It certainly came as a surprise to many people. Though all national polls in the USA indicated that the race was tightening in the run-up to the elections, almost all indicated a Hilary Clinton win. With 279 Electoral College Votes to Hillary’s 228, the world increasingly has to come to terms with a Donald Trump presidency. There are several lessons we can learn from the election: One, Trump’s victory could signal the ascendency and ultimate mainstreaming of right wing populism. This is a growing phenomenon in Western democracies, which is epitomized in backlashes against multiculturalism, growing anti immigration sentiments and…

That Trump would win was never in doubt, to some minds. America has lived a false reality for far too long. Make no mistake, there won’t be a spike in racism, bigotry, sexism or any other negative attitudes in the US. These decadences are at the same level they have always been in the American society. The only difference is that related incidences will be more visible, implying that they have been going on underneath and people were fooled into thinking they did not exist. Trump is not as stupid as was assumed. He spent many years and many millions…

Over the last 35 years, Western democracies have seen a rapid rise in political instability, characterized by frequent shifts in governing parties and their programs and philosophies, driven at least partly by economic transformation and hardship. The question now is how to improve economic performance at a time when political instability is impeding effective policymaking. In a recent article, one of us (David Brady) shows the correlation between rising political instability and declining economic performance, pointing out that countries with below-average economic performance have experienced the most electoral volatility. More specifically, such instability corresponds with a decline in the share…

I recently joined a tour in Bucharest of the Palace of Parliament, the gigantic folly built in the 1980s on the orders of the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, who was executed before he could see it finished. The statistics rehearsed by our guide were staggering: the third biggest edifice in the world, 220,000 square feet of carpet, one million cubic meters of marble, 3,500 tons of crystal. The enormous marble stairways had to be rebuilt several times to match exactly the steps of the dictator, who was a small man. To construct this neoclassical monstrosity, an entire swath of…