American Democracy Research Articles

Educating Undergraduates for American Democracy: The Third Way Civics Approach

It is one of few statements upon which Americans left, right, and center agree: The nation faces a civic crisis. Polarization, rage, and militancy vie with cynicism, disengagement, and despair in the much-vaunted battle for America’s political soul—all while trampling grace, deliberation, and cooperation underfoot. What can and should our institutions of higher education do to address this situation? Such a question demands at least as many responses as there are distinctive functions of higher education. This article explains one effort to answer it with reference to the sector’s most visible—and arguably most essential—field of endeavor: undergraduate teaching and learning. The Third Way Civics initiative (3WC) unites institutions across the country in an experimental approach to civic learning in college, centered on a one-semester, credit-bearing course on American political and social development across time. Orchestrated by the Minnesota Humanities Center (MHC) and funded by MHC, the Teagle Foundation, and Lumina Foundation, 3WC directly fosters the embrace and development of several core commitments and building blocks identified by MJCSL guest editors as essential to healthy civic identity, including commitments to liberal democracy, personal integrity, and public-minded self-reflection, and building-block capacities for engaging constructively across differences and for active, collaborative acquisition of democratic knowledge, habits, and skills. In these ways, 3WC responds not only to pundits’ predictions of a civic apocalypse, but to what surveys reveal to be a growing (and far more hopeful) desire among students for a practically democratic education: one that positions them for economic success but also prepares them for lives of public purpose and productive citizenship.

“The man who has money is king”: Discursive constructions of affluent domination of US politics in letters-to-the-editor, 1948–2016

ABSTRACT Scholarly and popular publications alike are rife with accusations and evidence of the wealthy’s outsized influence on US politics. The rich can vote more easily, have greater sway over policy, and comprise a disproportionate share of Congress. Yet few are asking what citizens have to say about both the real and perceived power of the rich. Scholars do not yet fully understand how the people process these realities in public fora or build communal interpretations of wealth-driven political power. This paper takes an historical perspective, asking how people across a period of increasing economic polarization and campaign spending made sense of democracy without equality and what they proposed to do about it. To that end, I conduct a fantasy theme analysis of nearly 400 letters-to-the-editor from 12 newspapers spanning the 18 US presidential elections from 1948 to 2016. This analysis contributes to a conceptual model of how citizens felt politics worked in the United States across an era of increasing inequalities. I argue the fantasy theme of affluent domination is one element of a rhetorical vision pitting the interests of the working poor against the wealthy for control of a political system that to some looks remarkably little like democracy.

“Can I write this is ableist AF in a peer review?”: A corpus-driven analysis of Twitter engagement strategies across disciplinary groups

At a time when scholars are increasingly expected to participate in public knowledge dissemination, social media platforms like Twitter hold great promise for engaging both experts and non-experts. However, it remains unclear in what ways academic tweets are shaped by disciplinary concerns and how this might, in turn, impact audience engagement. Our paper reports an early-stage corpus-driven analysis of 4,000 English tweets from 40 scholars’ Twitter accounts across four disciplinary groups: Arts and Humanities (AH), Social Sciences (SS), Life Sciences (LS), and Physical Sciences (PS). Engagement rates (Tardy, 2023), multimodal elements, tweet types, and interaction markers were quantitatively calculated using corpus and computational methods and qualitatively analysed through close reading. Our findings revealed some disciplinary variation in the corpus: specifically, LS used more multimodal elements than SS on Twitter; SS used fewer interactional markers than LS and PS on Twitter. We further found that LS also has the highest number of threads and the longest threads, often to unfold their multimodal information. Despite being the least multimodal and interactive disciplinary group, SS has the highest engagement rate. Our analysis suggests that explicit evaluation and critique plays an important role in eliciting responses on Twitter, particularly with regard to current social or political issues —a finding that resonates with previous research on science communication and popularization (Orpin, 2019). The findings can be applied in science communication training to raise disciplinary awareness in shaping one’s social media presence.

NUCLEAR ANXIETY: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE FILMS, DR. STRANGELOVE AND THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER

Due to the Cuban Missile Crisis between the USA and the USSR in 1962, the nuclear war was closer than ever. This situation thought as the most terrifying result of the Cold War era has also been the subject of film productions. Director Stanley Kubrick, satirically and critically, portrayed the US and Soviet politics of the time in his film "Dr. Strangelove." Conversely, John McTiernan's film "The Hunt for Red October," released in 1990, presents the politics of that era through American conservative values. These films reflect the policies of the era of unipolar world order, while also shed light on the transition period to a multipolar world order. In 2014, the Russian Federation's military intervention in the Crimean Federal District marked the beginning of a new era. In the following years, the Russian Federation expanded its military operations into Ukraine's interior regions, and consequently, this leads to concerns about nuclear threat once again. In this time of nuclear concerns has risen again, it is seen critical evaluate these films in the current context. These films, which present the politics of the era from different perspectives, were analyzed comparatively using a critical discourse analysis method.

Middle Passages: Lessons in Racial Subjection at the Hampton Institute and Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Abstract: This essay argues that the historically Black Hampton Institute (1868) and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879) are crucial sites to investigate how US political, territorial, and economic conquest were sutured to the project of emancipation after the Civil War. Rather than focusing on these schools’ manual education, I turn to their newspapers, the Southern Workman and Indian Helper , to demonstrate how they developed techniques of discursive representation, rooted in Black fungibility, that made racial subjection appear as racial emancipation in the postbellum period. These newspapers were framed as both tool and evidence of students’ subjective transformation. Instead of providing authentic evidence of Black and Native transformation, however, they provide a glimpse into how Hampton’s and Carlisle’s representations of racial emancipation drew on discursive techniques created in the material and symbolic violence of transatlantic slavery’s Middle Passage. The essay concludes by demonstrating how a trio of boarding school stories (1900) by the Yankton Sioux author Zitkala-Ša provides a nascent critique of the ways in which Indian boarding schools produced Native fungibility as a technique of white domination in the context of postbellum US imperialism.

Age Disparities in Prevalence of Anxiety and Depression Among US Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic

High levels of anxiety and depression were documented shortly after the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and were more prevalent in younger adults than in older adults. Knowing whether these age disparities persisted throughout multiple years of the COVID-19 pandemic and identifying associated factors will help guide health policy. To investigate age disparities in anxiety and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-sectional study consisted of a nationally representative online survey administered between April 2020 and August 2022 and included US adults who were not incarcerated. Data were analyzed between March and September 2022. The first 27 months of the COVID-19 pandemic included wide variation in infection rates, turbulence in US political and social life, and geopolitical instability. Primary exposures include individuals' age and economic precarity and pandemic-related events (eg, weekly state-level case counts and individual vaccination status). Symptoms of anxiety and depression were assessed via responses to 2-item screeners (Generalized Anxiety Disorder 2-item for anxiety and Patient Health Questionnaire-2 for depression). An individual's symptoms were identified as clinically elevated if scores exceeded validated thresholds. This study included 3 028 923 respondents (mean [SD] age, 48.9 [17.0] years; 1 567 603 [51.8%] female). In multiple regression analyses that include state fixed effects and survey-week fixed effects, likely anxiety and depressive disorders among 291 382 (40%) and 238 505 (33%) of adults aged 18 to 39 years, respectively, compared with 357 820 (31%) and 274 534 (24%) of adults aged 40 to 59 years and 225 295 (20%) and 183 695 (16%) adults aged 60 years and older. Levels declined throughout the pandemic period for those aged 40 years and older but remained elevated for younger adults. Analyses identified several associated factors of these age disparities. Younger adults' anxiety and depression increased more than older adults' after surges in COVID-19 case counts but decreased less following vaccination against the virus. Additionally, approximately one third of the age gap among individuals with depression and anxiety was attributed to economic precarity, to which younger adults are disproportionately exposed. In this cross-sectional study of anxiety and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic, economic precarity was associated with high anxiety and depression among younger adults in the US compared with older adults in the US. These findings suggest a need for greater mental health care and economic policies targeted toward younger adults.

The Problem with a Peremptory Challange – a Tool of Racial Discrimination Within American Jury Selection Process

Jury duty serves as one of the fundamental pillars of American democracy, for it encourages direct citizen participation. Yet, the process of selecting its members is characterised by a flaw in form of a peremptory challenge — a tool with considerable potential for abuse since it permits covert discrimination against members of visible minority groups. Despite not being a procedural right protected by the Constitution of the United States, peremptories have entered the canon of provisions thought to be necessary for preserving the fairness of trial due to their long history of employment in the legal system. In the late 1980s, the Supreme Court in Batson v. Kentucky ruled the exclusion of jurors solely on the basis of their race to be unconstitutional and established the first preventative procedural standard against dubious usage of peremptories in form of the Batson Rule. The effectiveness of the said standard remains questionable, for it did not successfully deal with racial discrimination during voir dire but only enabled to formally object to the questionable juror’s strike. This paper aims to put racial discrimination within the American jury system into a historical perspective, analyze the arguments of both the supporters and the opponents of further peremptory challenge usage and consider probable alternatives that might be implemented to successfully prevent discriminatory practices within the American jury selection process.

Efficiently Finding Cyclical Patterns on Twitter Considering the Inherent Spatio-temporal Attributes of Data

Social networks such as Twitter provide thousands of terabytes per day, which can be exploited to find relevant information. This relevant information is used to promote marketing strategies, analyze current political issues, and track market trends, to name a few examples. One instance of relevant information is finding cyclic behavior patterns (i.e., patterns that frequently repeat themselves over time) in the population. Because trending topics on Twitter change rapidly, efficient algorithms are required, especially when considering location and time (i.e., the specific location and time) during broadcasts. This article presents an efficient algorithm based on association rules to find cyclical patterns on Twitter, considering the inherent spatio-temporal attributes of data. Using a Hash Table enhances the efficiency of this algorithm, called HashCycle. Notably, HashCycle does not use minimum support and can detect patterns in a single run over a sequence. The processing times of HashCycle were compared to the Apriori (which is a well-known and widely used on diverse platforms) and Projection-based Partial Periodic Patterns (PPA) algorithms (which is one of the most efficient algorithms in terms of processing times). Empirical results from two spatio-temporal databases (a synthetic data set and one based on Twitter) show that HashCycle has more efficient processing times than two state-of-the-art algorithms: Apriori and PPA.

The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy

The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy

Foreign Policy Approaches in the US Political Parties Platforms in the XXI Century: Similarities and Differences

The article examines such a phenomenon of American politics as the party platform. The article reflects its features in comparison with European interpretations of the concept of “party program”. The author’s definition of the concept “party platform” is given, which is based on a consideration of the definitions of domestic and foreign policy researchers of the concept “party program”. The article focuses on the foreign policy parts of the platforms of the main US political parties. The ideological approaches and conditions that influence the formation of the foreign policy part of the party platform are considered (from factors such as political expediency to the personal views of US presidential candidates). An example of a comparative analysis of the foreign policy parts of the platforms of the US Republican and Democratic parties is given. Based on a comparative analysis of the foreign policy parts of the platforms of the main US political parties, the author proposes his own methodology for determining the similarities and differences of party platforms. This methodology allowed the author of the article to plot the similarities and differences in the foreign policy approaches of the US Republican and Democratic parties from 2000 to 2020. The comparative analysis carried out by the author allows us to say that the platforms of the main US political parties can be used to analyze the foreign policy course of different US administrations and make forecasts on Washington’s foreign policy.

The Kurdish Movement’s Factor in US Politics at the Peak of Iran and Afghanistan Crises, 1979 – January 1981

At the close of 1979, the United States encountered a critical need to realign its Middle East strategy in the wake of the capture of the American Embassy in Tehran by supporters of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah R. Khomeini on November 4, and the subsequent deployment of Soviet troops in Afghanistan on December 25. Faced with the challenges presented by the Iranian and Afghan crises, the United States' analytical, intelligence, and military bodies navigated various resources in search of viable solutions.This study delves into the consideration of the Kurdish factor as a potential instrument in shaping the regional landscape. The National Security Council (NSC), State Department, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the US Department of Defense all scrutinized the Kurdish movement, evaluating its prospects for advancing American interests. Drawing from documents obtained from the State Department, National Security Council, and CIA, this article tracks the evolution of US policy concerning the Kurdish movement and its utility in realizing Washington's strategic objectives during the most critical phases of the Iran and Afghanistan crises.The analysis underscores the fundamental flaw in the initial evaluation of events in Afghanistan and Iran, misinterpreting them as a calculated move within a Soviet strategy to extend influence into the Persian Gulf region. This misconception was the primary cause of the Carter administration's failure in utilizing the Kurds as a counterforce against the Khomeini regime and its erroneous perceptions of the Iranian political regime's vulnerabilities. Inconsistencies in Washington's relationship with Tehran hindered the formulation of a coherent approach toward the Afghan-Iranian direction.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FASCISM

ABSTRACTBruce Kuklick's Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture offers a compact, accessible, and broad‐reaching survey of “the linguistic career of fascism” in the United States. The book charts the widespread use of the term “fascism” across US political, cultural, and intellectual discourse from the early 1920s up through the present, arguing that rampant, uncritical overuse, outright abuse, and other hyperbolic deployments of the term have purged “fascism” of its analytic value and effectively negated its meaningful critical capacities. Moreover, Kuklick contends that this US “addiction to fascism” as a way to malign ideological and political enemies and express anxieties about the fragility of US democracy impedes accurate assessment of legitimate problems with the country's political system and traditions. This review essay offers a critical assessment of Kuklick's approach, interrogating what his narrow analytic focus on rhetoric and ideas misses and what nuance gets lost in declaring “fascism” a “political swear word” and little else. This thoroughly researched accounting of fascist invectives succeeds in showing that the term has consistently lacked reliable and substantive meaning, but as a survey, the book falters in collapsing its contexts, treating each and every usage of the term as equal and equally meaningless. Engaging with new scholarship on fascism, antifascism, and the modern US Right, as well as with Black radical political thought on fascism since the 1930s, this review essay challenges Kuklick's conclusion that the term “fascism” should be purged from public and intellectual discourse. In turn, it proposes a set of approaches for how we might continue our engagement with greater precision and analytic care.

Defensive racism and Christian righteousness in the time of Trump

This paper interrogates the relationship between Christianity, race and politics in the US through what I call ‘defensive racism’ — a multi-modal form of anti-Black racism that displaces racism, denies its existence toward Black Americans, and deflects racism away from white people. Drawing on ethnographic data, including qualitative interviews and participant observation data, collected in the US with white conservative Evangelicals from October 2020 to November 2022, I show how white evangelicals reproduce a racial, moral order through expressions of defensive racism. By focusing on the meanings and enactment of righteousness, this paper also deepens and refines the concept of Christian nationalism, which seeks to uphold the idea of a righteous Christian nation. By situating conservative white Evangelicals' anti-Black racism in relation to Trump's presidency, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the rise of racial consciousness around anti-Blackness in the US, I examine how white evangelicals reposition themselves racially and religiously in response to socio-political changes.

What Can Voting Do for Democracy?

Abstract Empirical political scientists and normative political theorists alike have challenged the grip elections hold on our democratic imagination, albeit for very different reasons. Against both sets of critics, Emilee Booth Chapman’s remarkable and timely new book Election Day: How We Vote and What it Means for Democracy makes a compelling case for the ballot box’s unique place in democratic theory as a site of collective agency among political equals. Chapman offers an invaluable framework for navigating the shifting character of the American voting system and the innumerable proposals for improving it. But at the same time, this essay argues that in face of American democracy’s moral failures, Election Day reveals as much about the limits of well-ordered elections as it does their democratic promise.

The perception of the Tiktok platform as China’s sharp power instrument in US politics

Public diplomacy can be defined as managing a country’s foreign policy objectives and protecting its national interests by establishing direct social relations and communication with the citizen or government of another country. Public diplomacy, which we know that each country has its own strategy, is handled from a different perspective in China as well. China, which has been identified with the concept of sharp power is confronted with the claims of the new rival of the USA. Recently, claims from the United States that China-based social media platform TikTok has been carrying out sharp power activities have come to the fore. TikTok is considered to be a major force for China as it has over one billion active users. However, there are debates as to whether China manipulates the peoples of other countries through this practice. Censorship and manipulation, the two main concepts of sharp power, are used in TikTok or does TikTok exist independently? The purpose of this article is to explore whether the TikTok platform, one of China's important public diplomacy tools, is perceived as a threat by American politicians. For this purpose, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s US Congress testimony were analyzed by content analysis method. As a result, it has been confirmed that American politicians perceive TikTok as a sharp power instrument of the Chinese Communist Party. It has been observed that concerns have been expressed about the concepts of censorship, manipulation, propaganda, control, and influence, which are the five elements of sharp power. It has been found that the TikTok platform is perceived as a propaganda device, a psychological warfare weapon, and not a public diplomacy tool or soft power element.

A Prologue to apology and futurism: Projections of nineteenth-century American Historicism in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House”

Distracted by the contesting political debates between aristocratic republicanism of the Revolutionary era and democratic republicanism of the Antebellum; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s narrative tone in his prologue, “The CustomHouse” carries out the ideological assets of nineteenth-century American historicism in accord with which he laid ahistorical fictional elements failing to portray the entirety of early colonial New England in his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter. In this respect, “The Custom-House” portrays Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Romantic projections aimed at consoling the contemporaneous polarization on the futurity of the nation as much as his redemptive quest for his ancestral past in colonial Salem. Thus, as the dean of American Renaissance authors and a fervent Romantic, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s concern for an absolute-oriented moral vision, his apologetic perspective of the past, and his affirmative tone for the futurity of American democracy are most out loud in his writing. This study aims to focus on Hawthorne’s apologetic and futurist projections of nineteenth-century American historicism in his prologue, “The Custom-House” for his 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter, concerning his responses to the anxieties of Antebellum America.

Androgyny in the Archives: 1970s Trans and Feminist Encounters with the Promise and Politics of Non-Binary


 
 
 
 Despite the recurrent appeal to androgynous myths, imagery and research in the US mid-twentieth century transgender archive, the aects and politics motivating these have been subject to little consideration. This paper explores the possibilities and problems contained within the mobilisation of androgynous ideals for gendered liberation. It argues that androgyny oered a basis for aective and subjective investments in non-binary gender to be pursued and articulated and considers how a philosophy of androgyny might complicate current discussions of queer and trans taxonomy.
 
 
 

Autonomy in Local Digital News: An Exploration of Organizational and Moral Psychology Factors

ABSTRACT This mixed-methods study examines autonomy and shifts in the evolving digital news industry. Autonomous agency of news workers is an essential indicator of how journalism work is fulfilling its role as the Fourth Estate in American democracy. This work responds to calls in media ethics, media sociology and moral ecology to better understand how organizational structure and individual moral psychology factors influence the levels at which digital news workers exhibit autonomy within their digital news organizations. Using participant observation, a unique survey and respondent interviewing, I worked for one year with a digitally native hyper-local news organization to examine how organizational structure, leadership, socialization, and individual factors influenced autonomy levels in the staff. Results found overall high levels of autonomy in the editorial staff, but with many constraints such as financial pressures, perceived lack of time, a high pressure to perform multiple jobs and duties outside of the scope of typical legacy journalism job descriptions.

The Judeo - Christian Tradition and the US-Israel Special Relationship

ABSTRACT Americans from various walks of life support Israel for religious reasons. This support comes from premillennialists, fundamentalists, and proponents of the covenant brotherhood, who base their advocacy for Israel on specific religious doctrines that demand tangible religio-political action. Additionally, Americans have employed the Judeo-Christian discourse to justify their backing of Israel. However, this term is neither an eschatology nor a doctrine, and its broad scope results in a degree of ambiguity. Consequently, it remains unclear how Americans deduced that this discourse should yield a unique relationship between the two nations. This article aims to explore the historical evolution of the Judeo-Christian discourse in the United States, arguing that Americans have adopted the term as a representation of the religious underpinnings of American democracy, freedom, and the Constitution, which originate from both the Old and New Testaments. As a result, when comparing their political institutions and values with those of Israel, Americans affirm that the connection between the two nations rests on a divinely ordained foundation.

The geopolitics of democracy: The US against Russia and China

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, American democracy set an example for the rest of the world, having proved its resilience to the authoritarian regime of the USSR during the Cold War. However, in recent years, China, which has adopted a different model of governance, a mixture of political authoritarianism and economic capitalism, has directly challenged the quality and credibility of American democracy. The more Beijing grows economically, the more it challenges Western institutions and the international order. It believes that there are alternative paths to prosperity. Russia, a classically authoritarian regime, agrees with China, with which it has developed close political and economic relations. The inherent problems of American democracy, especially under the Trump administration, have been used by Beijing and Moscow to support their arguments. The Russo-Ukraine war, aside from other interpretations, can be characterised as a dispute between democratic and authoritarian regimes.