link removed]], the United States stands at
the top of his Index of Difficulty, exceeding the next-highest-scoring
countries (Australia and Switzerland) by a wide margin. Not only do
constitutional amendments require the approval of two-thirds
majorities in both the House and the Senate; they must be ratified by
three-quarters of the states. For this reason, the United States has
one of the lowest rates of constitutional change in the world.
According to the U.S. Senate, 11,848 attempts have been made to amend
the U.S. Constitution. But only 27 of them have been successful.
America’s Constitution has been amended only 12 times since
Reconstruction, most recently in 1992—more than three decades ago.

This has important consequences. Consider the fate of the Electoral
College. No other provision of the U.S. Constitution has been the
target of so many reform initiatives. By one count, there have been
more than 700 attempts to abolish or reform the Electoral College over
the past 225 years. The most serious push during the 20th century came
in the 1960s and ’70s, a period that saw three “close call”
presidential elections (1960, 1968, and 1976), in which the winner of
the popular vote very nearly lost the Electoral College.

In 1966, Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, the chair of the Senate
Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments,
proposed a constitutional amendment to replace the Electoral College
with direct presidential elections. Americans were on board. A 1966
Gallup poll found 63 percent support for abolishing the Electoral
College. That year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce polled its members
and found them nine to one in favor of the reform. In 1967, the
prestigious American Bar Association added its endorsement, calling
the Electoral College
[[link removed]] “archaic,
undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous.”

Bayh’s proposal was given a boost by the 1968 election, in which
George Wallace’s strong third-party performance nearly threw the
race into the House of Representatives. A shift of just 78,000 votes
in Illinois and Missouri would have cost Nixon his Electoral College
majority and left the outcome to the House, where Democrats held a
majority. The result frightened leaders of both parties, who began to
rally behind Bayh’s proposal.

By 1969, the movement to abolish the Electoral College “seemed
unstoppable.” Newly elected President Richard Nixon backed the
initiative. So did Democratic Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield,
Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, House Minority Leader
Gerald Ford, and key legislators such as Walter Mondale, Howard Baker,
and George H. W. Bush. Constitutional reform was backed by business
(the Chamber of Commerce) and labor (AFL-CIO), the American Bar
Association, and the League of Women Voters.

In September 1969, the House of Representatives passed the proposal to
abolish the Electoral College 338–70—far more than the two-thirds
necessary to amend the Constitution. As the proposal moved to the
Senate, a Gallup poll showed that 81 percent of Americans supported
the reform. A_ New York Times_ survey of state legislators found
that 30 state legislatures were ready to pass the amendment, six
others were undecided, and six were slightly opposed (38 states would
be needed for ratification). Abolition seemed well within reach.

But the U.S. Senate killed the reform. Like so many times in the past,
opposition came from the South and sparsely populated states. Senator
James Allen of Alabama declared, “The Electoral College is one of
the South’s few remaining political safeguards. Let’s keep it.”
The longtime segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond promised to
filibuster the bill, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chair James
Eastland, another segregationist, “slow-walked it through the
Judiciary Committee
[[link removed]],”
delaying it by nearly a year. When a cloture vote was finally held on
September 17, 1970, 54 senators voted to end debate—a majority, but
well short of the two-thirds needed to end the filibuster. When a
second cloture vote was held 12 days later, 53 senators voted for it.
The bill died before it ever came up for a vote.

Bayh reintroduced his Electoral College reform bill in 1971, 1973,
1975, and 1977. In 1977, following yet another “close call”
election, the proposal got some traction. The new president, Jimmy
Carter, backed the initiative, and a Gallup poll found that 75 percent
of Americans supported it. But the bill was delayed and then, once
again, filibustered in the Senate. When a cloture vote was finally
held in 1979, it garnered only 51 votes. Afterward, _The New York
Times_ reported that supporters of Electoral College reform
“conceded privately that they stood little chance of reviving the
issue unless a president was elected with a minority of the popular
vote or the nation came disturbingly close to such a result.” As it
turned out, reform supporters were wildly overoptimistic. Two
presidents have been elected with a minority of the popular vote
during the early 21st century, and yet the Electoral College still
stands.

Our excessively counter-majoritarian Constitution is not just a
historical curiosity. It is a source of minority rule. The
Constitution has always overrepresented sparsely populated
territories, favoring rural minorities, but because both major parties
had urban and rural wings throughout most of American history, this
rural bias had only limited partisan consequences. This changed in the
21st century. For the first time, one party (the Republicans) is based
primarily in small towns and rural areas while the other party (the
Democrats) is based largely in urban areas. That means that our
institutions now systematically privilege the Republicans. The
Republican Party won the popular vote in only one presidential
election from 1992 to 2020—a span of nearly three decades. But
thanks to the Electoral College, Republicans occupied the presidency
for nearly half of that time.

In the U.S. Senate, Republican senators not once represented a
majority of Americans from 2000 to 2022, but they nevertheless
controlled the Senate for half of this period
[[link removed]]. As often as not
during the 21st century, then, the party with fewer votes has
controlled the Senate.

In 2016, the Democrats won the national popular vote for the
presidency and the Senate, but the Republicans nonetheless won control
of both institutions. A president who lost the popular vote and
senators who represented a minority of Americans then proceeded to
fill three Supreme Court seats, giving the Court a manufactured 6–3
conservative majority. This is minority rule.

What makes the situation so dangerous is that this privileged partisan
minority has abandoned its commitment to democratic rules of the game.
In other words, the Constitution is protecting and empowering
an _authoritarian_ partisan minority.

But that Constitution appears nearly impossible to reform.

To escape this predicament, we must begin to think differently about
the country’s founding document and about constitutional change
itself—more like the Founders thought about it and more like
Norwegians think about their own constitution today. In 1787, just
after the Philadelphia Convention, George Washington wrote
[[link removed]],
“The warmest friends and best supporters the Constitution has, do
not contend that it is free from imperfections; but found them
unavoidable.” He went on to write that the American people

can, as they will have the advantage of experience on their side,
decide with as much propriety on the alterations and amendments which
are necessary as ourselves. I do not think we are more inspired, have
more wisdom, or possess more virtue, than those who will come after
us.

Born of compromise and improvisation, the U.S. Constitution is not a
sacred text. It is a living embodiment of the nation. Throughout our
history, from the passage of the Bill of Rights to the expansion of
suffrage to the civil-rights reforms of the 1960s, Americans have
worked to make our system more democratic. But that work has stalled
over the last half century. It is essential to reawaken the dormant
American tradition of democratic constitutional change. Doing so will
enable America to realize its unfinished promise of building a
democracy for all—and perhaps be a model for the world.

_This article was adapted from Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky’s
forthcoming book,_ Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy
Reached the Breaking Point
[[link removed]].

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a
commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

_STEVEN LEVITSKY
[[link removed]] is the David
Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Government at
Harvard University._

_DANIEL ZIBLATT
[[link removed]] is the Eaton
Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University._

_Since 1857, THE ATLANTIC has been challenging assumptions and
pursuing truth._

_When the founders of The Atlantic gathered in Boston in the spring of
1857, they wanted to create a magazine that would be indispensable for
the kind of reader who was deeply engaged with the most consequential
issues of the day. The men and women who created this magazine had an
overarching, prophetic vision—they were fierce opponents of
slavery—but they were also moved to overcome what they saw as the
limits of partisanship, believing that the free exchange of ideas
across ideological lines was crucial to the great American experiment.
Their goal was to publish the most urgent essays, the most vital
literature; they wanted to pursue truth and disrupt consensus without
regard for party or clique.  _

_Here is the mission statement published in the very first issue of
The Atlantic, in November 1857, and signed by many of the greats of
American letters, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne:_

_First: In Literature, to leave no province unrepresented, so that
while each number will contain articles of an abstract and permanent
value, it will also be found that the healthy appetite of the mind for
entertainment in its various forms of Narrative, Wit, and Humor, will
not go uncared for. The publishers wish to say, also, that while
native writers will receive the most solid encouragement, and will be
mainly relied on to fill the pages of The Atlantic, they will not
hesitate to draw from the foreign sources at their command, as
occasion may require, relying rather on the competency of an author to
treat a particular subject, than on any other claim whatever. In this
way they hope to make their Periodical welcome wherever the English
tongue is spoken or read._

_Second: In the term Art they intend to include the whole domain of
aesthetics, and hope gradually to make this critical department a true
and fearless representative of Art, in all its various branches,
without any regard to prejudice, whether personal or national, or to
private considerations of what kind soever._

_Third: In Politics, The Atlantic will be the organ of no party or
clique, but will honestly endeavor to be the exponent of what its
conductors believe to be the American idea. It will deal frankly with
persons and with parties, endeavoring always to keep in view that
moral element which transcends all persons and parties, and which
alone makes the basis of a true and lasting national prosperity. It
will not rank itself with any sect of anties, but with that body of
men which is in favor of Freedom, National Progress, and Honor,
whether public or private._

_In studying this original mission statement, we came to understand
that its themes are timeless. The core principles of the founders are
core principles for us: reason should always guide opinion; ideas have
consequences, sometimes world-historical consequences; the knowledge
we have about the world is partial and provisional, and subject to
analysis, scrutiny, and revision._

_Subscribe to the Atlantic.
[[link removed]]_

* democracy
[[link removed]]
* History
[[link removed]]
* U.S. Constitution
[[link removed]]
* elections
[[link removed]]
* term limits
[[link removed]]
* Supreme Court
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]