What is the point of making strategic recommendations to someone who has not the slightest interest in hearing them?

Whether they like it or not, the Czechs are the nation of Havel. What they need to work out, with the help of biographies like Michael Žantovský’s, is what that means.

In international comparisons of electoral integrity, the United States does not score high—but most Americans appear to neither know nor care about it.

Changing how elections are structured can help depolarize U.S. politics without jeopardizing the democratic process.

Aleksander Wat’s life and work stand as warning that the totalitarian temptations of the 20th century have yet to run their course.

Contrary to the naive sirens of maximum democracy, greater transparency is as much a problem for good governance as it is a solution.

Michael Walzer struggles to explain the failure of secular liberation movements to overcome the religious cultures of the liberated.

The U.S. budget process lies at the core of U.S. political dysfunction because it provides too many points of entry for the logic of collective action. It cannot be changed fundamentally, but it can be reformed at the margins.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has managed to write a book on America’s racial dilemmas without involving either Barack Obama or Martin Luther King, Jr. Or has he?

If polarization and extreme partisanship in American politics are but skin-deep—problems caused by activists and professionals rather than the electorate as a whole—then reforms are possible. Happily, that’s the case.