Nexus

Donald Trump entered politics as a self-proclaimed “strong leader.” He castigated his supposedly tepid predecessor for lacking necessary strength. Trump, by contrast, would sweep away the establishment and remake America. But Trump quickly faced opposition from, among others, protesters, federal judges, career civil servants, and states. His executive order on immigration, for example, which temporarily banned all travel to the United States from seven majority …

Why is democracy in trouble? Long before democracy’s global slump became conventional wisdom, Yascha Mounk was warning that support for democracy was on the decline in the world’s most advanced societies.
In a paper published in the Journal of Democracy, Mounk, a lecturer on government at Harvard University, and his colleague Roberto Stefan Foa showed that public satisfaction with democratic governments was the lowest it had …

One answer lies in our nation’s founding document. Treason is the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution, which states: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
The Founders borrowed this language from the law of King Edward III of England. Enacted in A.D. 1350, Edward …

It is widely assumed in the West that legitimacy of a government comes from universal suffrage and multiparty competitive elections. Yet this assumption raises two issues: First, historically it is not true, as universal suffrage is a recent development. One can claim, for instance, that U.S. administrations only became truly legitimate in 1965, when African Americans were really allowed to vote. Furthermore, this practice is …

Will Los Angeles finally admit it’s a metropolis? And if so, what kind of metropolis does it want to be?
That may seem a strange question, given the size of the L.A. region. But Los Angeles is of at least two minds. Yes, we’re home to world class universities, two pro football teams, the nation’s largest port complex by volume, the third-busiest airport in the U.S., …

Does Trump’s election and its aftermath mean that the U.S. government is experiencing a crisis of legitimacy? In order to address that question, we need to understand how citizens determine whether a government is legitimate or not. What qualities do citizens use to assess the trustworthiness of their governments? Zócalo Public Square asked these questions of political scientist Margaret Levi, who has investigated the conditions …

Among the many different forms of government, democracies are unique in the extent to which their stability depends on legitimacy—a belief on the part of the public that the system of government in the country has what Seymour Martin Lipset called “a moral title to rule.”
Moral assessments of political authority are always to some extent relative. People may not love their system of government, …

Even if political power sometimes comes from the barrel of a gun, any government is more effective if it enjoys popular acceptance. Today, governments usually claim a popular mandate from an election, even if that election is fraudulent. In the past, however, elections played little role in bestowing legitimacy.
In the ancient world, rulers usually staked their legitimacy by proclaiming their divinity. The Persian emperor …

It’s mid-winter, your college applications have been submitted, and you’ll soon be pacing the floor waiting to learn where you have been accepted. But will you emerge from college four years from now better off than when you started? Does college help turn students into scholars, with greater expertise, maturity, and cognitive abilities? How effective is college in helping students prepare for work or graduate …

Where do big new ideas come from—the kind that break the mold and change how we see the world? As a sociologist, this has long been an interest of mine. So I was excited to read Michael Lewis’ new book The Undoing Project, which tells the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the Israeli psychologists whose work on decision-making helped convince economists—and everyone else—that …