II. Political Incentives, Norms, Culture

The norms, incentives, and strategies of political actors within a democracy pose one set of challenges to democratic infrastructure. In the democratic backsliding literature, scholars have highlighted how autocratic leaders, who by disposition are hostile to democratic institutions and civil liberties,¹ can gain political power through conventional and legitimate means, particularly by building coalitions with existing parties and gatekeepers, causing a gradual subversion of existing checks and balances and a consolidation of power.² These scholars also warn that democratic backsliding can also arise in a less direct form, through increasingly polarized and scorched-earth forms of political conflict between rival parties for power.³ There is a generalized danger here rooted in the interaction between political self-interest and structural weaknesses of modern democratic institutions: Organized interest groups deploy political strategies to gain power and advance their agendas in ways that exploit structural limits to our institutions and which can exacerbate the pathologies of contemporary democracy. This combination of self-interest and structural conditions is what arguably explains the proliferation of norm violations and the increasing prevalence of hardball tactics. Furthermore, it is enabled by increased political polarization.

Polarization represents the first key challenge to how existing democratic institutions are falling short. Partisanship is at record highs in the United States. The two distances between the parties is greater than ever before, as studies looking at the ideological party polarization from 1879–2012 demonstrate. Increasingly the two parties, Republican and Democrat, encapsulate a variety of issues which previously were non-ideological or nonpartisan.⁴ The realignment of these two parties in the 1960s led to more deeply entrenched liberal and conservative parties. One large reason is the exodus of conservative, white Southern Dixiecrats, out of the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights Movement. As Democracy Fund Voter Study Group research has demonstrated, the primary conflict structuring the two parties involves questions of national identity, race, and morality; the traditional conflict over economics is less salient.⁵

Recent studies have underscored how polarization has shifted from issue-based differences to strong dislike and distrust along party lines, leading to what is today called affective polarization. Through measures of self-reporting, implicit bias, and measures of inter-group favoritism, ⁶ scholars have found a growing social distance between Democrats and Republicans since 1978.⁷ This increase was linked to respondents’ increased enmity to the opposing party as opposed to respondents’ increased like for one’s party. However, there is also a counterargument against the polarization thesis. As some historians have suggested, the lamenting of polarization may be somewhat misleading, for it obscures the ways in which a depolarized mid-century politics was also deeply undemocratic and inegalitarian. James Wallner and Lee Drutman argue that what is needed is more of a battle of ideas.⁸ Drutman outlines the paradox: “We can’t have democracy without partisanship. But when partisanship overwhelms everything, it becomes increasingly difficult for democracy to function.”⁹

Polarization on its own does not necessarily pose a problem for democratic politics. But where polarization interacts with narrowly divided political environment where both parties are contesting for control, and where the stakes of losing political power feel existential, the result is an increasing pressure towards hardball politics and scorched-earth strategies that place existing political institutions under even greater strain. On this account, the pathologies of contemporary American politics have less to do with a resurgence of mass public opinion in favor of extreme right populism; instead a bigger driving factor is how the contest for political power incentivizes more extreme political tactics, ranging from institutional norm-breaking to taboo-shattering forms of political rhetoric in order to stave off potentially permanent decline of political influence. Thus, we see today how the coalition of business interests, conservative jurists, evangelicals, and the rest of the Nixonian coalition on the Right has sought to seize and defend political power, even through hardball tactics of bending and potentially breaking democratic institutions, like Senate judicial confirmations (Garland) and voter suppression, and money in politics. This is also what has led to the decades-long investment in skewing the media infrastructure (e.g. Fox, Sinclair, etc.) and the courts to create a supportive environment for these moves.

Each of these instances are ones where specific actors operating under self-interest have violated norms of good governance and mutual toleration—but have done so by weaponizing existing structural disparities in economic, political, and racial inclusion. This in turn has led to a greater crisis of democratic stability and legitimacy. This analysis suggests that the solution requires a shift in the incentives and coalitions that currently have a self-interest in breaking (or maintaining the broken) political system.

A related pressure of the key lenses for understanding the gap between democratic ideals and democratic realities focuses on the role of norms and political culture, particularly with respect to political elites and the ecosystem of leading political actors: elected officials, strategists, major media figures, party leaders, and the like. This approach emphasizes the importance of unwritten norms of political and civic conduct, particularly among political parties, candidates, and the Presidency. Where these norms are violated, the formal structures of democratic institutions can quickly become shells, encasing a more authoritarian and explosive form of politics.

The recent literature on democratic backsliding, for example, has tended to highlight the importance of defending existing institutional checks and balances, as well as restoring informal norms that govern political behavior—norms such as the “mutual toleration”¹⁰ of political opponents and “forbearance,”¹¹ which require political actors, once in power, to hold themselves back from deploying the full range of their coercive powers to snuff out their rivals. In the American context, a variety of other norms have also been central to maintaining democracy, including norms against conflicts of interest for elected officials, and norms promoting internal deliberation (such as the expectation that the president will consult with legal and other internal experts before advancing policy proposals). These norms prevent the executive branch from overreaching in normal circumstances.¹² Yet these norms have been blatantly violated by the current administration, contributing to concerns about presidential overreach and arbitrariness.¹³ At the same time, the institutional system of checks and balances—whether it is intra-branch processes of Executive and regulatory policymaking, or inter-branch norms of Executive-Congressional relationships in legislation and appointments—has also been under increasing strain as political parties engage in increasingly scorched-earth partisan warfare through “constitutional hardball,” tactics that while formally permitted in the constitutional scheme functionally lead to the breakdown of constitutional processes.¹⁴ Think, for example, of how the Republican party blockaded the appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016, or how Executive opposition to Congress has led to more and more expansive interpretations of presidential power under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

While norm violation theories focus largely on political elites of various kinds, these norm violations are partly enabled by—and themselves contribute further to—accumulated public distrust of democratic institutions and disaffection with political participation. The Pew Research Center, for example, found that in 2016, less than a third of Americans expressed trust in the federal government in 2016,¹⁵ while Gallup’s polling revealed a similar finding, with trust in “the government’s ability to handle domestic problems” at its lowest point since the 1970s.¹⁶ Scholars have documented substantially the same trend in the United States and globally, as citizens have lost trust in governments and in their own sense of political efficacy—the sense of being able to exercise meaningful political power.¹⁷ This problem of public distrust of democratic institutions can further accelerate the decline of democratic norms, practices, and institutional functioning. Indeed, this justified disaffection represents for many scholars a threat to “the legitimacy and stability of the political system.”¹⁸ Indeed, the resurgence of exclusionary populisms and political instability in recent years has borne it out.

It is worth noting, however, that some critics of the norms thesis have pointed out that a focus on norms is in many ways underdetermined, and the implications for reform turn greatly on what norms in particular we think are most critical to restore. For example, one could imagine a restoration of pre-2016 (or pre-2008) norms of inter-party comity that still leaves in place many of the practices and policies that contribute to the failure and delegitimization of democracy, like excessive money in politics, gerrymandering, voter suppression, or more.¹⁹ Norm erosion is also possibly a product of the increasing stakes of political conflict: As federal power increases and the consequences of electoral loss go up, there is greater and greater incentive by particular interest groups to win at all costs. Indeed, this is part of the mechanism through which high inequality can drive democratic decline as wealthy interests have more to lose from popular redistributive policies, or as dominant racial groups perceive increased political and demographic threats from immigrants, and racial minorities.

A third variation of these political pressures stems from the ways in which racial and ethnic identity are deployed in modern democratic politics. While identity politics has been a frequent flashpoint of controversy in political debates, there is a larger pattern of political conflict driven by the push for what Francis Fukuyama has recently termed as the “demand for recognition.”²⁰ In many cases these demands are critical for redressing the kinds of deep historical exclusion and inequities noted in Part III below. But in many democracies today, the demographic trends interact with deep histories of dominant-group identity, creating a toxic brew of racial anxiety, sense of threat from outsider “others,” and a sense of loss of status. These anxieties are then easily weaponized and leveraged into political conflict.

Indeed, racial resentment and desires to reassert traditional racial and gendered hierarchies represent powerful undercurrents driving much of the contemporary right’s anti-government political fervor.²¹ In recent years, the long-brewing backlash against immigration, and the experience of America’s first African-American president fueled a racial backlash was easily leveraged by political elites to disrupt the balance of power.²² There is also a history of stoking opposition to public spending that is tied to the perception that state-sponsored policies benefit racial and ethnic minorities.²³ Even when opponents of government programs and safety-net provisions have not openly engaged in racial appeals, Republican politicians have proved adept at fusing business interests and anti-government critiques with more subtle (and perhaps not always intentional) appeals to racial sentiments.²⁴ Indeed, as Kathy J. Cramer notes, “support for small government is more about identity than principle.”²⁵ This engagement with deeper conceptions of communal identity—and the linking of identity with a mix of frustration at socioeconomic decline and resentment of racial minorities—is particularly stark in the context of contemporary far-right movements who have a pervasive narrative of losing out to immigrants and racial minorities who in their view have cut in line to advance towards greater prosperity through unequal and unfair treatment.²⁶

In running for election, Donald J. Trump made an implicit and explicit link between these emotions of grievance, decline, and a sense of social and cultural threat from ascendant “others,” in many ways removing prior social taboos on explicit racial resentment, amplifying these underlying attitudes and bringing them into an open political configuration.

Quantitative data supports the ethnographic analyses of scholars like Katherine J. Cramer, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and others. White voters without a college education made up around two-thirds of Trump’s supporters in the Republican primaries and around three-fifths in the general election. Survey data from the Voter Study Group shows a strong correlation between negative assessments of Muslims and support for Trump both in the Republican primary and the general election.²⁷

Moreover, the survey results find the same relationship in the 2012 data on Muslims, suggesting Trump tapped into pre-existing attitudes.²⁸ Once engaged, these racial attitudes may have become even more toxic. In a recent study, Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel analyzed the data of over 4,000 respondents in the American National Election Studies pre- and post-survey and found that Trump accelerated realignment in the electorate around racism.²⁹