Prospects for Democratic Breakdown in the United States: Bringing the States Back In

Bernard Grofman

doi:10.1017/s1537592721003285

Abstract

The greatest threat of democratic breakdown stems from the federal structure of the US Constitution and from false claims of election fraud with the potential for state- or congressional- level reversals of popular vote outcomes. The potential for such a breakdown was revealed by the events of January 6, 2021, with tens of millions of voters still believing in the big lie and the repetition of that lie by legislators and government officials. It is exacerbated by hyperpolarization, minoritarian control caused by partisan gerrymandering for state legislative districts and in the US House, malapportionment in the US Senate, and the highest likelihood of Electoral College reversals of popular vote outcomes in more than a century. Democratic breakdown is also made more likely by recent legislation that makes it easier for legislators in some gerrymandered states to reverse the outcomes of the popular vote in their states.

Highlights

The greatest threat of democratic breakdown stems from the federal structure of the US Constitution and from false claims of election fraud with the potential for state- or congressional- level reversals of popular vote outcomes
Recent work in political science, drawing on the comparative politics literature on features held in common by countries that have exhibited democratic breakdowns, and using tools such as qualitative classification analysis (QCA), have offered opposing points of view on whether the United States exhibits the features historically found to be associated with democratic breakdowns
To resolve the differences between these two essays about either the general relevance of QCA analyses for the study of causality or the degree to which QCA findings support the claim that the United States displays many of the indicators whose combination could predict a high likelihood of democratic breakdown