A review of The Failure of Presidential Democracy, edited by Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela.
About the Author
Matthew Soberg Shugart, associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, is the coauthor of Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics (1992).
Complaining about parties and politicians is common everywhere, but troubled Peru has devolved into a cautionary tale for what a democracy without established parties and professional politicians can look like.
Europe in the Middle Ages was hardly democratic, but it did have law-based institutions that could and did stay the hands of kings, laying a crucial basis for future state-building and…
