American Constitutional Exceptionalism and Democratic Erosion

Abstract

Contemporary scholars worry that democracy is being eroded from above by populist authoritarian leaders and from below by citizen polarization. These are not new concerns. The framers of the American Constitution understood that the twin diseases incident to republican government were demagogues and the violence of factions. They designed the Constitution with an eye towards what today we would call democratic erosion. The paradox of contemporary American constitutionalism is that the mechanisms put in place to temper these diseases in the late eighteenth century—presidentialism and institutional (and electoral) complexity—are not only exceptional among the world’s long-standing democracies but are also accelerating and facilitating democratic erosion in the twenty-first century.

Democratic erosion perches uneasily on supply and demand factors. On the supply side, presidentialism does a poorer job than parliamentarism in sustaining the constitutional-political conventions needed to support democracy for the long haul. On the demand side, institutional (and electoral) complexity coupled with citizen polarization has made the American government dysfunctional. Dysfunctional government, in turn, fuels the rise of populist authoritarians who claim that they alone can fix the nation’s ills. This Article argues that America’s exceptional constitution lies deep at the roots of her contemporary democratic travails. This Article, moreover, breaks new ground by providing an empirically grounded, historical and comparative account of democratic erosion in the United States.