We live in a period of hopes and fears for democracy. The fears, however, are now foremost in our minds. Democratic erosion is now taking the perverse form in which institutions long associated with democracy, especially competitive elections, have become vehicles for authoritarian populists to undermine other institutions necessary to democracy, including rights and the rule of law. Yet although the democratic project seems to be backsliding, the democratic values of citizens remain relatively strong. Hopes for democracy will involve continuing to defend, reform, and reinforce electoral democracy, while supplementing these institutions with “democratic innovations”—processes that tap these democratic values with smarter and better citizen participation, more equal and responsive representation, and better deliberation. If we can target the democratic deficits in representative democracies with these kinds of innovations, the democratic project will continue to march forward, and our hopes will have places to land.

As a wave of backsliding has swept across both new and established democracies, scholars have sought to identify formal and informal institutions that can act as guardrails of democracy. But while informal norms, party structures, and formal institutions such as separation of powers have all been singled out as potential bulwarks against democratic backsliding, the literature has had less to say about what role, if any, federalism might play in stopping democracies from sliding into autocracy. While some constitutional designers and scholars have argued that federalism can help to prevent the emergence of a national tyranny, most contemporary research has emphasized the damaging effects federalism can have on democracy. In this article, we assess the relationship between federalism and threats posed by national rulers, with quantitative analysis of that relationship in countries around the world and with structured, focused comparative case studies in the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, and India. Our quantitative analysis finds no systematic relationship between federalism and backsliding, while our comparative case studies support our argument that federalism is only likely to serve as a bulwark against autocratic threats posed by national rulers under a limited set of conditions.

Sweden’s adoption of proportional representation (PR) is interesting because it involved static structural and institutional factors, well captured by variance-based left-threat thesis, and four temporal factors—sequencing, timing, historical change, and duration—that historical case studies highlight. We integrate these two sets of factors. We fuse the more static, temporally homogeneous world created by the left-threat thesis, that is well suited to explain cross-sectional variations, with the more dynamic, temporally heterogenous world presumed by the case studies that is attuned to temporal processes. It illustrates how comparative historical analysis (CHA) can translate temporal anomalies into generalizable temporal mechanisms and how nested analysis, together with causal graphs, provide helpful tools for updating theories. We ultimately employ an abductive approach that evaluates evidence not just for its inferential leverage of confirming theories but also for its inductive potential to generate new, more test-worthy hypotheses.

While it is commonly understood that the poll tax and literacy tests, among other measures, were used effectively in the South to disenfranchise Black voters from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, what is not well known is how much those disenfranchising laws mattered. Specifically, how much did the enactment of poll taxes or literacy tests affect turnout in federal and state elections? And how much did those disenfranchising provisions dampen vote totals for Republican candidates in the South? Using the staggered implementation and removal of several disenfranchising policies over a 101-year period, we answer these questions and provide some precision to our collective knowledge of the “disenfranchising era” in American electoral politics. Overall, we find that the poll tax was the main driver of disenfranchisement in Southern elections, with literacy tests and the Australian ballot providing some secondary effects. We also find that ex-felon disenfranchisement laws were considerably more important—both in reducing turnout as well as Republican vote share in Southern elections—than has been traditionally understood. Finally, we unpack the “South” and unsurprisingly find that racial politics drove these results: the disenfranchising institutions were more impactful in states with a larger Black population share. Our results show the powerful effects of disenfranchising policies on electorates and electoral outcomes. We discuss these results in both their historical context as well as with a mind to the continuing use of disenfranchising provisions in law today.

It is widely agreed that the increased polarization many countries experience is bad for democracy. However, existing assessments of how polarization affects democracy operate with simplified understandings of both polarization and democracy. Bringing empirical studies and democratic theory into dialogue, I argue that polarization cannot be understood as a single phenomenon that can be evaluated in one way. Moreover, its different kinds affect different parts of the democratic system in distinct ways. First, we must distinguish between the degree of polarization in a given context and the different kinds of polarization at play. Second, we must consider whether people have good reasons for their polarizing behavior or whether it is entirely irrational. If people have good reasons for their polarizing behavior, the problem lies elsewhere than in polarization itself. Third, we must distinguish between the content of polarized opinions and the process of opinion formation. Both can be assessed with democratic criteria, but they raise different questions. Finally, for democratic evaluation it matters where polarization occurs and thus, we must differentiate between different sites of polarization: civil society, election campaigns, and legislatures. I recommend a systemic approach to assessing the democratic implication of polarization, which analyzes both the effects of polarization at different sites and on democracy as a composite whole.

Do demonstrations tend to deepen or endanger democracy? I examine this theme of major debate between scholars and among political actors, analyzing how the United States and other democracies have dealt with—and been shaped by—popular pressure on representative institutions. Cases that are discussed include Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington and the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, as well as examples drawn from Spain, Portugal, and Italy. I offer clear principles to differentiate between types of protest that deepen democracy, advance the goal of inclusion, and others that endanger democratic principles. Among the issues I take up is whether the location of protest—for example, adjacent to or even inside legislative chambers—is decisive. Rejecting that approach, my argument instead emphasizes the difference between protests intended to influence policy-making or the political agenda and those that use intimidation or violence to replace the primacy of elections in selecting office holders. The discussion argues that conceptualizing demonstrations as complementary to the work of representative institutions can help to promote the difficult to obtain objective of political equality between citizens. The article also asks whether consensus on this matter can be attained and if so how.

Revolutionary protest rarely begins as democratic or revolutionary. Instead, it grows in a process of positive feedback, incorporating new constituencies and generating new demands. If protest is not revolutionary at its onset, theory should reflect this and be able to explain the endogenous emergence of democratic demands. In this article, I combine multiple data sources on the 2010–2011 Tunisian Revolution, including survey data, an original event catalogue, and field interviews. I show that the correlates of protest occurrence and participation change significantly during the uprising. Using the Tunisian case as a theory-building exercise, I argue that the formation of protest coalitions is essential, rather than incidental, to democratic revolution.

I consider the role of exposure to large-scale strikes in shaping preferences about workplace action and labor unions, replicating and extending past work identifying the effect of large-scale teachers’ strikes. I study a large 2019 grocery store strike. Using an original survey fielded in affected states and an instrumental variables design, I find strike exposure increased support for the strikes, including actions taken supporting the striking workers. I do not find consistent evidence that strikes increased interest in online actions to support other workers or in workers taking most forms of labor actions at their own jobs. Firsthand contact with strikes had no effect on individuals’ broader perceptions of the labor movement or support for a union at their job. These results suggest important distinctions between strikes. Suggestive evidence indicates that the grocery strikes may have failed to inspire a greater sense of linked fate between affected members of the public and striking workers, as had occurred with teachers’ strikes. I conclude by laying out a research agenda for understanding the impact of mass strikes.

While scholars have focused extensively on the consequences of partnerships between interest groups, less attention has been paid to the historical dynamics shaping when, how, and why such groups unite. This is especially true of “unexpected” partnerships, which unite groups with seemingly little in common. Such partnerships are important, as they can reshape to an unusual degree which actors, issues, and ideas “fit together” politically. We address the puzzle of how unexpected group partnerships form through case studies of previously non-existent alliances between labor unions and the gay/lesbian rights movement in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. Using these cases, we produce a theory arguing that unexpected partnerships are a product of a favorable political opportunity structure—present when each group experiences shared threats and mutual vulnerabilities—and the actions of entrepreneurial group leaders, who forge cross-group identities, accentuate shared ideological convictions, and build institutional ties.

Extremism and terrorism are thought to go hand in hand in civil wars. Yet do they? Are rebel groups with more extreme goals more likely than moderate ones to use terrorism, as commonly assumed? Arguments linking extremism to terrorism are often circular: groups are tagged as extremist because they do extreme things. Our article addresses this problem by articulating a novel conceptualization of extremism as the distance of group goals from the status quo. Understanding the relationship between what groups want and how they try to achieve it has obvious theoretical and policy implications. We theorize mechanisms that might connect extremist goals to terrorism and use new data on rebel group aims in civil wars from 1970 to 2013 to examine the empirical relationship between extremism and terrorism in a nontautological way. The results show that some extremist goals are associated with terrorism but not others. Groups with goals that involve changing the political ideology of the state or transforming political power across identity groups are more likely to use terrorism or to use more of it. Secessionist groups, however, are no more likely to produce terrorism than are those with less extreme territorial aims such as autonomy.

This article presents new empirical evidence about the impact of Jihadist terrorist attacks on far-right preferences using the “unexpected event during survey” research design. This strategy allows us to match individual-level data from the European Social Survey (ESS) to data on Jihadist terrorist attacks to compare respondents’ party preferences before and after a terrorist attack during the same survey period in the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and Germany. We theorise and test three distinct hypotheses about how different combinations of attitudinal changes including out-group prejudice and trust in institutions impact far-right preferences. We find no statistically significant effects. Analyses of the two indirect mechanisms— i.e., prejudice and trust—yield mixed results consistent with the null effect on far-right party preferences. By showing that terrorist attacks are unlikely to decisively change party support despite attracting significant public attention and affecting political attitudes, our results challenge the argument that Jihadist terrorism necessarily benefits the far-right and highlight the importance of null effects for overcoming confirmation bias in the study of voting behaviour.

Racial violence is central to the American polity. We argue that support for violence, specifically anti-Black violence, has a long historical arc in American politics dating back to chattel slavery. In this paper, we argue that the racial violence associated with the “great replacement” conspiracy is much more pervasive among the white American public because of the historical legacy of anti-Black violent sentiment. To investigate the prevalence of this idea, we conducted a preregistered simple priming experiment aimed to tap into top-of-mind ideas about racial demographic change. Our experimental design spans multiple data sources, including two probability samples, over the course of a year. We ultimately find that simply priming attitudes about racial demographic change through a single open-ended question consistently leads to increased support for political violence, increasing racial resentment, and expressed anti-Black views. Our approach allows us to test this question through variant methodological means, all of which confirm strong associations Americans have between racial demographic change, anti-Blackness, and violence. Our findings demonstrate that Black threat is an important driver of democratic backsliding in the realm of political violence that requires further attention.

Why do soldiers engage in unauthorized atrocities? This article explores this question by analyzing the use of postmortem mutilation by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. I show that such acts were remarkably frequent, despite being explicitly prohibited by military policy, and argue that individual-level variation in participation in such violence is explained by social dynamics within military units. Soldiers used mutilation mostly as a means of avenging enemy atrocities or deaths among comrades. Revenge motives were stronger when soldiers shared particularly strong social bonds. Whether these motives resulted in unauthorized atrocity, however, depended on the extent to which discipline was maintained within military units. In units characterized by “deviant cohesion”—strong social ties and weak discipline—informal combatant norms diverged from organizational policies and promoted unauthorized atrocities as a unit-level practice. Evidence for this theory comes from a combination of archival sources and survey data gathered from a representative sample of Vietnam War veterans. A case study of a single Army unit illustrates the mechanism implied by the theory.

Most analyses of the intersection of police, politics, and violence—which center on the police’s use of force as a means to control subordinate classes, repress political dissidents, or confront non-state armed actors—conceptualize the police as an instrument of political incumbents. In this paper, I problematize the relationship between the police and its political principals by focusing on how police administer violence as a political response in compliance or defiance of political incumbents. While elected officials may enact policy changes that restrain or incite police violence, police forces can either abide with or disregard these directives. Building on this interaction of policy shifts and police responses, I develop a typology of four variants of police administration of violence: peacekeeping, punishing, shirking, and sabotaging. I illustrate this typology with various examples from developed and developing democracies.

Victimization is often associated with increased political participation, and victims are influential political actors in many countries around the world. Yet for victims, activism is costly: they tell and re-tell painful stories, face searing criticism, and work to exhaustion—all at one of the worst moments of their lives. So why do they do it? Based on ethnographic research with Families for Safe Streets, a group of victims-turned-activists in New York City, this article advances a new explanation for victims’ participation in politics. I propose that for some victims, meaning-making is an in-process benefit of activism. My inductive research suggests three ways victims find meaning in politics. First, through their activism, victims can re-conceptualize the losses and harms they have suffered as policy problems, rather than random, inexplicable events. Victims may also seek to help others by changing laws to prevent similar tragedies from recurring, and some victims see their activism as a way of fulfilling important obligations to their communities, their families, and their deceased relatives.

Policing by consent is an influential frame of reference for police forces, policy makers, and members of the public in appraising the means and ends of law enforcement in Anglo-American societies. The doctrine is nonetheless vulnerable to powerful philosophical and political objections, which suggests that an alternative paradigm is necessary. This article draws on recent republican political theory in elaborating a doctrine of policing by contestation. This republican conception does not rest the legitimacy of policing on the supposed consent of the policed, but on the availability and adequacy of the means through which the policed can contest arbitrary interference at the hands of the police.

The “gender gap” in voting is one of the most well-documented findings in survey research across democracies. However, gender gap research has traditionally assumed that everyone is either a man or a woman, which does not account for the growing number of people who identify as nonbinary. How do nonbinary people differ from men and women in their party identification and voting behavior? We answer this question using data from the 2021 Canadian Election Study online panel, which has a large enough subsample of nonbinary respondents to identify gaps in party identification and voting behavior. Nonbinary people are much less likely to identify with and vote for the Liberal Party or Conservative Party and much more likely to identify with and vote for the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) than both men and women. Many of these gaps persist even when restricting the analysis to LGBTQ respondents, adjusting for demographic variables that predict nonbinary identity, and adjusting for issue attitudes. Nonbinary people’s distinctiveness from men and women suggests that researchers need to add nonbinary response options to gender questions and, wherever possible, incorporate nonbinary people into analyses of gender and politics.