The chapter begins by reviewing the long history of how Congress has procedural rules for itself and, in the process, created protections against majority tyranny while limiting the power of transient majorities to rewrite Americas laws. It also describes how members individual political need to depart from party platforms limits party leaders power and often promotes bipartisanship. The trouble is that these same rules facilitate gridlock, stoking anger and polarization across the wider society. The chapter concludes by analyzing how filibusters, supermajorities, and government shutdowns limit majority tyranny by supplying a practical test of when proposed legislation unduly burdens the minority.

In this chapter we summarise results from studying existing institutional indicators, a quantitative survey of 149 respondents and more than 50 hours of interviews with key informants. Focus is on identifying a series of key institutional weaknesses for further analysis in subsequent chapters.

Why do working-class people so rarely go on to hold elected office in the world’s democracies? In this chapter, we review what scholars know and use new data on the social class backgrounds of national legislators in the OECD to evaluate several country-level explanations that have never been tested before in a large sample of comparative data. Our findings suggest that some hypotheses have promise and warrant future research: working-class people more often hold office in countries where labor unions are stronger and income is distributed more evenly. However, some common explanations do not pan out in our data – neither Left-party strength nor proportional representation is associated with working-class officeholding – and the various country-level explanations scholars have discussed in the past only account for at most 30 percent of the gap between the share of workers in the public and in national legislatures. Future research should focus comparative analyses on individual- and party-level explanations and consider the possibility that there are factors common to all democracies that limit working-class officeholding.

The chapter begins by describing the presidents relations with Congress, backed the threat of presidential vetoes on one side and impeachment on the other. It then traces the rise of the federal bureaucracy as an independent policymaker, asking whether and to what extent presidential power, rule of law norms, and bureaucratic incentives can ensure broadly democratic outcomes. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of the Presidents War Powers, the dynamics of wartime elections, and the Executives alarming authority to impose emergency measures without Congress.

Political research has argued that systematic inequalities in political participation are bound to produce a system that caters more to those who actively voice their opinions. Yet it might be that citizens who rarely see their preferences translated to policy are discouraged from participating in politics. In this chapter, we attempt to estimate the extent to which unequal representation affects participation. Using nine survey measures of system satisfaction across twenty-nine European countries, and looking at nine forms of political participation, we decompose gaps in participation and estimate counterfactually how large these gaps would have been if low-educated and poor citizens had the same beliefs about the system as more-educated and affluent citizens. We find that the gap in voting between the bottom and top education/income quintile would be around 15 20 percent smaller if those groups were equally optimistic about the workings of the system. These results suggest that unequal participation is partly attributable to the system being unequally responsive.

The rule of law and judicial independence are a project yet to be achieved in Mozambique. The different attempts made so far to reform the legal system, mainly after the change in political and strategic direction brought about by the Constitution of 1990, were always short-sighted and conjunctural in nature, under domestic and foreign pressure that was not always clear or well-intentioned. Real structural reforms need to be made for the judiciary to be able to affirm itself as a real power and, in this way, favour balanced growth of companies, increased productivity, investment and jobs and, at the same time, the defence of the rights and legitimate interests of individuals and groups with fewer economic resources.

This chapter explores agricultural performance of Mozambique, its institutional weaknesses, and the underlying factors that underpin an unsatisfactory performance during many decades. We point to the role of systemic political instability and violence combined with challenges to state legitimacy. Regional divides and lack of market integration continue to influence in a critical and all-encompassing manner. Finally, the way in which the interests of the elite and donor influence have affected progress in the agriculture sector suggests the need for concerted reorientation in existing strategies, policies, and priorities. This is reinforced by future challenges, including the extractive industry; population growth and internal migration; national and international markets; climate change; and COVID-19. We highlight the need to place the future of agriculture in Mozambique within a long-term perspective, focusing on the adoption and stabilisation of an institutional framework aimed at increasing agricultural productivity and preserving the environment.

This paper pools datasets on policy responsiveness to public opinion in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Following the empirical strategy set out by Gilens (2012), we show that the policy outputs correspond much better to the preferences of affluent citizens than to the preferences of low- and middle-income citizens in all four countries. We proceed to explore how government partisanship conditions unequal responsiveness. In so doing, we distinguish between economic/welfare issues and other issues and we also distinguish between the period before 1998 and the period since 1998. Our findings suggest that policymaking under Left-leaning governments was relatively more responsive to low- and middle-income citizens in the economic/welfare domain before 1998, but this was not true for other policy domains before 1998 and it is no longer true for the economic/welfare domain. We conclude with some general reflections on the implications of our empirical findings for the literature on mechanisms of unequal representation in liberal democracies.

This chapter serves as a general introduction and overview. It defines the fork in the road and outlines Mozambiques historical context. It goes on to identifying eight key proximate causes and deep factors that determine the basic institutional weaknesses of the country, which are in focus throughout the remainder of the volume.

From the early days of national independence in 1975, the central aim of the educational policy in Mozambique has been to ensure that all school-age children have access to school and can remain there until they have completed their basic education. In the pursuit of this aim, the extension of access to primary education was relatively successful, given that it reached a net rate of school coverage of almost 100 per cent. However, the impressive increase in school attendance rates has not been accompanied by a corresponding improvement in the quality of learning, and there are worrying signs of a considerable setback in relation to this aspect. Using this observation as a starting point, this chapter identifies and analyses the variables in the institutional context behind ‘schooling without learning’. The results point to (i) weak state capacity; (ii) excessive dependence on external aid; and (iii) poor community involvement and participation in school management, as factors with a major influence on the poor quality of education in primary schools.