Politics in the United States has become more polarized in recent decades as both political elites and everyday citizens have been divided into mutually antagonistic partisan camps. Increasingly, these rival camps question the political legitimacy and democratic commitments of the other side. Such polarization or “teamsmanship” can have a number of important political consequences: it can drive actors further apart, intensify political conflict, impede negotiation and compromise, and block the construction of bipartisan legislative and policymaking coalitions.Footnote 1 Since polarization makes it difficult, if not impossible, to find common political ground, it can prevent democratic institutions from making important policy choices and responding to the critical issues of the day. Polarization, in short, can easily lead to democratic gridlock, paralysis, the decay of rights, and, in the extreme, violent conflict, as the Trump administration’s waning weeks so vividly demonstrated.Footnote 2
Beyond these widely recognized paralyzing effects, however, lies a deeper and more troubling set of questions regarding the political consequences of polarization. Is polarization a threat to democracy itself? That is, does polarization make democratic institutions susceptible to forms of political manipulation that “stack the deck,” “tilt the playing field,” or otherwise confer advantages on some partisan actors over their rivals? Does it foster antidemocratic political behavior among rival elites who seek to concentrate power, neutralize or circumvent institutional checks and balances, and delegitimize or incapacitate political opponents? Does polarization undermine national cohesion by making common citizens less tolerant of others who belong to different social groups or espouse different political beliefs and values? Indeed, does it induce citizens to support political leaders who openly challenge democratic norms and procedures in their pursuit of public office and the control it provides over resources and the levers of public policy?
Democratic institutions in the United States were explicitly designed to provide for political stability and guard against unwarranted concentrations of power by fragmenting authority across different branches and levels of government and by providing multiple points of entry for diverse actors who seek to participate in the public sphere. Is it possible, however, for political polarization to negate the multiple veto points erected by the separation of powers and federalism, two primary vehicles of institutional fragmentation embedded in the constitutional order? The Constitution does not prevent a party that dominates multiple institutions from using its power to control judicial nominations, neutralize legislative oversight, and establish electoral rules and procedures that increasingly tilt the political system in its favor. Moreover, many ordinary American citizens may be drawn into polarization, as partisan affiliation increasingly reflects and reinforces cleavages of race, ethnicity, religiosity, place (e.g., urban versus rural), and economic status; as a result, mass polarization may reinforce and exacerbate the divisions spurred by political elites.
Each of these challenges confronts one or more of the key attributes of a functioning democracy – free and fair elections, the idea of legitimate opposition, inclusive participation, the protection of civil rights and liberties, and the rule of law – and cumulatively they risk rendering American democracy precarious and uncertain.
Although the dynamics of polarization have been widely studied, scholars have made less progress toward understanding either how it affects the health of democracy or the extent to which democratic political systems might prove resilient to it. In this volume, we ask our contributors to consider both questions, investigating whether polarization leads to democratic erosion and also what resources democratic systems may have to resist or overcome the negative effects of polarization. Can democracy maintain itself when it is exposed to the kind of intensified polarization that the United States, along with other democracies, has experienced in recent decades? To the extent that it can, we would describe that system as resilient.
Our contributors – experts on a wide array of political institutions and processes – tackle these questions from a range of different analytical perspectives, bridging the conventional divide between institutional and behavioral approaches to the study of American politics. They break new ground in assessing polarization’s implications for democratic governance and, more fundamentally, the resilience of democratic institutions in the United States. We seek to understand the conditions under which polarization does and does not become a threat to democracy itself and the conditions under which democratic institutions and processes prove resilient in the face of threats to their guiding principles and common practices. At a time of rising concern about “democratic backsliding” and the strengthening of authoritarian currents around the world, we explore whether the United States is also prone to such tendencies and we analyze what features of American society and US democratic institutions make them more or less resilient in the face of such pressures.
Clearly, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and his polarizing administration lent a new sense of urgency to the questions our contributors address in this volume. To buttress his appeal as an antiestablishment political figure, Trump brazenly fanned the flames of tribalism, defied constitutional requirements, and flouted democratic norms. Nevertheless, the trends that endanger American democracy are not the product of a single presidency; rather, they have been on the rise for decades and they threaten to persist well beyond the Trump administration.Footnote 3 And while not all observers are equally alarmed about the prospects for the American democratic regime, it is clear that the Trump era has exposed a critical question with which political scientists have not yet fully grappled: how resilient will American political institutions and civil society prove to be in the face of the dramatic transformations of recent decades?Footnote 4
To answer this question, we begin by explaining our approach to the two critical concepts that are the analytical cornerstones of this volume: democratic resilience and polarization. These concepts have both institutional and behavioral properties and they are intrinsically multidimensional in character.
Democracy and Democratic Resilience
We define democracy as a system of government in which citizens are able to hold those in power accountable, primarily through regular competitive elections, and in which representatives engage in collective and cooperative decision-making.Footnote 5 Some theorists of democracy, notably the economist Joseph Schumpeter, define democracy in strictly procedural terms as a political system in which citizens choose their rulers through competitive elections.Footnote 6 But others argue that holding elections is not sufficient to classify a regime as a democracy. Many nations, for example, hold elections that confer power but simultaneously violate other important conditions for effective democratic accountability, such as free and fair elections, universal voting rights, and the protection of civil rights and liberties that are necessary for effective debate and contestation. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way categorize these regimes as “competitive authoritarianism,” a hybrid form of governance in which some of the forms of democracy are preserved but other conditions create a substantially uneven playing field that unfairly advantages incumbents against challengers. In these systems, elections do not provide accountability.Footnote 7
American history, not to mention global experience, reinforces the obvious point that democracies, once established, do not automatically remain strong and robust or even endure. Democracies come and go, and although a democratic regime’s longevity makes democracy more likely to persist, even long-established democracies can deteriorate toward autocracy.Footnote 8 But democracy’s end does not necessarily come suddenly, with tanks in the street and a sudden seizure of power as in the classic coup d’état; more often, especially in recent decades, democracies erode, through apparently legitimate democratic processes.Footnote 9 Democratic erosion might appear as the measurable decline of key democratic attributes: free and fair elections, the recognition of a legitimate opposition, the rule of law, institutional checks and balances, and the integrity of rights, all of which are susceptible to decay over time if they are not tended and protected. In the United States, in fact, each of these attributes has suffered harm in recent decades, as evident in the country’s declining scores on numerous comparative democracy indices in the decades since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act.Footnote 10 Like sand dunes that become more vulnerable to storms as they gradually erode, democracies can grow increasingly susceptible to more sudden destructive forces through erosion.
We thus define “democratic resilience” broadly as a system’s capacity to withstand a major shock such as the onset of extreme polarization and to continue to perform the basic functions of democratic governance – electoral accountability, representation, effective restraints on excessive or concentrated power, and collective decision-making. Democratic resilience has both institutional and behavioral components. Institutionally, effective democracies are able to preserve what Guillermo O’Donnell calls “horizontal accountability” – a system of checks and balances in which different government institutions are able to challenge and restrain each other and thereby prevent excessive concentrations and abuses of power.Footnote 11 In the United States, horizontal accountability arises principally from institutional arrangements such as federalism, bicameralism, and the separation of powers, which tend to fragment power and induce office holders in one branch of government to resist domination by the other branches, as James Madison foresaw in Federalist no. 51 (“ambition must be made to counteract ambition”).
Social scientists generally regard political institutions, by their very nature, as sources of stability. Whether we understand institutions as formal organizations, networks of rules, recurring patterns of behavior, or widely shared cultural understandings, institutions across the social sciences are generally interpreted as promoting order, even in changing social or political circumstances.Footnote 12 This is especially the case with the United States Constitution, which is commonly seen as imparting particular stability to American politics by establishing enduring structural features such as the separation of powers, the bicameral legislature, and federalism. But the stability of constitutional arrangements does not foreclose the possibility, even the likelihood, of profound change; political development – a “durable shift in governing authority,” in Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek’s often-cited definition – is an equally persistent feature of the American regime.Footnote 13 As Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler show in their contribution to this volume, checks and balances are not self-executing; the Madisonian view of institutions-as-clockwork does not account for the threat that polarization can pose to the system of checks and balances and its ability to ensure horizontal accountability.
In the first impeachment of Donald Trump, for example, rather than hold the president to account for his evident abuse of presidential power and obstruction of Congress – or even, indeed, conduct a thorough trial and hear from witnesses who might have shed light on the charges – the Senate’s Republican majority protected the president. It is instructive to compare the Trump impeachment episode with the near-impeachment of Richard Nixon almost a half-century earlier, at a moment of considerably lower polarization in American politics. In addition to unanimous Democratic support, each of the three articles of impeachment against Nixon approved by the House Judiciary Committee received Republican votes. Nixon’s eventual resignation was precipitated by the collapse of Republican support for his acquittal in the Senate in the face of overwhelming evidence, much of which had been uncovered by a series of investigations conducted by federal government institutions acting independently (notably Congress and the Department of Justice). By contrast, in the polarized contemporary Congress, not a single Republican voted in support of articles of impeachment in the House, either in the Judiciary committee or on the floor, and in the Senate trial, only one Republican, Mitt Romney, voted for conviction on one of the two articles.Footnote 14 Trump’s unprecedented second impeachment, in the wake of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the United States Capitol, came a bit closer to a bipartisan reckoning with presidential misconduct; ten Republicans in the House voted to impeach and seven Republican Senators supported conviction, still ten votes short of the two-thirds majority needed for a guilty verdict. The inability of a highly polarized system to rein in evident executive wrongdoing raises serious questions about the system’s ability to preserve democratic accountability in the face of extreme polarization.
On the institutional dimension, then, democratic resilience entails the maintenance of the checks and balances and restraints on concentrated power that the constitutional system promises but does not always ensure. Some of the observable manifestations of institutional resilience might include the avoidance of deck stacking in electoral rules, the preservation of incentives for public officials to cooperate across party lines and seek policy compromise, or restraint in the use of constitutional hardball tactics that can send democratic regimes into a cascade toward authoritarianism. Likewise, institutional resilience requires that institutions designed to perform “watchdog” functions for the regime itself – including the courts, the Justice Department (including the FBI), and executive branch inspectors general – maintain a significant measure of professional independence from overt partisan manipulation; this is necessary in order to preserve the rule of law and protect against officials who are tempted to abuse their authority to pursue their own personal or political gain. Our contributors differ on the extent to which they see American institutions as resilient in the face of contemporary polarization. Frances Lee and Douglas Kriner, for example, argue that polarization has not fundamentally eroded at least some important checks and balances. Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler, Desmond King and Sidney Milkis, Thomas Keck, and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, on the other hand, see more threats in contemporary circumstances.
Democratic accountability runs not only horizontally, among officials empowered by governing institutions, but also “vertically,” through mechanisms that enable citizens to hold their representatives accountable.Footnote 15 The ability of citizens to replace those in power stands as the ultimate tool of representation and check against abuses of power. We expect office holders to hold each other to account, but when they fail to do so the electorate gets the final say. As the capacity erodes to hold those in power accountable, democracy risks further decay. Effective vertical accountability requires electoral practices that maintain a level playing field for voters and protect free and fair elections. Practices such as gerrymandering and various means of voter suppression risk distorting electoral accountability by giving those in power a built-in advantage in their quest to defeat challengers and retain power. Vertical accountability, moreover, also requires action; the government’s perceived failure to address social problems effectively – which is often a product of the very checks and balances that enable horizontal accountability – can produce frustration, cynicism, and anger toward government, which themselves contribute to the erosion of democracy.Footnote 16
On the behavioral side, moreover, polarization among the electorate can affect the possibility of electoral accountability. To the extent that partisan attachments among voters reinforce rather than cut across social divisions such as race, ethnicity, gender, and religiosity, electoral polarization can further buttress the “teamsmanship” that impedes institutional accountability. Such teamsmanship is especially dangerous when it induces voters to tolerate or even reward violations of democratic norms by officials of their own party because they so loathe the other “team.” For democracy to be resilient, it is essential that voters be willing and able to recognize and electorally sanction antidemocratic behavior, whatever its source. Where polarized teamsmanship impedes such recognition or electoral sanctioning, vertical accountability is seriously impaired, and politicians can transgress democratic norms with impunity.
In the 2016 and 2020 elections, for example, despite widespread anxiety about Trump’s suitability for the presidency, Republicans eventually fell in line behind him; 88 percent of Republican voters chose him in 2016 and 94 percent in 2020. Despite his overall unpopularity, Trump has successfully mobilized and energized his electoral base around an extreme and dangerous set of antiestablishment impulses and extreme positions on immigration, race, and America’s role in the world.Footnote 17 His persistent high levels of approval from his core constituencies – Republicans and older, wealthier, white, male, rural, and Christian voters – even through the trials of impeachment, a global pandemic, and a precipitous plunge into a deep recession have underscored the challenges of vertical accountability in the face of polarization. Voters did hand Trump and the Republican party a rebuke in the 2018 midterm, electing a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, and ultimately ousted him and elected an evenly split Senate in 2020. Still, events that would likely have dramatically diminished another president’s support – impeachment, a mismanaged pandemic, and the rapid onset of a recession – seem to have had little impact on Trump’s public approval. And although he lost in 2020, he outperformed his own previous vote total and percentage and gained ground among a number of constituencies, including African Americans, Latinos, and women. Moreover, the president’s conspiratorial and dishonest fury over the conduct of the 2020 election, amplified by the right-wing media echo chamber, not only impelled many of his followers to parrot his grievances but also incited some of them to mount what can only be described as an insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, at the very hour that Congress was meeting to ratify Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
Behavioral resilience might mean the rejection or marginalization of extreme views; the ability of political leaders to mobilize voters and compete for power on the basis of broad and inclusive (rather than divisive and polarizing) appeals; the emergence or persistence of cross-cutting rather than reinforcing cleavages among the electorate; and the maintenance of a sense of legitimacy for the democratic system as a whole. Politics will function better to protect democracy when leaders attempt to unite broad and diverse coalitions, as that process in itself requires participants to recognize the need to compromise, diffusing the tendency for politics to be perceived as mortal combat. In addition, it can make political losses less threatening to the social identity of particular groups, thus making partisanship less likely to inculcate polarized perceptions of one another as “us versus them.”
Polarization: A Multidimensional Approach
Polarization is hardly a new phenomenon in American politics. The United States, after all, fought a civil war over slavery in the 1860s, and the extension – or denial – of citizenship rights to African Americans remained deeply divisive issues thereafter. In contrast to European democracies, however, the United States never developed a strong, labor-based socialist party in the twentieth century and levels of class and ideological polarization in the American two-party system were markedly lower than in most other industrialized societies in the post–World War II era.Footnote 18 This postwar political landscape, which was dominated by two large, ideologically eclectic, and socially heterogeneous “catch-all” parties, weighed heavily on scholarly thinking about how American democracy “works.” Given the presence of liberal northern Republicans and conservative southern Democrats, the two parties overlapped ideologically and created a centripetal dynamic of political competition. They competed for support around the median voter, as Anthony Downs theorized, and they adopted moderate programmatic positions that eased the construction of bipartisan legislative and policymaking coalitions.Footnote 19 The most contentious and polarizing issues – particularly desegregation and civil rights – had begun to realign the parties at the state and local levels during the New Deal era, but these issues did not structure interparty competition at the national level until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, as they cut across the partisan divide.Footnote 20 Civil rights, in other words, divided both parties internally (the Democrats, in particular, along regional lines), rather than aligning one party against the other on opposing sides of the political cleavage.
The transformation of this postwar order into the polarized political landscape of the early twenty-first century was a prolonged, complex, and multifaceted process, one that involved both institutional and behavioral components. Since that story has been told very capably elsewhere, we will not repeat it here, other than to say that the process was heavily conditioned by the civil rights revolution, crystalized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the conservative backlash against it.Footnote 21 This backlash was subsequently reinforced by other cleavages in the “culture wars,” and by the patterns of social mobilization and countermobilization they elicited among movements and activist networks on both sides of the divide. Social and political mobilization around cultural issues brought new grassroots activists with strong policy and ideological commitments into the parties, helping to push them further apart. The Supreme Court’s decision on abortion in Roe v. Wade had a significant effect on the decision of evangelical Christians to abandon their earlier reticence and enter politics. The fight over the Equal Rights Amendment, too, energized conservatives, enabling Phyllis Schlafly and her followers to reinvigorate the waning anti-communist movement with support for “family values.”Footnote 22 Similarly, rising immigration has invigorated the right, divided the left, and become a key flashpoint in ideological and partisan battles. It has joined other sources of division, including religion, LGBTQ rights, and gun control, in gradually realigning the conservative South from the Democratic to the Republican camp. Partisan realignment thus produced a more consistently liberal Democratic Party and a more deeply conservative Republican Party, sharpening the programmatic distinctions between the two parties on a wide range of social and cultural issues.
Realignment, however, was not simply a matter of ideological sorting and polarization. It also transformed and differentiated the social bases of the two major parties, with each party becoming more closely identified with specific social and cultural groups. Whites, evangelicals, and small-town and rural America gravitated toward the Republican camp, which became increasingly homogenous in its social composition and possessed fewer crosscutting ties to diverse social groups. On the other hand, racial and ethnic minorities, secular and non-evangelical voters, and urban America moved toward the Democrats. This “sorting” of different social groups into rival partisan camps was parallel to the sorting of liberal and conservative voters into parties with distinct ideological or programmatic brands. As Lilliana Mason demonstrates, however, these dual sorting processes were analytically distinct and not reducible to each other, even if they were mutually reinforcing.Footnote 23 Similarly, Frances Lee identifies the important phenomenon of partisan teamsmanship among lawmakers, a polarizing dynamic that is rooted in organizational self-interest and is not dependent on either ideological or social differentiation. The need for cohesive teamsmanship within parties has, she points out, grown far greater since 1980, when the Democrats lost their hegemonic control of Congress – and especially since the Gingrich era in the 1990s – and it became possible for either party to win or lose the majority.Footnote 24
These distinctions are indicative of the multidimensional character of polarization processes and the diverse mechanisms that can drive them. Therefore, to assess the implications of polarization for democracy, it is important to look beyond the ideological plane to these social and organizational dimensions and the complex – and often synergistic – interactions among them. The following sections analyze these three dimensions of polarization and their mutually reinforcing properties, which help to explain polarization’s inertial tendencies and the challenges they pose to democratic resilience.
Ideology and Issue-Based Polarization
Political parties routinely seek to develop reputations or “brands” to differentiate themselves from opponents and cultivate a loyal core of followers in the electorate. Voters, in turn, rely on such brands as heuristics or shortcuts to reduce the information costs of voting decisions.Footnote 25 Although party brands can be based on “valence” reputations for competence, clean government, or other values that are broadly shared in the electorate, the adoption of policy or programmatic positions on issues that divide the electorate is standard fare for the construction of party brands that appeal to the interests or values of loyal core constituencies.Footnote 26 Spatial models of party competition assume that parties differentiate themselves on such “positional” issues, and research in both American and comparative politics suggests that this differentiation is healthy for democratic representation. A special committee of the American Political Science Association famously recommended that the United States needed parties that were more programmatically differentiated to offer “a proper range of choice” to voters in the more consensual postwar period.Footnote 27 Likewise, comparativists have argued that a lack of programmatic differentiation may cause some societal interests to be excluded from effective representation, enhancing the appeal of populist outsiders who challenge established partiesFootnote 28
There is no clear benchmark, however, for determining when “healthy” programmatic differentiation gives way to dysfunctional or even threatening forms of ideological polarization. In general, ideological polarization is a function of three basic factors: (1) the gap or distance between the policy positions adopted by major parties on key issues under dispute; (2) the internal cohesion or consistency of each party around their modal position; and (3) the mapping or “bundling” of multiple issues onto the same axis of programmatic contestation (such as the conventional left-right or liberal-conservative axis). So conceived, polarization is magnified when parties move toward opposite ideological “poles” on an axis of issue competition, when their positions are not watered down by more centrist internal factions, and when the parties bundle social, cultural, and economic issues onto the same competitive axis.
A large body of literature attests to the reality of issue-based polarization in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century US politics.Footnote 29 The Republican and Democratic parties moved further apart in their policy positions, the Democrats became more internally cohesive in their programmatic stands with the gradual exodus of southern conservatives, and both parties mapped a wide range of social, cultural, and economic issues onto an underlying liberal-conservative axis of competition. As Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal report, interest-group rankings of members of Congress indicate that “moderates are vanishing,” the two parties “have pulled apart,” and individual issue areas no longer have a “distinctive existence,” since they are increasingly bundled onto a “single, liberal-conservative dimension.”Footnote 30 Although the two parties occasionally manage to work together, as in their joint development of a stimulus package in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic effects, the ideological overlap between them disappeared after 2005, as every Democratic member of Congress had a voting record “ideal point” to the left of every Republican.Footnote 31
Although the process of ideological polarization reflects changes in both major party organizations, it has not been a symmetrical process. As Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins note, congressional Democrats have moved modestly left since the 1970s while Republicans have moved much more dramatically to the right. Moreover, Democrats remain more ideologically heterogenous.Footnote 32 Given the Democratic Party’s centrist positioning on economic issues under Bill Clinton – whose presidency introduced NAFTA, welfare reform, and financial deregulation, reflecting a general pro-market policy orientation – polarization on economic issues was largely attributable to the Republicans’ shift toward market-fundamentalist positions on the far right pole. In that sense, the competitive dynamic on economic issues was arguably one of unilateral radicalization rather than bilateral polarization, at least until the rise after 2016 of Bernie Sanders, whose politicization of economic inequalities pulled the Democratic Party further to the left. On a wide range of other social and cultural issues, however – including abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, gun control, and eventually immigration – the two parties gradually moved in opposite directions, staking out sharply polarized positions that mapped onto the liberal-conservative axis. Ideological identities were especially prominent on the conservative side of the divide under the Republican Party, which bundled multiple issues into a form of conservative orthodoxy that gave it, according to Grossmann and Hopkins, “the most consistently conservative positions of any political party in the world.”Footnote 33 Indeed, the GOP’s current positions on gun rights, climate change, taxes, and deregulation are striking for the lack of parallels among any other mainstream conservative parties elsewhere in the world today, including throughout Europe and Latin America.
Although this partisan polarization has induced voters to sort into one party or the other depending on their policy or ideological preferences, it is important to recognize that many voters do not have consistent or well-defined ideological worldviews. Consequently, scholars have debated whether the mass public itself has polarized on the issues or whether polarization is largely a function of party elites’ efforts to differentiate their brands, discredit their rivals, and turn out the vote.Footnote 34 Even where moderate or ill-defined policy positions predominate in the general electorate, however, non-elite societal actors can play a central role in the process of partisan and ideological polarization. A wide range of interest groups, activist networks, and social movements have contributed to the realignment of the Republication and Democratic parties and the definition of their respective policy platforms, as each party came to be seen as the primary representative of particular societal interests in the democratic arena.Footnote 35
On the left, labor unions’ traditional ties to the Democratic Party were supplemented after the 1960s by new ties to the movements for civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, environmental protection, and eventually immigrants’ rights. On the right, the Republican Party – traditionally associated with pro-market business interests – became a staunch ally of the antiabortion and evangelical Christian movements by the 1980s as well as guns rights activist networks and, increasingly, white ethno-nationalist currents. The anti-Obama Tea Party movement stitched together these diverse currents on the right flank of the Republican Party after 2009, combining grassroots mobilization with elite financial and organizational support from free market think tanks and advocacy networks, such as the Koch brothers–aligned Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works.Footnote 36 As Theda Skocpol, Caroline Tervo, and Kirsten Walters show in this volume, Tea Party groups at the local level tilted the Republican Party further to the right, embracing more extreme candidates, policy positions, and tactics. Notably, the anti-Trump resistance groups have not pulled the Democratic Party in analogous ways, but rather have been willing to embrace moderate and incrementalist approaches as they face practical challenges in efforts to achieve and retain national power. With that exception, most of these forms of civic activism, beyond their impact on the policy agendas and the ideological polarization of the two major parties, were also instrumental in shaping a second key dimension of polarization, that of social sorting, as explained in the following.
Group Identities, Social Sorting, and Partisan Polarization
Although many voters do not have consistent and well-defined policy preferences, neither do they approach each election with a blank state or tabula rasa. Beyond – and typically complementing – their programmatic identities, political parties develop brands for representing the interests and values of particular social groups in the democratic arena. Analogous to ideological branding, citizens’ identification with social groups bound to a specific party can provide a convenient heuristic to simplify vote choices; as Alan Zuckerman, Josip Dasović, and Jennifer Fitzgerald pithily state, “Partisanship is a socially derived choice.”Footnote 37 Voters, in short, may learn through family or social ties that a given party stands for “people like me” and internalize partisan loyalty as a natural extension of their social group identity. This extension is clearly facilitated where a party establishes political ties to social group organizations or activist networks and embraces their policy preferences, but it cannot be reduced to such programmatic considerations; voters with strong social identities but hazy or diverse policy preferences may still vote on the basis of their primary group identity.
In her careful work on social sorting and social polarization in contemporary US politics, Lilliana Mason persuasively demonstrates the extent to which “the American electorate has become deeply socially divided along partisan lines,” undermining “the cross-cutting social ties that once allowed for partisan compromise.”Footnote 38 In a competitive environment, she argues, strong in-group identities can be a source of political conflict with out-groups even in the absence of significant differences in group-based policy preferences. Where social group identities are aligned with parties and policy preferences, as in the United States, those social identities clearly magnify polarization on the party dimension and may have an even stronger effect in shaping citizens’ attitudes.
The problem, then, is not only that the Republican and Democratic parties have moved further apart in their programmatic stands, but also that they represent very different sectors of the American electorate, divided on lines of race and ethnicity, gender, religion, and place. Such patterns of social sorting can produce a cultural divide and forms of mutual intolerance or antagonism that magnify policy or issue-based differences. Indeed, social sorting is central to the forms of “negative partisanship” that have been identified in the American electorate, whereby voters have stronger adverse reactions to the “other side” than they do positive affect toward their own preferred party. As Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster state, “Americans largely align against one party instead of affiliating with the other”; this negative partisanship is deeply rooted in the racial divide between the two parties and rising levels of racial resentment among white Republicans.Footnote 39 Negative partisanship is also fueled by highly partisan media outlets and the sorting of voters into separate and insular networks of political information and communication.
Partisan Competition, Teamsmanship, and Polarization
If social sorting is capable of exerting an independent effect on political polarization above and beyond its association with deep ideological or policy divides, so also can the dynamics of partisan competition contribute toward polarization. As Frances Lee argues, “there is far more party conflict in the Congress than one would expect based on the ideological content of the congressional agenda or the policy differences between liberals and conservatives.” Party competition for “elected office and chamber control” helps to explain this surfeit of conflict; competition creates shared interests among partisans as well as shared risks, and it ensures that the personal and professional interests of individual members of congress “are bound up with the fate of their parties.” Competition between rival partisan “teams,” therefore, tends to “institutionalize, exploit, and deepen” policy-based differences, or even “create conflict where it would not have otherwise existed” by encouraging forms of “reflexive partisanship.”Footnote 40 In short, partisans in Congress reflexively try to discredit their opponents, highlight issues that differentiate the rival camps, and oppose any initiatives introduced by the other side, even when they do not invoke core ideological principles.
This teamsmanship or competitive polarization is caused in significant part by the dynamic that arises when the two parties approach electoral parity and a competitive equilibrium. Under such conditions, institutional control of the executive and legislative branches is at stake in every election cycle, and congressional majorities become highly insecure. As insecurity intensifies interparty competition, it also transforms parties’ strategic behavior; simply put, “competition for institutional control focuses members of Congress on the quest for partisan political advantage.”Footnote 41 Not surprisingly, then, political polarization in the United States in recent decades was driven by the erosion of the majoritarian status of the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition, and by the rise of a new competitive equilibrium. Since 1980, the two major parties have become more equally balanced in their electoral appeal and in the size of their congressional blocs; the two parties have alternated in the presidency, divided government has become the norm, and the majority party in both houses of Congress has changed hands multiple times (seven times in the Senate, and four times in the House). Razor-thin electoral margins have allowed the last two Republican presidents – George W. Bush and Donald Trump – to win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote.
On multiple fronts, then, political polarization has raised the stakes of partisan competition and intensified the battle to win elections, control institutions, and dictate the terms of public policy formation. The two major US parties have grown further apart on the issues, sorted distinct social groups into rival partisan camps, and become locked in a competitive equilibrium whereby electoral outcomes, institutional leverage, and policy orientations are highly uncertain and tenuous.
Because these multiple dimensions of polarization are increasingly aligned and mutually reinforcing, they impede the construction of bipartisan legislative and policymaking coalitions, producing either gridlock and paralysis or narrow partisan-based policy initiatives that are bitterly opposed by the rival camp. The central question we pose in this volume, however, is whether these multiple forms of polarization also create novel political temptations to manipulate different institutional sites for partisan advantage in ways that undermine democratic norms and practices. Such forms of manipulation – for example, efforts to stack the courts, circumvent or “weaponize” oversight institutions, or tilt the electoral playing field – can be induced by polarization, but they also exacerbate it, since they are intrinsically threatening to the other party and its social constituencies. Indeed, they are central to the dynamics of the inertial or self-reinforcing “pernicious polarization” that Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer examine in this volume. Is polarization, then, a threat to democracy itself? And if it is, what institutional mechanisms and forms of societal resistance are available to counteract these threats, temper polarization, and buttress democracy as a system of governance? In short, what makes democracy resilient?
Bridging Institutional, Behavioral, and Historical Analysis
The central questions of this volume are whether contemporary polarization presents a serious threat to US democracy itself, and whether the nation has the institutional and political capacity to resist or recuperate from the harm it may experience. It is well known that polarization has transformed numerous aspects of government and politics, for example, by altering standard operating procedures in Congress, deterring policy enactment, and prompting voters to align their policy preferences with one party or the other. Might it also endanger the United States’ character as a democratic regime?
Both polarization and democratic resilience, as we have seen, engage multiple dimensions of American politics. Polarization presents a challenge to American politics at the system level, as mass and elite actors affect one another, and numerous institutions and political processes come into play and interact. Resilience, too, involves both mass and elite actors and the institutions and political practices that connect them and foster (or undermine) democratic accountability. Understanding polarization’s impact on democracy and evaluating democratic resilience, therefore, require a system-level response that brings together diverse analytical threads. Yet scholars of American politics typically study the political system through what Paul Pierson calls a “pizza-pie approach,” concentrating on a particular part of the political system and specializing deeply in it.Footnote 42 This has led to the accumulation of sophisticated literatures on each part of the system, and yet it leaves us ill-prepared to analyze developments that transcend particular components; in fact, we may even fail to recognize their emergence, much less understand them.
As we have argued elsewhere, both history and comparison are essential to meeting the system-level challenge of understanding the dynamics of democracy and democratic resilience in the United States.Footnote 43 Throughout its history, American democracy has weathered numerous shocks that have threatened the integrity of democracy – from the nearly ruinous polarization of the 1790s and the conflict over slavery to the violent rollback of voting rights for African Americans after Reconstruction and the presidential excesses of the twentieth century such as the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the misadventures of Watergate. In each case, certain features of the democratic regime have proven resilient, while others have sustained serious damage. Frequently, these two dynamics have coincided; the resolution of democratic crises in American history has often entailed a compromise of democratic values that reaffirmed or perpetuated racial hierarchy and exclusion.Footnote 44 Historical inquiry can be useful as a way to examine these patterns of resilience and backsliding in American democracy and probe their causes. A historical approach can help identify the processes of change that drive resilience and might (or might not) be at work in the contemporary crisis of American democracy.Footnote 45 Polarization in particular, as Pierson and Schickler have argued, has been an ever-changing and dynamic force in American politics that has become increasingly self-reinforcing in recent decades, heightening the challenge of resilience.Footnote 46
The problem of democratic resilience is also a global one, and comparison can also illuminate it. Events around the world suggest that the challenges to democracy in the United States are not unique. Previously democratic regimes are under threat or have turned in an authoritarian direction around the world in countries such as Russia, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Venezuela, and the Philippines. Viewing the United States in a comparative context provides more data with which to develop and test theories of democratic resilience. Although the prospect of democratic backsliding or breakdown has long seemed outside the realm of reasonable speculation in the United States, comparative scholars have made substantial progress toward understanding and explaining why democracies emerge, how they fail, and under what conditions they might survive.Footnote 47 Comparative studies have shown that several conditions pose especially grave threats to democracy: conflict over the boundaries of membership in the political community, particularly on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or other “formative rifts” that predate democratization; high and rising economic inequality; the decay of democratic norms and institutional restraints; and high levels of political polarization.Footnote 48
Guided by this analytical framework, we have gathered first-rate scholars of American politics, both students of institutions and of political behavior. Our aim has been to bring them into dialogue with one another, by asking them to think about how each other’s research findings might have a bearing on their own area of study. We have also encouraged them to think about how time matters in their analysis, as circumstances unfold and change dynamically. The authors in this volume probe the historical currents and developmental processes that have helped produce current conditions, asking how the American experience might compare to that of other countries where democracy has been under threat. The resulting analyses take us far in understanding the dangers to US democracy posed by polarization and the capacity of the political system to prove resilient.
The next two chapters – the first by Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler and the second by Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer – address the question of polarization’s consequences for resilience from this broad historical and comparative perspective. American political institutions, including the structures of separation of powers and federalism, have long been regarded as fragmenting political power by facilitating widespread access to the political system and at the same time impeding efforts by one side or the other to stage a takeover. Nevertheless, the escalation of polarization threatens to overwhelm these institutions. Polarization is not static; rather, it can take on a life of its own and eventually generate different effects than earlier on, as it intensifies and metastasizes. Pierson and Schickler demonstrate this in their developmental analysis of polarization, in which they show that the United States’ “meso-institutions” – including interest groups, state parties, and news media – have ceased to operate as countervailing mechanisms that constrain polarization, and have either weakened or turned into engines of polarization. As a result, partisan public officials increasingly run roughshod over checks and balances, seek to delegitimize and incapacitate the political opposition, and aim to rig the system to cement their dominance.
Growing social polarization that emanates from ordinary Americans, moreover, may also increasingly affect how these institutions operate. It may undermine national unity and constrain political elites from working across the aisle, effectively exacerbating harmful consequences. Put differently, mass and elite polarization may feed each other, leading to a spiraling of both. McCoy and Somer view the United States today as subject to “pernicious polarization,” a process that transforms the incentives of political actors in ways that can lead to the demise of democratic resilience. Surveying polarization in countries around the world, they observe that it can be most corrosive to democracy when it revolves around unresolved “formative rifts,” debates over who is considered a citizen that may date back to the nation’s origins, as is the case in the United States. Such developments raise the question of whether the political system can withstand these mounting challenges and permit democracy to survive.
National Institutions
To investigate whether the dispersion and fragmentation of power underlying the US constitutional system remain sufficient to weather the onslaught of threats the nation is confronting presently, we then shift to a focus on institutions themselves. In three chapters, specialists examine the extent to which polarization hinders or obstructs the capacity of national institutions, along with the arrangements of separation of powers, to protect democracy.
Rising polarization in Congress and its impact on the policy process has received considerable attention from scholars, but notwithstanding these problems, Congress may still remain the most resilient of the national institutions to democratic erosion. Frances Lee observes that the political parties in Congress, reflecting their membership across the nation, have grown more socially sorted, more differentiated along lines of race, gender, and religion. Yet while she agrees with Pierson and Schickler that cross-cutting cleavages no longer play the role in ensuring democratic stability that they did in the past, Lee argues that US institutions themselves retain consensus-promoting abilities, enabling them to thwart and restrain such social divides. The separation of powers, strong bicameralism, and federalism still promote power-sharing between the parties and therefore safeguard democratic stability. Some chapters (such as Pierson and Schickler’s and McCoy and Somer’s) point out that growing dysfunction in Congress impedes the policymaking process, but while acknowledging these concerns, Lee maintains that the institution continues to force bipartisan compromise and negotiation.
Some scholars suspect that ascendant polarization and its accompanying legislative gridlock and failure of responsiveness are leading to the greater assertion of unilateral power by presidents, as they seek alternate means of delivering to the public. Certainly the rise of presidential power is nothing new; presidents of both parties, at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt (and with precedents dating back to George Washington) have exerted it in efforts to respond to the public’s demands. Examining trends since the mid-1970s, however, Douglas Kriner finds only slim evidence that contemporary polarization has exacerbated presidential power grabs in the form of executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations. He then investigates the Trump presidency and finds it to be neither imperial nor exceptional in these respects, largely because Republican leaders in Congress themselves have pushed back on several of Trump’s key policy initiatives. Yet when it comes to oversight – a critical factor for democratic resilience – Kriner explains that the Trump administration has engaged in almost total obstruction of Congress, in ways that might have the “most dangerous and long-lasting consequences for the balance of power between the branches.” Such developments, if they pass judicial muster, threaten to decimate the capacity of Congress to check the power of presidents and the administrative state, especially when executive malfeasance and obstruction are aided by the president’s own party in Congress. Taken together, these assessments offer a fair amount of confidence in Congress’s ability to restrain presidential unilateralism in policymaking, but Kriner raises grave concerns about the effectiveness of legislative checks on executive misconduct in a context of acute partisan polarization. Such polarization threatens to neutralize congressional oversight or render it strictly partisan in character, posing a risk to democratic resilience.
By contrast, Thomas Keck’s chapter on the courts indicates that democratic erosion is already long underway in that domain. It is often assumed that courts can act as guardrails of democracy by restraining the partisan excesses of the “political” branches of government. In the face of worries about the Supreme Court’s “countermajoritarian” tendencies in the postwar era, for example, Robert Dahl famously argued that the Court tends to be constrained by the political system and, given the political method of judicial selection, eventually catches up with political majorities.Footnote 49 But as Keck explains, courts can also be effective agents of democratic erosion. The long history of court-packing in the American past offers instances of efforts at facilitating both outcomes. In the contemporary era, since the 1970s, Republicans in particular have taken action to stack the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, and conservatives now stand to dominate it for years to come, regardless of the outcome of elections. This dominance threatens democracy given that the courts in recent years have often proven willing to block efforts at democratic renewal and to permit unfair procedures to persist.
Social Polarization and Partisanship
As polarization has grown, many ordinary Americans themselves have been drawn into it. Four chapters explore how social polarization and partisan affiliation have come to be mutually reinforcing and what this trend means for democratic resilience.
Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe introduce the concept of “social sorting,” showing how social identities have increasingly aligned with political identities. The mid-twentieth-century political parties that featured overlapping social identities have become transformed into a Republican Party made up primarily of white Americans, including those who strongly identify as evangelical Christians and those who are particularly concerned with maintaining their privileged status, while the Democratic Party has grown increasingly diverse in its composition and simultaneously more affirming of inclusive policies. Drawing on psychological theories, Mason and Kalmoe illuminate how such social sorting can lead to intergroup conflict and political intolerance. These developments, in turn, may put the polity at risk by leading to greater emotional hostility, moral disengagement, the possibility of violence, and the rejection of election results that threaten one’s own party. Mason and Kalmoe draw on the historical record to demonstrate that such outcomes are not only well within the American experience but in fact have been commonplace, making their reemergence today highly conceivable.
Social sorting can facilitate what Matthew Lacombe calls “identity-based mobilization,” the political rallying together of those who share a common identity. While such mobilization is fueled by democratic processes, it can have deleterious consequences for democracy if it fosters the kinds of intolerant and exclusionary political reactions that Mason and Kalmoe discuss. The next three chapters explore how this has occurred in recent decades around race, religion, and gun ownership.
Although many journalists widely attributed support for Trump in the 2016 election to economic anxiety, Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto show that support for him was fueled more heavily by white identity. They examine the role of fears on the part of some whites that they were losing “their country” or “way of life,” as they perceived growing racial and ethnic diversity in the US population – and the election of the nation’s first black president – as a threat to their status.Footnote 50 The capacity of such fears to fuel conservative, and in some instances, authoritarian political movements has a long history in the United States, encompassing the Ku Klux Klan, John Birch Society, and the Tea Party. These movements risk harm to democracy because they stoke intolerance of social difference that can activate and mobilize latent authoritarian currents that are intrinsically threatening to democratic resilience.Footnote 51
Religious sorting plays a crucial role in contemporary politics, as Michele Margolis explains. Today’s religious divisions, different from those of the past, cut across denominations, joining together active evangelical Protestants and Catholics in the Republican Party, and a religiously pluralistic coalition among Democrats, with its quickly growing contingent of less religious or unaffiliated Americans joining highly religious African Americans. This partisan cleavage, which has been growing for forty years, has become extremely consequential for American politics as highly mobilized religious conservatives have become a core constituency of the Republican Party. Margolis argues that such mobilization threatens democracy by weakening political accountability, stymying political discourse and dissenting views, and undermining the possibility for compromise and negotiation.
The identity of gun ownership has been actively cultivated in recent decades by the National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the largest mass-based interest groups in the United States. Matthew Lacombe explains that the NRA portrays candidates and legislative proposals as a fundamental threat to gun owners’ interests and values, generating fear and mobilizing them politically. The tactics it uses make compromise harder to attain, encourage supporters to delegitimize opponents and think of them as enemies, and spur political leaders to engage in constitutional “hardball.” These developments therefore harm democratic accountability and responsiveness.
By these accounts, social sorting can be used by political leaders to generate voter turnout and political participation and to promote a policy agenda. While such mobilization itself fosters democratic values, including civic engagement and representation, the goals and tactics it features can undermine democratic norms and capacity, particularly when it is in the service of a narrow social base or ideological stance.
Related to this point, several chapters point to a fundamental asymmetry between today’s Republican and Democratic parties. The Republican Party is more socially homogenous, predominantly white and Christian, and as a result its supporters are more likely to feel that their identity itself is at stake in elections and the policy process. It has also become more ideologically grounded and homogenous over time, with a well-defined set of issue positions defining conservative orthodoxy. The Democratic Party, by contrast, encompasses greater diversity on multiple dimensions, including race, ethnicity, religion and religiosity. As a coalition of different and often crosscutting interests, it encompasses a broad ideological spectrum ranging from moderate-liberals to left-progressives.Footnote 52 This structural asymmetry between the parties fosters a different kind of politics in each; Republicans, who are able to mobilize around targeted policy arenas that offer their constituencies more concentrated costs and benefits, are more likely than Democrats to eschew compromise and negotiation and to treat politics as mortal combat. Democrats, on the other hand, tend to develop a list of policy stands that appeal to specific constituencies but often struggle to connect those policy stances to overarching identities or principles.Footnote 53 Finally, as Pierson and Schickler point out, the meso-institutional processes that fuel contemporary polarization are more intense on the right and provide continuing incentives for Republicans, more than Democrats, to pursue polarizing political strategies.
Interplay of Mass and Elite Political Behavior and Institutions
If mass and elite polarization are exacerbating each other, might checks and balances that proved reliable at other earlier points in time grow increasingly unlikely to function reliably? Several chapters investigate this possibility by exploring the interplay between institutions and political behavior amid rising polarization and investigating how they have developed over time.
Desmond King and Sidney Milkis continue our focus on national political institutions by analyzing the contemporary administrative state. They argue that presidents of both parties, from Nixon onward, have sought to deploy state power in order to cater to partisan constituencies. Partisanship no longer entails a battle over the size of government; rather, both parties pursue the enlargement of particular programs and policies. With a polarized Congress often hamstrung in its ability to deliver on major party goals, presidents now take the lead in responding to party activists and social movements, many of whom eschew deliberation and compromise. Trump has nurtured executive-centered partisanship, as Obama did before him. These dynamics, which have been intensifying for decades, disrupt the constitutional system.
Another pair of chapters turn to developments at the state level, and in the process interrogate the long-standing assumption that federalism necessarily protects democracy. Historically, the southern states long served as what Robert Mickey terms “authoritarian enclaves,” and many other states, too, were slow to extend political, civil, and social rights.Footnote 54 At the same time, some have argued that the states present greater and more diverse opportunities for democratic renewal than the sclerotic and increasingly hollow federal government.Footnote 55 Phillip Rocco shows that even today, the states remain uneven in the extent to which they protect democracy. Collectively these American subnational units continue to lag well behind those of comparable nations in this protection. Democratic erosion in the states, which is fostered by polarization and party extremism, matters also for national politics since state governments run elections, determine congressional districts, implement many federal policies, and define the scope of many rights. Alexander Hertel-Fernandez explains how conservatives captured control of many state governments in recent decades owing to the efforts of wealthy donors, ideological activists, and private-sector businesses. Working together, these groups have pushed the Republican Party in many states to the right on its policy agenda, which means that the priorities of the average citizen (including most Republicans) lack representation, undermining the quality of democracy. In addition, they have pushed those in power to tilt the playing field, aiding Republicans’ electoral prospects for years to come; these changes harm democracy in more fundamental and enduring ways.
As these three chapters illustrate, key aspects of contemporary polarization emanate from long-term organizational and institutional changes. In combination, these have played crucial roles in transforming the political landscape, leading the United States to a political moment of democratic erosion. These studies highlight the value of scholarship that probes the intersection between mass and elite politics, or political behavior and institutions. The long-term dynamic interplay between them reveals troubling developments for American democracy than would not be visible through a narrower analytical lens.
Whereas this volume’s four chapters highlighting national institutions offer a somewhat mixed assessment of democratic resilience, the two analyses of state governments present a more troubling portrayal. As Rocco observes, democratic erosion at the state level matters for national political outcomes given the states’ role in running elections and creating congressional districts. How might political change come about? Next we turn to this question.
Possibilities for Democratic Renewal
Does the American polity currently have the capacity to foster countercurrents that can reverse or repair damage to democracy that may have already occurred? One might hope that threats to the political system will provoke a democratic backlash that will set the system right. Several chapters consider how this might occur or is already occurring, and in keeping with the volume’s dual approach, our contributors offer a range of approaches that focus on both institutions and mass mobilization.
Some authors argue that in circumstances of polarization in which one party has taken the lead in advancing democratic erosion, the opposition party can choose to safeguard and restore democracy. McCoy and Somer note that the Democratic Party, though it has itself engaged in some polarizing strategies, has also demonstrated the political will and capacity to choose a nonpolarizing leader and to avoid extra-constitutional measures. Mason and Kalmoe observe that the contemporary Democratic Party is highly motivated to press for the advancement of previously marginalized groups, embracing a democratizing agenda.
Another approach to democratic renewal might be through elections, which are widely viewed as the most fundamental feature of democracies. Yet as David Bateman explains, elections are inherently paradoxical. Although they have the potential to strengthen democracy, they are also vulnerable to becoming tools of those who seek to restrict it. Elections serve two functions in a democracy that exist in tension to one another: first, giving voters a meaningful choice, which by definition makes them polarizing, and second, an integrative role, by serving as processes through which those who govern can be regarded as legitimate. In addition, political leaders themselves are in a position to structure elections and set the rules of the game, and when the parties compete intensely with one another, this can encourage electoral manipulation – a frequent occurrence in American history. Today, as Bateman explains, such manipulation emanates almost entirely from hardball efforts by partisans rather than from fraud or malfeasance. In order to make democracy resilient, reformers need to protect the electoral process from political self-entrenchment. Like Keck, Bateman ultimately argues that democracy’s defenders must be prepared to take some hardball measures in order to renew democratic institutions, and he offers several possibilities.
Finally, we address the potential of grassroots organizing to restore democracy. As Skocpol, Tervo, and Walters argue in their chapter, the two nationwide waves of such voluntary citizen efforts that commenced after the 2008 and 2016 elections – the Tea Party movement and the resistance groups, respectively – can both be credited with engaging more citizens in collective action and boosting voter turnout, and in those respects are democratizing. Yet the Tea Party also fueled the ethnocultural and authoritarian tendencies that led to Trump and the subsequent willingness of the GOP to override legal practices in its quest to retain power. Nationally organized progressives, distinct from the grassroots resistance groups, have been willing to embrace maximalist and moralistic positions that lack broad support, which can be problematic for democracy. In sum, though civic engagement is certainly democratic in and of itself, it has the potential to both engender greater democracy and, conversely, to heighten the existential warfare for power that has been on the rise for four decades. As it so often has in American history, this conflict is increasingly manifesting itself in a partisan divide over fundamental questions of democratic participation: should we make it easy or hard (or even impossible) for Americans to exercise their right to vote?Footnote 56 The record to date suggests that the Tea Party led to a rightward shift of the Republican Party, exacerbating polarization and undermining possibilities for compromise and negotiation. The resistance groups, by contrast, have facilitated the election of a broad range of Democratic candidates, from moderates to progressives, thus reducing polarization. Similarly, Parker and Barreto observe that people of color have become particularly mobilized in response to Trump’s election, with the aim of protecting and renewing democracy. In short, when some groups become mobilized to roll back democracy, countermobilization by others may occur to protect and expand it.
Taken together, the chapters in this volume identify myriad ways in which polarization can strain democratic institutions and foster political behavior that challenges democratic norms. Yet they also provide evidence of the subtle ways in which institutions can restrain autocratic behavior and foster democratic resilience by providing leverage to countervailing forces and offering channels of access to society actors who seek democratic renewal. Our contributing authors offer no simple formulas to gauge the prospects for American democracy in the years to come. Collectively, however, they shed new light on the dynamic forces that work both for and against it.
