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The US government system nearly failed on January 6, the House select committees chairman has warned while a conservative judge underlined that Donald Trump and his allies remain a a clear and present danger to American democracy.

Judge J Michael Luttig, who was an adviser to the former vice-president Mike Pence, told the hearing that Trump and his Republican backers were openly preparing an attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but [to] succeed.

The committee hearing also detailed how the former president imperilled Pences life by falsely claiming he had the power to refuse to count votes for Joe Biden. Just 40ft divided the former vice-president from the mob Trump whipped up on January 6: some chanted Hang Mike Pence and a gallows was erected outside.

When Trump heard about the chant, the panels deputy committee chair said, the president responded Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it.

How widespread is Trumps lie among Republicans? More than 100 Republicans who have won primaries for midterm elections this year back Trumps lie about electoral fraud in 2020, according to the Washington Post.

The lead Republican negotiator in US Senate talks for a bipartisan gun safety bill walked out of negotiations on Thursday, telling reporters that he was through talking.

Senator John Cornyn said he had not abandoned the negotiations but was returning to Texas amid an impasse, reducing the chances of a vote on the legislation before the Senate breaks up for a two-week July 4 recess.

The group has been developing legislation to deal with gun violence after the Uvalde school shooting in Texas, which happened just 10 days after another gunman killed 10 people in Buffalo, New York.

A shooting at a church in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama killed two people and wounded two others on Thursday, police have said. The suspect was taken into custody.

Russia has already strategically lost the war in Ukraine and will never be able to take control of the entire country, the head of the UKs armed forces has said.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said Russia was suffering heavy losses for marginal gains and would emerge from the conflict a more diminished power while bolstering Nato. Putin has used about 25% of his armys power to gain a tiny amount of territory and 50,000 people either dead or injured, he said.

Meanwhile the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, gave an interview with the BBC on Thursday, saying: Russia is not squeaky clean. Russia is what it is. And we are not ashamed of showing who we are. When asked about alleged war crimes against civilians, he accused the UN of spreading fake news.

What does western intelligence say? British intelligence reports appear to echo claims about casualties. Some Russian battalion tactical groups usually made up of about 600 to 800 personnel have included as few as 30 soldiers.

The US state department is aware of a photograph appearing to show two missing Americans believed to have been captured by Russian forces while volunteering to defend Ukraine, a relative of one of the men has said.

The last remaining UN humanitarian aid route into Syria is likely to be closed amid the collapse in relations between Russia and the west. The security council will vote on 10 July on whether to keep the Bab al-Hawa crossing from Turkey open; this year, more Syrians are at risk of hunger than at any other point during the conflict.

Japanese schoolchildren have once again been allowed to talk to their friends during lunch break, after the Covid rule of mokushoku silent eating was scrapped. It comes as cases fall nationally and amid concern about childrens development.

An investigation has been launched into the death of a disabled passenger who reportedly fell after disembarking from a plane at London Gatwick airport without a helper. An airport spokesperson said staff shortages were not a factor in the passenger falling down an escalator.

Once an abundant source of food and medicine, Maui now imports between 85% and 90% of its food. But a growing food and land sovereignty movement in Hawaii is working to bring back the lost thriving landscape, with Indigenous farmers pushing back against the dominance of agrochemical transnationals in the state.

While hip-hops first confirmed billionaire raps about staying close to his roots, residents of the Marcy Houses where Jay-Z grew up have met his plan offer them a free financial literacy cryptocurrency course with skepticism. Many reacted to the idea of joining the Bitcoin Academy with frustration: People dont want to be investing money knowing that they might have a chance of losing it, one 58-year-old retiree said.

Climate campaigners have accused western countries of seeking to exploit the fossil fuel reserves of the developing world while failing to help them deal with the climate emergency. Countries including Germany are planning to ramp up their imports of fossil fuels to replace gas from Russia amid the Ukraine war.

Kevin Beresford, a proud member of the Dull Mens Club, has been crowned the most boring man in Britain. The international collective (which welcomes women to its ranks) finds joy in the mundane; Beresford, who once created a bestselling calendar celebrating the traffic circles in his town, has this quality in spades.

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First Thing: Trump a clear and present danger to US democracy - The Guardian US

But for journalists, not every story is as black and white as a mob storming the United States Capitol to try to overturn a free election. Often, there are areas of gray.

Gerrymandering is a classic example. Its not always easy to identify heroes and villains when writing about the redrawing of district boundaries. Republicans have had more success with redistricting lately, and theyve often run afoul of voting rights laws, but both parties manipulate political maps for their own ends. In New York, for instance, Democratic legislators sought to maximize their number of House seats, only to run into a court order throwing out their maps.

So is gerrymandering a fundamental threat to democracy, as some would argue? Is it a tool politicians use to protect their jobs or gain an edge over rivals? Something in between? The details matter.

Journalists run into difficult questions like these every day:

How to calibrate a headline on a big story like the assault of Jan. 6, 2021.

How to correct misinformation when repeating it could amplify lies.

How seriously to take fringe groups that might seem inconsequential now, but could prove dangerous in the future.

Whether and how to quote politicians who make outlandish comments for the very purpose of generating a backlash.

How to cover campaigns that exclude reporters from their events or refuse to respond to basic questions.

Theres no handbook for any of this, but a group of activists and academics is trying to help.

A new 28-page report by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group, proposes guidelines for news outlets to help them distinguish between normal political jockeying and truly dangerous conduct. Its primary author was Jennifer Dresden, a former scholar at Georgetown University who has studied democracy around the world.

In an interview, Dresden said she was driven by the conviction, backed by decades of research, that authoritarianism doesnt happen overnight. Like a stalagmite, it develops from the slow drip of infringements on freedoms and breaches of longstanding democratic rules and traditions. That process is now well underway in the United States, she worries.

The idea motivating the report, Dresden said, was to develop rules for thinking about how to evaluate whether something is a systemic risk to democracy and expose it as such or just one loose cannon doing things that are problematic.

Protect Democracy assembled a panel of academic luminaries for the project, including Sheri Berman, Larry Diamond, Timothy Snyder, Kim Lane Scheppele, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The group also consulted editors at various news outlets, including The New York Times, to help gain insights into how newsrooms are approaching this task.

The panel reached a consensus on seven basic tactics authoritarian leaders and movements use to pursue and maintain power, which are listed verbatim below:

They attempt to politicize independent institutions.

They spread disinformation.

They aggrandize executive power at the expense of checks and balances.

They quash criticism and dissent.

They specifically target vulnerable or marginalized communities.

They work to corrupt elections.

They stoke violence.

Each bullet point comes with its own section, along with suggestions for journalists meant to influence their coverage. But the advice is all guided by the overarching question that animated the report: Whats politics as usual, and whats not?

Dresden says there ought to be clearer standards than the Potter Stewart test referring to the former Supreme Court justice, who famously said in a 1964 case that his method for identifying obscenity was I know it when I see it. Theres some wisdom in that trust-your-gut approach, but democracy is a lot more complicated than a pornographic film.

So the report contains advice like explain and contextualize the reasons why institutions were designed as independent and rely on experts familiar with each particular institutions history.

The Trump era prompted many mainstream news organizations to do exactly that. At one point, Slate, a left-leaning website that pioneered many aspects of early web journalism, ran a semiregular feature called Is This Normal? that aimed to answer readers questions about moves like Donald Trumps firing of James Comey, the F.B.I. director whose role in the Russia investigation agitated the former president. (Spoiler alert: That was not normal.)

But all of us in the journalism business, admittedly, are still figuring out how best to cover what the weight of evidence suggests is an authoritarian moment with few parallels in our lifetimes.

In one measure of the challenge, researchers with the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin studied the views of 56 people who believed Trump won the 2020 election. The results are sobering: Participants trusted unedited video content, personal experience, and their own research and judgment more than social media and news organizations, they found.

The Trump era has prompted The Times and other news outlets to take steps to better organize and invest in coverage of democracy and efforts to undermine it.

Its first editor is Griff Witte, a longtime foreign correspondent who said in an interview that his years abroad gave him fresh eyes in approaching the job.

From perches in London and Berlin, he covered the far rights reaction to an influx of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, and witnessed up close how Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, managed to use the mechanisms of democracy against democracy to entrench his power.

We have Jan. 6, which is highly visual and very dramatic, Witte said, but you also have a lot that is going on in a subterranean way that no one sees.

The Timess new executive editor, Joe Kahn, has been clear about his view of the papers responsibility to the public: that Times journalists cannot be impartial about whether the United States slides into autocracy. As he told David Folkenflik of NPR in a recent interview, You cant be committed to independent journalism and be agnostic about the state of democracy.

The Times approaches this mandate broadly, reflecting the papers size and the sprawling, global nature of the topic.

Coverage of democracy is woven across multiple parts of the newsroom, including the politics desk, which covers campaigns and elections; the enterprise and investigative teams, which dig deep into stories that require more than the usual elbow grease; national correspondents across the United States, who cover everything from hurricanes to school shootings to big societal trends; international correspondents, based in many instances in countries that dont have a free press; and the Washington bureau, which covers the White House, Congress and federal agencies.

We need your input, too.

The Times has asked readers to tell us their concerns about the state and future of American democracy, and On Politics will regularly round up stories on this topic from colleagues across the newsroom. Expect to see new guest authors contributing to the newsletter in the weeks to come. And please drop us a line with your thoughts.

In case you missed it, Peter Baker wrote about the House panels laserlike focus on Trumps culpability for the Jan. 6 riot. In the entire 246-year history of the United States, Baker writes, there was surely never a more damning indictment presented against an American president than outlined on Thursday night in a cavernous congressional hearing room where the future of democracy felt on the line.

States are spending millions to combat a deluge of unfounded rumors and lies around this years midterm elections, Cecilia Kang reports.

Matt Apuzzo and Benjamin Novak examine how Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, has not hesitated to use the levers of government power to erode democratic norms and cement one-party rule during a decade in power. Orban, as Elisabeth Zerofsky wrote for The New York Times magazine last year, has become a source of inspiration for some on the American right.

Danny Hakim and Alexandra Berzon take apart 2000 Mules, a new movie about the 2020 election that makes a host of misleading and outright false claims.

In The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reflect on how, after covering Richard Nixons downfall, we believed with great conviction that never again would America have a president who would trample the national interest and undermine democracy through the audacious pursuit of personal and political self-interest. But then, they write, along came Trump.

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On Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Heres what Shuran Huang told us about capturing the image above:

It was a hot day at Union Square near Capitol Hill. Gun violence survivors and families of victims were waiting to hear from members of Congress at a gun control rally. Many wore red shirts bearing the words Moms Demand Action.

People were wiping sweat off their foreheads. Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally showed up. As she spoke, I noticed a woman in the crowd raising her hands and clapping to every line Pelosi said.

The speaker promised that Congress would pursue action on guns. Why would someone be against raising the age so that teenagers do not have AK-47s? she asked. Why would someone not want protection in their home so that children cannot have access dangerously to guns?

As Pelosi spoke, the womans hands appeared to hold both the speaker and the Capitol building in the center of the frame.

Thanks for reading. Well see you on Monday.

Blake

Is there anything you think were missing? Anything you want to see more of? Wed love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.

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How Journalists Wrestle With Covering Threats to Democracy - The New York Times

During the 1930s, a beast called fascism stirred to life and began overwhelming societies across the world. Within 10 years, it was clear this had been one of historys worst ideas. But the unappealing reality is that during the fascist moment, many, many people thrilled to its appeal and not just in the places that would become the Axis powers in World War II.

Yetthe United States didnt go fascist. Why? In 1941, the journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote an unsettling article for Harpers Magazine which asked the question, Who Goes Nazi? Based on her time spent in Europe she was the first U.S. reporter expelled from Nazi Germany Thompson explained, Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type ofmind. Moreover, Thompson wrote, huge swaths of Americans possessed this type of mind.

Looked at from a distance of nearly a century, the reason the U.S. evaded fascism seems clear. It wasnt that were nicer or better than other countries, thanks to our inherent sterling character. We just got lucky. The prolate spheroid-shaped football of history bounced the right way for the country. And a huge part of that luck was Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.

We forgot the New Deal was not a mountain range created by nature but an extraordinary achievement that was erected by humans and could therefore eitherbe extended or destroyed.

Roosevelt was exactly the right president at the right time. The New Deal demonstrated that democracy could deliver unmistakable benefits, both material and emotional, to desperate people, and thereby drained away much of the psychological poison that powers fascism.

Then, over the next 30 years, something terrible happened: America forgot all this. We forgot how lucky we got. We forgot the New Deal was not a mountain range created by nature but an extraordinary achievement that was erected by humans and could therefore eitherbe extended or destroyed.

Robert Kuttner illustrates this eloquently in his new book Going Big: FDRs Legacy, Bidens New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy. Kuttner, born in 1943, writes, I am a child of the New Deal. My parents bought their first home with a government-insured mortgage. When my father was stricken with cancer, the VA paid for excellent medical care. After he died, my mother was able to keep our house thanks to my dads veterans benefits and her widows pension from Social Security.

The problem, he says, is, My generation grew up thinking of the system wrought by the Roosevelt revolution as normal. But this seemingly permanent social contract was exceptional. Above all, it was fragile, built on circumstances and luck as much as enduring structural change.

Kuttner has been fighting for the New Deal, and against its ferocious enemies, for his entire life. He started as one of journalist I.F. Stones assistants, served as a congressional investigator, was general manager of Pacificas WBAI Radio in New York City, and has been a regular newspaper columnist. Perhaps most significantly, hes co-founded two enduring institutions: the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, and The American Prospect, one of the zestiest liberal publications in the U.S.

During much of this time, Kuttner has been trying to persuade the Democratic Party to care about its heritage and stop collaborating with the U.S. right in undermining the New Deal extended universe. But in Going Big, Kuttner makes a scary case that the stakes are now much larger than this. The books first words are Joe Bidens presidency will be either a historic pivot back to New Deal economics and forward to energized democracy, or heartbreaking interregnum between two bouts of deepening American fascism. The final chapter is titled Americas Last Chance.

Going Big is largely the story of how we got to this moment, starting with Roosevelt and ending inJanuary of this year, when it went to press. Its filled with peculiar and little-known history, such as the fact that at the 1932 Democratic Party convention, candidates required two-thirds of the delegate vote to secure the nomination. This rule was championed by the conservative white Democratic powerbrokers of the South whose ideological descendants are now Republicans to give them a veto over who would lead the party. Kuttner quotes a New Deal historian as saying, Roosevelt came within an eyelash of being denied the nomination thanks to this; he only squeaked through by allying with the extremely unpalatable Southerners.

Kuttner highlights examples of the 200-proof racism then at the commanding heights of the Democratic Party. At the 1936 convention, the invocation was delivered by Marshall Shepard, an African American pastor from Philadelphia. Cotton Ed Smith, a senator from South Carolina, called Shepard a slew-footed, blue-gummed, kinky-headed Senegambian, and that was the nicer part. Smith walked off the floor in outrage.

Kuttner identifies this type of racial insanity as one of two potent undertows that would hobble the New Deal and make it vulnerable to attacks in the future. But while racism remains pervasive, writes Kuttner, the U.S. is not the same place as it was in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the Democratic failure to deliver economic gains for ordinary people has allowed white racism once again to fill the political vacuum. This is thanks to the second factor undermining New Deal politics: the residual power of capitalists in a capitalist economy.

The books more recent history features the enjoyable intellectual dismantlement of some of the personifications of this power particularly two of Bill Clintons treasury secretaries, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. The 2008 economic collapse can to a significant degree be laid at their feet. Kuttner takes deserved satisfaction in pointing out that they or their followers were regnant in the Obama administration but have largely been marginalized by Biden. Summers in particular was reduced to griping from the sidelines as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Act Plan far larger than anything dreamed of by Obama was passed in March 2021.

And thats great. But that brings the book to the obvious, core problem of U.S. politics right now. Biden could try to makethe 2022 midterms and the 2024 election a referendum on his Build Back Better agenda, or the PRO Act (which would make union organizing much easer), or abortion rights, or expanding Social Security, or a crackdown on corporate villainy, or any and all of the many popular positions that Democrats theoretically hold.

Biden and the Democrats now seem intent on going small so smol and petite and inoffensive that no one notices or gets mad at them.

Roosevelt would have relished the fight and going big. But Biden and the Democrats now seem intent on going small so smol and petite and inoffensive that no one notices or gets mad at them. One especially dispiriting example of this that Kuttner does not address in the book, but has elsewhere, is inflation. The Biden administration could have gone on the offensive and made the case that inflation is being driven by supply chain issues, corporate price-gouging,and Saudi Arabias crown prince as opposed to rising wages and government spending but insteadhas largely settled into a silent defensive crouch. Now Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve reappointed by Biden, is saying that the Feds policy is to get wages down, something Americans will enjoy even less than inflation.

The novel Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy was published in 1971, just as the energy of the New Deal was quietly dissipating. It begins:

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?

Were about to find out whether that luck in fact is over. But part of that charmed existence has always been people like Kuttner. Were fortunate to have him, and now its up to everyone else to take his warning seriously, and try to make our own luck.

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History Says Democracy Will Die if Democrats Don't Try Going Big - The Intercept

Yall, I listen to a lot of political podcasts, and the general consensus among Democratic podcasters is that Biden is having a bunch of successes and things are going great and its just unfair that the media isnt helping him get his message out.

Yesterday, I went to the Sonic on Clarksville Pike. Their ice cream machine was down. Their soda machine was down. They couldnt take cash unless it was exact change, and only the drive-thru was open. The workers seemed to be in OK spirits, but I cant imagine spending my Saturday shift on a warm summer day having to tell everyone that theres nothing cool. Like, either fix shit or put the place out of its misery.

Also, MNPS has put chain-link fences around the schools in my neighborhood, but they cant pay staff living wages. Its a crapshoot whether theres going to be milk at the grocery store. And authorities just pulled a gaggle of fascists presumably on their way to attack gay people out of the back of a U-Haul. Not to mention gas prices.

Its no Siege of Leningrad out here or anything, but so many things feel rundown or neglected, just a little harder than they should be. Everything sucks a little bit.

Of course, Biden isnt responsible for the Sonic, or how much Nashville pays school employees. Hes not causing the explosion of white supremacist activism were seeing. Gas prices are high the world over. These things objectively are not his fault.

But its like, for example, if a friend tells you he has a broken foot and cant afford to go to the doctor to get it fixed, and you tell him that the weathers lovely and he should just get outside and move around some and hell feel better you are going to sound clueless and disconnected, and you shouldnt be surprised if he gets mad at you.

There are so many frustrating things about Trump, but one of the most frustrating is that for the rest of our lives, if we are able to sustain some semblance of a country, the bar will have been set so low for politicians that being somewhat sentient will be a great achievement.

Biden is not a good president. Obviously, hes not the worst president in living memory, because one dude tried to stage a coup. But Biden is objectively out of touch with the fact that most of us are living in The Great Suck, and whatever it is hes doing to make things better, they dont seem to be changing peoples day-to-day lives.

When the Democrats get their asses handed to them at the polls this fall, voters are going to catch the blame for it. But voters put a Democratic president in office and gave him a Democratic Congress to get things done, and even then, nothing happened. We apparently need to vote even harder. Now they dont need just a majority, they need a filibuster-proof majority. Whatever. Joe Manchin is a gift to Democrats with him, they dont have to do anything.

I dont know, yall. I was going to continue to rant, but Im stuck on a couple of questions. First, do you think a country can be too large, with too many constituencies, to be governed by democracy? The point of a democracy is supposed to be that the people elect representatives to make decisions that enact policies that the people who elected them either support or benefit from. But were in a situation now where many politicians dont feel beholden to voters. Do you think Sen. Marsha Blackburn loses even one minute of sleep worried that not being available to constituents might hurt her? I dont.

Or it could be that Blackburn sees her constituents not as people who live in her district, not even as people who voted for her, but as the people who give her money. But I dont think that changes my question. Is there just some limit to the amount of people any one person or group of people can give a shit about? Because it seems like politicians use all kinds of ways to winnow down the number of people they have to pay attention to. Its an asshole move, but maybe its an asshole move with roots in biology. I dont know. Maybe a country this big cant function as a democracy because people cant care about this many people?

Its depressing to think about, but it certainly explains the resurgence in white supremacist Christian nationalism this is a group of political ideologies committed to actively shrinking the number of people most Americans give a shit about through demonizing out-groups, and then actively shrinking the numbers of people most Americans dont give a shit about through violence.

Maybe were failing because were too big? But thats not satisfying to me, because theres never been a point in our countrys history where all of us have been represented. We dont even know if it would work, let alone if its failing, because we have never fully tried it.

But this brings me to the next thing I cant quit thinking about: Do you think white people are more committed to the U.S. as an as-of-yet not-fully realized democracy and beacon of freedom than they are to the U.S. as a white supremacist country? In other words, will most white people sell out democracy in order to keep power? I think weve seen that the answer to this question is yes. On both sides of the aisle.

And I think the hard lesson Im having to learn, and maybe you are too, is that even with my relatively advantaged position in my community I have a job, I own a house, etc. I am not worth consideration for most of the politicians who represent me.

But Im not entirely sure they realize theyre drawing a circle around the small subset of the people they should be serving and focusing solely on them.

I mean, when Bidens surrogates say, Things are going so much better for you, why arent you happy? do they know theyre not talking to all of us? Do they even realize how many of us are invisible to them?

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Biden, American Democracy and The Great Suck | Pith in the Wind | nashvillescene.com - Nashville Scene

Meanwhile, Russias invasion of Ukraine is making Western democracies rethink some of their most fundamental assumptions about how democratic norms take hold.

So what do we know about democracies, anyway? How do they stack up against other kinds of governments? And how can they be strengthened? Heres a roundup of some our research on the topic.

A common notion is that a democracy should be superior to dictatorships because they are able to select the best people, says Georgy Egorov, a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences. That is, democratic regimes should oversee more economic success and experience more longevity. But this is not always the case, according to a 2012 study from Egorov and his collaborators.

Where democracies have the edge, the researchers find, is in their ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

Imagine a country composed of both generals and economists. The country goes to war and the generals form a government. In this scenario, the government is effective whether it was formed as a democracy or a dictatorship because the best wartime leadersthe generalsare already in place.

Now, however, imagine that the war ends and the country experiences an economic recession. A democracy can adapt by electing the economists to powerbut a dictatorship cannot. After all, even though the generals are unable to manage the crisis efficiently, they are unlikely to cede power.

Here is where we get an unambiguous prediction that the more democratic a country is, the more able it is to fire people that are no longer competent and bring in people that are needed at the moment, Egorov says.

Ameet Morjaria, an associate professor of managerial economics and decision sciences, is a native of Tanzania, but attended school in Kenya, where hed long observed how curiously haphazard Kenyas road network seemed to be. He points out that, if you were to look at a road map of Kenya from the 1970s and 1980s, you literally see roads going nowhere.

The haphazardness is largely due to mismanagement of public funds leading to corruption, which was more acute during periods of autocracy, according to a study by Morjaria and his colleagues.

Since gaining independence from Great Britain in the early 1960s, Kenya has experienced alternating periods of autocracy and democracy, often within the same leaders. Under autocracy, districts in which the population shared the presidents ethnicity received three times more investment in road-building projects than their population size would indicatehence the construction of all of those roads that were seemingly designed without transportation goals in mind. But those funding imbalances largely attenuated during periods of democracy, suggesting the power of democracy to prevent corruption.

Not only does political competition become better regulated, but the constraints on executive action are better monitored as parliamentary committees are formed, and civil society gains voice, Morjaria says. He adds that simply the possibility, albeit a small one, of being kicked out of office can cascade into constraining those in charge.

Social mobility is important to maintaining a stable democracy. When people believe that they are likely to move into a different social class in the future, they will vote in the interest of those future selves, not necessarily their current selves.

But there is a catch: having high social mobility isnt enough to maintain a stable democracy. Pivotal decision-makers also have to plausibly believe that they (or their descendants) are equally likely to move up or down in class. Such is the finding of a separate study from Egorov and his colleagues.

For example, if you are currently in the middle class and believe, correctly or not, that you are more likely to become rich than poor, this may lead you to favor an autocratic government that benefits the wealthy, rather than a democratic one that works in the interest of the middle class.

This is why a thick middle class makes democracy more stable than a thin one, Egorov says. When the middle class constitutes much of the population, and middle-class citizens feel they are likely to either remain or return there, they will be reluctant to give power to the rich.

Political scientists think about regimes as being a spectrum. On the one end are true democracies, in which democratic norms exist and function. On the other end are strong dictatorships, where power is concentrated in the hands of an individual or small group, without any limits or oversight. Between these poles fall limited democracies and weak dictatorships: regimes in which democratic norms exist but do not function, or in which power is concentrated, but not absolutely.

Its these limited democracies and weak dictatorships that are most likely to respond with aggression to a foreign conflict, compared with true democracies and strong dictatorships, according to a model from Sandeep Baliga, a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences.

He and his coauthor constructed a game-theory model in which conflicts are triggered by leaders who fear both being attacked by other nations and being removed from power by the people they govern.

In their model, limited democracies (and weak dictatorships) tend to be more aggressive in response to a foreign threat than either true democracies or strong dictatorships. Thats because voters are likely to punish leaders in a true democracy if they deem a war to be unnecessary, making democratic leaders more dovish. Leaders of a limited democracy (or weak dictatorship), however, face only some checks on their power, making them less concerned about political blowback from engaging in an unnecessary war, and more worried about appearing weak in the face of aggression. Meanwhile, strong dictators, confident in their power, are less concerned about appearances, making them less aggressive than weak dictators.

The researchers then put their model to the test on real-world data. They found that two countries with limited democracies are more likely to fight each other than any other combination, while peace is most likely at either extreme.

To Baliga, the results suggest that spreading democracy can be risky: when it is not fully implemented, a democratic government could be more aggressive than the regime it replaced. If you take half measures, you can make matters worse, says Baliga.

Economic crises often lead to political unrestbut not always.

According to research from Nancy Qian, a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences, in countries with high levels of trust, a recession is less likely to trigger political turnover than in countries with lower levels of trust.

If Im a less-trusting person, I might say something like, I dont understand the details of what our leader is doing, but most politicians are bad and theyre lazy, so it is probably his fault, Qian explains. Alternately, a trusting person might blame factors beyond politicians control. Its about how likely I am to attribute the economic problems to circumstance or luck versus to the political leadership.

But critically, she and her colleagues find, this relationship was only seen in democracies, where people had the power to vote officials out of office.

We didnt see this pattern in autocracies, which makes sense, Qian says. You can change your leadership in an autocracy by having a revolution or a coup, but that is more difficult to pull off, so theres not much people can do, even if they are generally slow to trust.

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Take 5: Democracies and How They Thrive - Kellogg Insight