The U.S. system of checks and balances has turned back some of President Trump’s worst instincts, but in the long run America’s vetocracy poses other problems.

We first published on September 1, 2005 amidst the crisis triggered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the controversy over the subsequent war it provoked. We face another such watershed today.

The United States lags behind other Western countries in infrastructure building because we have a system ruled by vetoes.

Flaws aside, Obama is in touch with an American electorate that is very skeptical about the wisdom of heavy involvement in the Middle East.

For readers of the Chinese edition of Political Order and Political Decay, I thought you might like to know what parts were altered from the original text. The passages below are the English language originals, followed by the Chinese versions.  If you don’t read Chinese, there is an English-only version after the Chinese text.  Hence the […]

An introduction to the oddities and limits of institutional political reform in the United States.

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.

The starting point for a sensible policy rests on the realization that the U.S. and other democratic countries have no reason to favor one religious sect over another in the Sunni-Shiite war.

A new book arguing for the ubiquity of esoteric writing in pre-modern times redeems Leo Strauss from his many detractors.

The idea that more transparency in government is always an unalloyed good is a dangerous populist illusion.