Journal Entries #8

Institutions, Polarization and Threats to Democracy This is excerpted from the introduction to the edited anthology: Democratic Resilience: Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization? (Cambridge Press, 2022). The introduction provides a helpful introduction to the broad themes of threats to democracy and democratic resilience without the deep dive into the weeds of the individual chapters. I will provide definitions and introductory remarks as needed to help understandings for those new to political science. The introduction is titled How Democracies Endure: The Challenges of Polarization and Sources of Resilience. It is by Robert C. Lieberman (Johns Hopkins University), Suzanne Mettler (Cornell University) and Kenneth M. Roberts (Cornell University). This section is fairly straightforward and the authors carefully define their terms. If you have any questions or have any trouble understanding a part of it please reach out. I am here to help.

Introductory remarks and terms to know

In this section the authors show how the concerns of comparative political scientists about weakening democracies globally have influenced American politics scholars to reassess the longtime view that the American system was immune to threats to democracy. While our fragmented system was designed to avoid any particular approach from dominating the system, polarization is now overwhelming our institutions and weakening democracy. Will congress continue to be an effective check on the powers of the presidency?

Terms to Define

Mass and Elite Actors: Mass refers to the public/citizens. Elites refer to those in power inside and outside of government. Actors means anyone engaged in political action from citizens (public) to elites, including private sector and elected leaders. Actors' perspectives are shaped by political beliefs, culture, education, history, geography and social position.

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.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.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 co. 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 analysisincided; the resolution of democratic crises in American history has often entailed a compromise of democratic values that reaffirmed or perpetuated racial hierarchy and exclusion.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.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.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.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.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.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.