A president can leave the White House six ways: voted out, term-limited, dies in office, resigns, or removed through one of two constitutional mechanisms built for entirely different failures. One of those mechanisms has been attempted four times in 237 years and has never succeeded. The other has never been attempted at all. Despite frequently being treated as interchangeable in public debate, they were designed by different generations of American lawmakers to solve differe

Iceland spent over a decade in accession limbo, an applicant frozen mid-process, and on August 29 the country chose to stay there. Voters rejected a government proposal to restart membership talks with the European Union, 52.8 percent to 47.2 percent. The vote changes little at the structural level. EU accession runs on a system built for slowness, and this result left that pace exactly where it was. Iceland applied for membership in 2009, days after its banking system collap

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the same kind of politician. I know — put the pitchfork down for a second. They don't agree on taxes, immigration, healthcare, or basically anything anyone would actually vote on. But strip all of that away, and both of them are doing the same thing structurally: there's a corrupt elite screwing you over, and there's a silent majority getting ignored. They simply have different definitions of who that corrupt elite is, mainly because it's e

You have heard this line, probably from someone who sounded very sure of themselves: America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. And they say it like it's some witty response to a question no one asked, or like some kid from school who started his responses by saying "well, actually." You know the one. That kid was me. But anyway — are these people right? Have we been fed a lie our entire lives, and the United States isn't a democracy? Was Reagan wrong when he said

Twenty-seven countries. One set of laws binding on all of them. No army, no taxes, and technically, not even a country. The European Union is one of the strangest political creations in modern history, and understanding what it actually is starts with understanding why it exists at all.

The United Kingdom has never written its constitution down. What is known as the "British Constitution" is instead a patchwork of statutes, court rulings, and unwritten convention accumulated over roughly a thousand years, alterable at any time through an ordinary act of Parliament rather than a formal amendment process.

Britain is getting its seventh Prime Minister in ten years, and once again, the public has had no say in the matter. The transition arrives amid an unusually busy stretch of British news: June marked the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, and the architect of that campaign resigned his own parliamentary seat last week over an undeclared multi-million-pound donation scandal — though he is now standing to reclaim it, against a candidate running under the name Count Bin

Germany's government structure is younger than most people assume — younger, in fact, than the United States. But like the US and France, its history explains the government it has today...

France has burned through five republics, two empires, and a monarchy since 1789 — here's how the president, prime minister, and parliament actually work today.

Welcome to Politics 101, an easy guide to how governments work across the transatlantic world. Every entry takes a country apart piece by piece, so that when something goes wrong, you know exactly who to blame. Today, in honor of its 250th anniversary, we start with the United States.

Ten years ago this week, on June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom shocked the world and voted to leave the European Union, 52 to 48 percent. The cursed ratio. The people behind the Leave campaign called it the will of the British people. Most voters didn't even know what Brexit was, and a decade later the country has changed its mind. Poll after poll shows more Britons want back in.

For the past hundred years, the same two parties, the Conservatives and Labour, have swapped power between them. Today they're both falling apart, and if things continue, both could be shut out of Downing Street when the next election rolls around in 2029. The most remarkable part? Both wounds are self-inflicted.

A quick note on terms. I'm using "left," "right," and "center" by the American Overton window. Our "left" would read as moderate in Sweden, and plenty of center-right parties abroad would sit on our left. The only shared definition runs to broad ideas of more or less government, so for this piece, American frame. Every time the Democratic Party loses, the blame game starts. The left says the ticket ran too cautiously. The center says the left scared off the independent swing

The template most of these parties borrowed (one dominant, charismatic leader, one defining issue, winner take all) was built for a two-party system, mainly the American one. Clear 51% and you run the government, push through your agenda, and do as much as you can before the voters reject you. That's the whole ball-game.

A presidential executive order cannot reach into the administrative apparatus of 50 independent state governments and shut their elections down. There is no mechanism for it and no law requiring states to comply. An executive order is, structurally, an internal directive to employees of the executive branch. It functions more or less like a memo from a boss, with no force over people outside that office. States can disregard them.

From leaked diplomatic chats to threats against Greenland and Canada, to cascading tariffs between Washington and Brussels, transatlantic relations have deteriorated faster than most observers thought possible. At the center of it is an alliance that has underpinned Western security for three quarters of a century. NATO is under pressure it has not faced since the Cold War, with the significant difference that this time the pressure is coming from the country that built it.

Over the past year, both major American political parties have been engaged in a redistricting arms race ahead of the upcoming midterms. By most projections, it will produce almost no net partisan gain for either side. That outcome is not a coincidence. It is the predictable result of how gerrymandering actually works when both sides do it simultaneously.

Justin Trudeau's Liberals were down twenty points and staring at a generational wipeout.Justin Trudeau's Liberals were down twenty points and staring at a generational wipeout. Pierre Poilievre was measuring the drapes. Then Trump imposed tariffs and started talking about annexation — and the entire frame of the election changed. Mark Carney, a man who had never won a seat in his life, ended up with a working parliamentary majority. Here's how.

Every few years, us Americans rediscover that our political system was designed to produce exactly two parties, and we spend considerable energy being surprised by this. From the Federalists vs Anti-Federalists to the Democratic-Republicans and Whigs to today's Democrats vs Republicans, this binary choice has never changed. New parties only rise when one of the existing ones implode.

Oftentimes, in American politics, one party doesn't get pulled further towards its wings, such as the left if you’re a Democrat unless the other party implodes. It's happened a couple of times, like in 1932, and the Democrats adopted left-wing policies under FDR.

Trump went all in on Orbán and came up short. Opposition leader Peter Magyar was swept into office on a landslide big enough to give him a blank check to undo eveything Orban built on a 78% turnout. You can't rig that, now matter how hard you've tried after 16 years of democratic backsliding.

Recently, several European states have gone to the polls, and each has an interesting nugget of political science to digest. Across France, Denmark, and Italy, right-wing and far-right forces ran hard and largely fell short. Hungary, where the definitive test comes on April 12, may be the most consequential data point of all.

Iceland's vote in August is genuinely uncertain. The fishing question will dominate the campaign, but the deeper issue is whether Iceland’s 400,000 citizens want to trade some degree of sovereignty for security in a moment when the traditional guarantor of that security is making territorial threats against their neighbor.