The current presidential campaigns in the US has exposed the underbelly of American democracy which should force us to re-think some of the assumptions we have about ‘mature democracies’ and ‘democratising states’. The classic assumption is that in mature democracies elections truly reflect the will of the electorate, with little or no ‘hanky-panky’ or ‘mago- mago’, while in the ‘new’ or ‘democratising societies’ authoritarian impulses and manipulative tendencies prevail. American democracy is over 200 years old – whether you start counting from the country’s ratification of its constitution in 1788 or the time its first elected President George Washington took…

Something interesting has emerged in voting patterns on both sides of the Atlantic: Young people are voting in ways that are markedly different from their elders. A great divide appears to have opened up, based not so much on income, education, or gender as on the voters’ generation. There are good reasons for this divide. The lives of both old and young, as they are now lived, are different. Their pasts are different, and so are their prospects. The Cold War, for example, was over even before some were born and while others were still children. Words like socialism do…