American Democracy Research Articles

The Conditional Yet Corrosive Effects of Partisan Hostility

Abstract Partisan Hostility and American Democracy: Explaining Political Divisions and When They Matter explores the growing phenomenon of partisan animosity in American politics and its profound consequences for democracy. Authored by James N. Druckman, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, Matthew Levendusky, and John Barry Ryan, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of how identity-driven divisions between partisans shape public perceptions, policy support, and democratic norms. Moving beyond traditional perspectives that focus more generally on partisan loyalty and its negative side effects, the authors investigate the more insidious threat posed specifically by partisan animus (i.e., hostility toward the opposing party) and its potential to erode democratic cohesion. With a balanced approach and thoughtful study design, the book examines the conditional nature of partisan hostility, its corrosive effects on political compromise, and how party cues contribute to increasing polarization on key issues. Drawing on extensive panel data from 2019 to 2021, the authors analyze the complex interplay between partisan animosity, the personal relevance of policies, and the rhetoric of political elites. Their findings highlight the urgent need to address partisan hostility in our research and public discourse as a means of preserving democratic values and fostering more effective governance.

Hollow Parties, Turbulent Times: A Review Article

Abstract Katherine Krimmel reviews The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld. She argues that the book offers valuable new concepts and historical context for understanding pathologies of modern American democracy.

Political Polarization and Climate Policy Implementation: An Analysis Based on Panel Data of Carbon Dioxide Emissions in U.S. States

The U.S. attitude toward global climate governance is volatile, and its behavior is often constrained by its domestic politics. Studying the implementation of climate policy at the state level in the United States from the perspective of party politics and political polarization in the United States can provide important lessons for climate governance practices. Through a panel data model, this research analyzes the relationship between the party affiliations of governors in all 50 U.S. states and carbon dioxide emissions from 1997 to 2020. Based on this, the connection between political polarization and climate governance is discussed. Results indicate that the party affiliations of U.S. state governors significantly impact carbon dioxide emissions in their respective states; American democracy has the inherent flaw of failing to fulfill electoral promises; U.S. party politics is not conducive to the stable, long-term development of climate policies. These results reflect deeper societal contradictions and divides in the U.S., and the political polarization epitomized by the climate governance issue will have serious spillover effects on global climate governance.

Beyond Neutrality: A Longitudinal Analysis of Gender, Party, and Media Visibility in the Tone of US Political Coverage

Research shows that female politicians often receive more negative news coverage than their male counterparts, which can undermine voter support and contribute to their underrepresentation in politics. Despite the increase in politically active women and heightened attention to gender issues in political discourse in the United States, the past decade has also witnessed a rise in divisive rhetoric and political polarization. These changes not only transformed the political environment but also may have impacted media coverage of political figures. Despite the evolving sociopolitical landscape, existing research on news sentiment lacks a longitudinal perspective. This study uses transformer-based classifiers for sentiment detection and state space models for time series analysis to provide new longitudinal evidence on the evolution of positive and negative coverage of 1,095 US politicians in almost 900,000 news articles during the 2010s. The results indicate that while some female politicians experienced more negative coverage than men, the pattern varied depending on the politicians’ party affiliation and media visibility. In both election and routine periods, the media portrayed female Democrats, who received moderate levels of media coverage, less negatively than male Republicans, but more critically than female Republicans and male Democrats. Notably, Democratic and Republican women received slightly more positive coverage in most election years of the 2010s. Highly visible politicians, especially women, received more negative attention overall. The study and its findings advance our understanding of how news sentiment varies across different groups of politicians and how it fluctuates between election and nonelection periods.

The Rhetorical “What Goes with What”: Political Pundits and the Discursive Superstructure of Ideology in US Politics

The Rhetorical “What Goes with What”: Political Pundits and the Discursive Superstructure of Ideology in US Politics

Analyzing Themes, Sentiments, and Coping Strategies Regarding Online News Coverage of Depression in Hong Kong: Mixed Methods Study.

Depression, a highly prevalent global mental disorder, has prompted significant research concerning its association with social media use and its impact during Hong Kong's social unrest and COVID-19 pandemic. However, other mainstream media, specifically online news, has been largely overlooked. Despite extensive research conducted in countries, such as the United States, Australia, and Canada, to investigate the latent subthemes, sentiments, and coping strategies portrayed in depression-related news, the landscape in Hong Kong remains unexplored. This study aims to uncover the latent subthemes presented in the online news coverage of depression in Hong Kong, examine the sentiment conveyed in the news, and assess whether coping strategies have been provided in the news for individuals experiencing depression. This study used natural language processing (NLP) techniques, namely the latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling and the Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner (VADER) sentiment analysis, to fulfill the first and second objectives. Coping strategies were rigorously assessed and manually labeled with designated categories by content analysis. The online news was collected from February 2019 to May 2024 from Hong Kong mainstream news websites to examine the latest portrayal of depression, particularly during and after the social unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, 2435 news articles were retained for data analysis after the news screening process. A total of 7 subthemes were identified based on the topic modeling results. Societal system, law enforcement, global recession, lifestyle, leisure, health issues, and US politics were the latent subthemes. Moreover, the overall news exhibited a slightly positive sentiment. The correlations between the sentiment scores and the latent subthemes indicated that the societal system, law enforcement, health issues, and US politics revealed negative tendencies, while the remainder leaned toward a positive sentiment. The coping strategies for depression were substantially lacking; however, the categories emphasizing information on skills and resources and individual adjustment to cope with depression emerged as the priority focus. This pioneering study used a mixed methods approach where NLP was used to investigate latent subthemes and underlying sentiment in online news. Content analysis was also performed to examine available coping strategies. The findings of this research enhance our understanding of how depression is portrayed through online news in Hong Kong and the preferable coping strategies being used to mitigate depression. The potential impact on readers was discussed. Future research is encouraged to address the mentioned implications and limitations, with recommendations to apply advanced NLP techniques to a new mental health issue case or language.

The Deaths and Afterlives of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt: Political Martyrs, Political Movements, and the Politics of Memory

In this paper, I explore how two recent politically charged deaths—those of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt—illuminate the broader dynamics inherent in the concept of political martyrdom and its relationship to American democracy. Political martyrdom (as distinct from that associated with religious communities) offers martyrs a life beyond the grave, not by promising eternal life or paradise, but by ensuring them a role in a community’s collective memory. It involves three components: death, in what we might call “unnatural” circumstances, generally connected to an individual’s identity (or identities) or political commitments; consecration of that death, embedding it in a community’s collective memory and ascribing to it transcendent meaning; and transmission, the passing down of martyrdom narratives over time through media, ritual, and commemorative practices. The paper uses the examples of Floyd and Babbitt to illustrate the value of this conceptual category, one that focuses less on the personal qualities of individuals and more on communities’ narrations of their lives and deaths; highlights such narratives’ capacity to build collective identities over time, often in contexts far removed from the martyrs’ own lives and deaths; and offers new interpretive lenses for considering twenty-first-century issues of systemic violence and structural injustice.

The Dangers of Low Literacy for American Democracy: The Promising Role of Public Institutions as Community Conveners

The Dangers of Low Literacy for American Democracy: The Promising Role of Public Institutions as Community Conveners

The effects of anti-gender activism on Latin American democracies: a comparison of Brazil and Peru

ABSTRACT In Latin America, anti-gender activism has flourished in recent decades, with consequences for feminist and LGBTQ+ movements and the political representation of their agenda. We compare two countries, Brazil and Peru, where these campaigns have reshaped public debates. They entered the field of electoral competition, congress dynamics and government policymaking in the 2010s. However, the political processes preceding the rise of this activism in both countries are significantly different. Through a process-tracing comparative analysis, we explore the factors that account for the variation in the effects of anti-gender activism on previously achieved gains in women’s and sexual minorities’ rights. We consider the disputes over gender and sexuality as they were embedded in local political processes and focus our empirical analysis on the mechanisms that characterize antigender actions in three contentious issues: abortion, same-sex marriage and sex education. We show that the two countries saw a backlash against gender perspectives in policy and reproductive and sexual rights. However, the effects varied according to institutional factors and local contexts of opportunities for opposing actors to be involved in party politics and access state resources.

Election Reflections—and What Comes Next

A curated collection of essays tracking the pulse of American democracy as the second Trump Administration comes into power, this special section considers the campaigns that were waged and previews the battles yet to come.

Taking responsibility: Asilomar and its legacy.

A reappraisal of the constitutional position of science in American democracy is needed.

Immigration Policy Solutions Are Achieved Through US Political Interests, Economic Market Manipulation, And Legal Rulings

Immigration Policy Solutions Are Achieved Through US Political Interests, Economic Market Manipulation, And Legal Rulings

Book review: Myrna Perez Criticizing Science: Stephen Jay Gould and the Struggle for American Democracy

Book review: Myrna Perez <i>Criticizing Science: Stephen Jay Gould and the Struggle for American Democracy</i>

“Dominating the battlespace”: Right-wing tactical performances and the spatial politics of postdemocracy

In this paper, we argue that the political right is a coherent object of analysis and a powerful presence in US politics, because it possesses a spatially-informed alternative theory and practice of society. We thus propose the concept of battlespace as an analytic to understand the political right’s project. The right constructs its alternative theory and practice of society, we argue, through spatial tactics that seek to generate collective experience around the feeling of embattlement. We then analyze the ways in which this collective experience is constructed for and with participants through tactical performances. We understand tactical performances as a constellation of creative, improvised, and adversarial actions that spatially create shared experiences among participants. We then trace three modalities of action – hostility, frontierization, and validation – that characterize the tactical performances of the political right. What unites the right against racial, gender, and sexual self-determination is its ability to forge a common identity and experience through an alternative vision of society. Tactical performances are enacted to nullify and threaten such heterogeneity and processes of pluralization. Finally, using the concept of postdemocracy, we discuss how these spatial tactics undermine democracy’s conditions of possibility.

The perception of insecurity and vote choice in national referendums: The case of Chile in 2022

The perception of insecurity increasingly explains political behaviour in Latin American democracies. Since the literature on referendums underlines that people often vote motivated by issues not directly addressed in the ballot, we assess if the perception of insecurity impacted the vote choice in the September 2022 constitutional referendum in Chile. We hypothesise that those who perceive more insecurity punish the national government by voting against the ruling coalition’s preferred outcome. We use a national poll conducted before the 2022 constitutional referendum and find that moderates were more likely to vote against the government if they perceived more insecurity. Among those in the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum, the perception of insecurity has a more limited impact. As perceptions of insecurity increasingly impact vote choice in Latin American democracies, voters also use constitutional referendums as an opportunity to punish the government for issues that trigger popular discontent.

Not all emotions are the same: an intersectional analysis of women’s political action based on emotive responses

If there was ever a time in US history to understand women’s politics, that time is certainly now, as with the increase of women candidates, the rise of women’s political engagement, and women-led social movements, scholars have little intersectional insight into what motivates women’s political participation. Anger and fear are powerful forces in US politics, yet how negative emotions about race matter for women is less understood. Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Postelection Survey, we find that fear about race is associated with engagement in costlier political acts. Women’s anger about race leads to more frequent non-electoral political engagement once accounting for time, money, and civic skills. No one emotion has the same effect on women’s non-electoral political participation. Not all women are similar in their emotional responses to race, which impacts how women look to political systems to address racial issues.

Presidential Particularism and Mayoral Elections

Abstract Amid the growing trend of political polarization and nationalization of US politics, the link between federal and local governments has become increasingly significant in the American public policy process. Consequently, the president, as party leader, has increasingly supported co-partisan candidates, not only in federal elections but also in subnational ones. Incorporating 1,124 contested partisan local elections for 399 cities with populations exceeding 50,000 between 2005 and 2020, we investigate how the president strategically employs federal funds to assist co-partisan mayoral candidates. Using two-way fixed effects models, we find that the president distributes more block and project grants to swing cities with co-partisan mayors during mayoral election years. We do not find that the president disproportionately allocates grants to co-partisan mayors in swing cities during non-mayoral election years; instead, jurisdictions are rewarded irrespective of their electoral value.

The Polarization of U.S. Alliances: Domestic Division and America’s Commitment to International Security

ABSTRACT Democracies are considered particularly reliable allies as their political elites are accountable to their voters and party, prohibiting them from reneging on alliance commitments. Yet heightened polarization in the U.S. raises questions about this political support system of U.S. alliances. Combining the literature on audience costs with research on polarization and U.S. foreign policy, this article theorizes how partisan and ideological polarization negatively affects U.S. commitment to security alliances. It is argued that partisan and ideological polarization among members of Congress prohibits American democracy from sending credible signals of resolve because it makes legislators prioritize party unity and ideological conviction over national security. Testing a set of hypotheses with an analysis of an original data set of co-sponsored legislation concerning the South China Sea dispute and the Russian annexation of Crimea reveals how partisan and ideological polarization in Congress undermine bipartisanship support of allies as well as contend the policy instruments necessary to support the alliance. The findings of this article further develop existing research on the implications of polarization for American democracy as it sheds light on the nature and drivers of polarization in Congress regarding U.S. alliance commitments.

Rising Threats to U.S. Democracy

Abstract This is the expanded written version of the James Madison Lecture delivered on September 6, 2024, at the APSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA. I grapple with the pressing question before us as social scientists and as citizens: How and why have US politics and governance arrived at the present juncture where long-standing constitutional practices and democratically responsive governance are very much at stake? My answer focuses on what I see as the prime driver of the current crisis: the recent radicalization of the Republican Party and its allies, as they have pursued two forms and phases of antidemocratic politics. The first version involves maximum use of legal hardball steps that stretch existing laws and rules to disadvantage partisan opponents (I also call this approach “McConnellism” in honor of its chief practitioner, outgoing GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky). The second approach targets political competitors and government operations with extralegal harassment, threats of violence, and even actual violence. Drawing on my own research with many collaborators, as well as from many excellent studies by colleagues in political science and beyond, I will dissect the elite and popular roots of recent Republican embrace of both forms of antidemocratic politics.

American Political Violence (The Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro Lecture 2023)

Abstract Amongst the ways in which American democracy is distinct, the Weberian anomaly stands out: the United States equates to a classical Weberian state with the routine trappings of bureaucratic power, national organization, stable territorial parameters, a legal code and military power. But it is at best a quasi-Weberian state in respect of state monopolization of legitimate violence. The scope of the Second Amendment means the federal government has control in many instances over the use of physical force but historically this authority coexists with the (explicit or implicit) delegation of political violence to societal actors. In this article I argue that the legitimation of political violence outside the state is endogenous to the American constitutional settlement, a feature which arises from the country's origins and the institutional arrangements adopted in key constitutional clauses and judicial decisions.