Among other essays we published this week at NYU’s Democracy Project, we published three essays from the three of us who founded and direct the Project — Bob Bauer, Sam Issacharoff, and me. I’ll blog about each piece separately, starting with this excerpt from Sam’s piece:

Democracy requires a long-time horizon.  The winners of today must internalize that they might be voted out tomorrow, and the losers must believe the future might be rosier.  The presidential election of 1800 was the first time that a head of state had been removed through the popular franchise.  That engendered a norm of reciprocity that should prevail across the democratic world. Samuel Huntington famously declared that democracy is demonstrated by the two-turnover test: two successful rotations in office between rival political parties….

That period of party-driven politics now seems to be over.  Trade unions have dried up, church attendance is down, and local business associations are a weak countermeasure to the dominant power of a few large corporations.  In the U.S., the parties are swapping their historic bases as Republicans increasingly draw the more vulnerable sectors of the society and Democrats the wealthier and more educated.  The formal parties themselves have yielded power to charismatic individuals and well-heeled outside political players.  

As a result, how democracy works is being fundamentally altered.  In the U.S., Congress a half century ago would pass 300-400 pieces of legislation a year.  Now that number is in the 20-30 range, less than 10 percent as much.  Democracy is being defined increasingly as the election of a head of government who in turn rules by decree. …

Modern democracies are characterized by dominant executives and weak legislatures.  In the American context, Justice Robert Jackson characterized legislative inaction as auguring a period of constitutional “twilight” with corresponding pressures on the courts to counteract executive aggrandizement without legislative guidance.  And not just in the U.S., recently we have seen the muscular Miller decisions of the UK Supreme Court curbing the prorogation of Parliament.  

Clearly we are entering a new period of democratic politics with stronger executives and weaker political parties and other intermediary civic organizations.  The challenge of the day is to preserve the fundamentals of democratic competition in an uncertain institutional environment.  For the time being, courts are an indispensable stopgap.  But that is only for now, and only temporary.