United by their realistic approach to the study of democratic politics, Hans Kelsen and Joseph Schumpeter similarly sought to de-ideologise ‘classical’ accounts of popular sovereignty. Both developed an analytical framework to explain how modern democracy, based on parties and the electoral selection of representatives, functions and realises its ideals. Both emphasised that democracy lasts only if it successfully generates a ‘compromise’ between the contingent majority and the temporary minority (in the terminology for Kelsen) or if current majorities exercise ‘self-control’ (in the language of Schumpeter). However, neither explained the mechanisms that induce democratically elected majorities to limit themselves in the practice of governmental power. The chapter first charts the innovations introduced by Kelsen and Schumpeter into our understanding of democracy; then, it teases out their views on how majorities abstain from aggrandising their power beyond some limits. For both, such limits must be self-enforcing and observing them must constitute an equilibrium. Yet, a proper understanding of how this equilibrium emerges remains one of the greatest challenges for contemporary scholars of democracy. ‘Compromise’ or ‘self-restraint’ is almost definitionally a requisite of democratic politics, but it cannot be imposed from outside, and it cannot just follow from agreements about certain rules, unless those rules are self-enforcing. As the chapter explains, it must be in the best interest of the democratic rulers to stop monopolising power given the potential reactions of the opposition, and it must be in the best interest of the opposition to participate peacefully given that the incumbent stops. Despite the significant progress in the normative and empirical study of democracy over the past several decades, the greatest challenge faced by Kelsen and Schumpeter has not been completely resolved.

Four ways of considering partisanship and factionalism dominated the political landscape of the nineteenth-century United States: the residual anti-party views of classical republicans, who were often drawn to a traditional politics of deference involving voluntary allegiance to leaders of a higher class who would advance the “common good”; James Madison’s view that multiple factions, in shifting configurations extending across a large geographic expanse, could prevent majorities from dominating minorities; the stance of those like Andrew Jackson who believed that parties harnessed the power of the people, whose interests would otherwise suffer neglect or worse from elite leaders; and finally, the fear of a polarizing, two-party system expressed by John Adams evolved in the views of a Mugwump like Henry Adams, who held himself apart from partisan corruption without aspiring to restore the elite politics of deference. This chapter explores the presence of these varied approaches to partisanship and factionalism in literary works by Henry Adams, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, James Fenimore Cooper, William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion Tourgée, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mark Twain, and Simon Pokagon.