As the Framers anticipated, factions remain a powerful force in American politics. The founding generation disagreed about much, but there was a broad consensus that factions, the inevitable companions of democracy, lead to democratic excess and the abuse of power. Ironically, the factor most responsible for the continued influence of factions and particularly for the dominant influence of majority faction has been the steady democratization of the American constitutional system. The Framers would not be surprised. The best prospects of constraining the negative influences of faction are restoration of the balance between state and national powers and acceptance of the need for constraints on simple majority-rules democracy.

The role of the judiciary as a check on the legislative and executive branches was believed necessary to the effectiveness of the horizontal separation of powers as a check on political factions. The nature of the judicial power was generally agreed to include the power of judicial review, but selection and tenure in office were thought to be important to limiting abuses of power.

Federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism, the electoral college, judicial review, constitutionally guaranteed rights, and the relative difficulty of amendment have all helped limit the influence of political factions.

The principle of popular sovereignty allows for only democracy as a form of government. But democracy produces the political factions that can corrupt government unless constrained. Beginning with the corrupting influence of factions in the state governments after the Revolution, the chapter discusses the Framers’ understanding of why human nature leads to factions.

The Founders committed the country to a “democracy” which at that time excluded most Native Americans, Blacks, and women. But the commitment was there, and eventually most of the excluded were granted full citizenship rights. Furthermore, for more than a century, considerable “wherewithal” was provided for them. The elements of wherewithal were provided by political “parties,” by “education,” and by “journalism.” Parties got organized almost immediately, so that politicians could offer voters policy choices and so that the politicians themselves could bring different parts of the new government to work together. “Public schools” started teaching children to maintain religious faith but, during the 19th century, morphed into institutions culminating in land-grant and other “universities” aimed at educating citizens in science, useful occupations, and democratic culture. Journalism first belonged to parties, but technology produced the penny press sold to anyone and hawking sensationalism, which got a professional response in the 1890s when the New York Times announced it would publish only news “fit to print.” Ominously, however, early decades in the 20th century cast “doubts” on the viability of democracy, when thinkers like Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Lippmann described ordinary citizens as in thrall to the “herd instinct” and “stereotypes,” and when leaders like Adolf Hitler explained how the masses can be swayed by “big lies.”

This chapter argues that the literature on legislatures in authoritarian regimes has hitherto explained their origins, described their effects on regime duration, analyzed how they fulfill the roles of oversight and legitimation of autocratic regimes, and accounted for their influence on policy outcomes under highly specific conditions, but have not adequately explained another main function that legislatures are supposed to perform: lawmaking. The few works on this topic have highly specific scope conditions, present theories unrelated to the political dynamics of authoritarianism, and cannot explain variation of legislative outcomes across different types of dictatorship. We argue that these limitations can be overcome by extending the power-sharing theory of authoritarian government to account for lawmaking institutions and outcomes.

This chapter presents our methodological approach, our case selection, our data sources, and the general patterns emerging from our comparative analysis of lawmaking institutions and outcomes. Our results shows that Argentina’s last dictatorship, supported by a coalition of factions with high levels of unity and embeddedness, featured a reviser legislature that amended and rejected higher shares of government bills than both the notary legislature created by Franco’s regime in Spain, which was based on a coalition of factions with lower levels of unity and embeddedness, and the oscillating legislature of Brazil’s military dictatorship, based upon a coalition of factions with uneven and unstable levels of unity and embeddedness.

This chapter presents our theory, which claims that lawmaking institutions and outcomes in autocracies depend upon the nature and dynamics of factional politics. When factional politics is balanced, because the factions that make up the autocratic coalition are highly united and embedded in organizations, they establish reviser legislatures mandated to intervene in all lawmaking processes and empowered not only to review but also to amend and reject government initiatives. In contrast, when factional politics is unbalanced, because factions are less united and embedded, regimes establish notary legislatures with limited and contingent intervention in lawmaking processes, and empowered to amend but not necessarily reject government bills. Reviser legislatures typically amend and reject significant shares of government bills and are able to impose important changes in policy, whereas notary legislatures typically amend government initiatives, but rarely reject them, and are hardly able to impose important policy changes. Variation in the resources of factions may lead legislatures to oscillate between these two extreme types.

While most scholars of criminalized governance in Rio de Janeiro attribute its origins to the prison-based factions which formed during the military dictatorship (1964–85), this chapter argues that these arrangements emerged before, in the homes and on the streets and alleyways of the city’s favelas and housing projects. This chapter investigates these origins by focusing on the first embryonic gangs in Complexo da Maré in the 1970s. Combining archival research with oral histories of longtime residents, the chapter documents the emergence of Maré’s gangs after a variety of other non-state actors that had previously provided governance were increasingly marginalized during Brazil’s military dictatorship and as the abusive practices of police became more widespread. Maré’s incipient gang networks quickly began to compete over valuable drug-selling turf and, as the more successful ones consolidated territorial control, they expanded their organizations and governance activities. The chapter concludes with a description of the history of Rio’s prison-based factions and the marriage between these two organizational forms as the favela-based gangs integrated into these citywide networks.

In this chapter, I first argue that the key function that parties perform, when functioning as they ought to function, is to facilitate a mutually responsive relationship between public policy and popular opinion by acting as an intermediary between a state and its people. They perform this intermediary function in a unique manner, because of their bi-directionality and their plenary character. When they perform this function effectively, political parties significantly reduce four key information and transaction costs that would otherwise make democratic governance impossible: political participation costs, voters’ information costs, policy packaging costs, and ally prediction costs. I further identify four normative principles in relation to political parties: viz, the purposive autonomy principle, the party system optimality principle, the party-state separation principle, and the ‘anti-faction principle. These political principles are drawn from the value of democracy itself. As such, they should – alongside other relevant political and constitutional norms – inform fundamental constitutional design choices.

Political factions at Carthage cannot be identified beyond a simple polarity: supporters and opponents of Hannibal’s family, ‘Barcids’ and ‘anti-Barcids’. At Rome, the richer naming system has encouraged prosopographic studies, conjectures about political alliances based on kinship, marriage ties, and shared local origins. But more than temporary existence of such ‘groups’ is doubtful. It is also disputed whether Republican Rome was any sort of democracy: Polybius controversially claimed that tribunes of the plebs were there to do the people’s will. In the second Punic war, where we rely on Livy, elections do not look very democratic, but there is a special and temporary reason for this: demography. Casualties in the 218−216 disasters produced a top-heavy senate for years to come. The trials of the Scipios (180s) do not support the idea of groups but rather exemplify the ruling class’s concern to prevent ambitious individuals from upsetting a competitive equilibrium.

The victory of Cameron’s Conservatives in 2010 ushered in the idea of a new Conservative Party, repairing both image and electoral prospects. However, this chapter will examine to what extent that change occurred, and how much the Conservatives were united or divided by the same older questions of policy and ideology – particularly on Europe and the economy. The chapter will also analyse the development of the party’s structures, power and personnel, and contemplate what effects any change may have had.

Antioch’s circuses and theaters are well known; however, how they gradually became locus to faction rivalries and hotbeds for civic strife is brought into focus by this chapter.

This chapter focuses on Rousseau’s underappreciated treatment of voting and electoral laws. It argues that these are a worthy and essential part of the Social Contract – a matter of political life and death. First, Rousseau sees universal suffrage as necessary for establishing a political community, for selecting its form of government, and for discerning the general will. Second, electoral reforms are the primary mechanism for reducing the speed of political decline and “death.” The chapter brings together Rousseau’s remarks on the design of electoral districts, the manner of voting (i.e. timing, place, secret vs. open, order of casting ballots, thresholds), and the aggregation of votes, drawing primarily on his examples of flawed but enduring republics such as Rome, Sparta, Venice, and Geneva. Instead of reconstructing Rousseau’s blueprint for the perfectly just republic, the chapter shows how frequent and appropriate electoral reforms allowed these republics to outlive even their less corrupt contemporaries.

This chapter examines the meanings of moderation in the American political tradition, beginning with George Washington’s Farewell Address, continuing with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, and ending with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.

Chapter 3 describes how the Constitution created a system for control of factions. But when those factions more and more polarized around the issue of slavery, the Northern and Western national majority was unable to rule and eventually had suppress the Southern minority in the Civil War. In recent decades, much Black migration out of the South and some White migration into the Republican Party have again polarized voter sentiment into red and blue states, or two tribes. This gridlock in the national government has again created a national majority which cannot rule (see the Senate cloture procedure), in which case a new political crisis plagues the country.