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| 1 |
ID:
172532
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| Summary/Abstract |
Is support for democracy in the United States robust enough to deter undemocratic behavior by elected politicians? We develop a model of the public as a democratic check and evaluate it using two empirical strategies: an original, nationally representative candidate-choice experiment in which some politicians take positions that violate key democratic principles, and a natural experiment that occurred during Montana’s 2017 special election for the U.S. House. Our research design allows us to infer Americans’ willingness to trade-off democratic principles for other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, and policy preferences. We find the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing in several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence. Our findings echo classic arguments about the importance of political moderation and cross-cutting cleavages for democratic stability and highlight the dangers that polarization represents for democracy.
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| 2 |
ID:
154911
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| Summary/Abstract |
Tocqueville’s discussion of American Indians in Democracy in America is often read as the paradigmatic expression of a conventional story about American political expansion. This narrative holds that westward expansion was easy, in part because American Indians did not offer much resistance. Historians of political thought and scholars of American Political Development tend to affirm this narrative when they read Tocqueville’s text as suggesting merely that Indians are “doomed” to an inevitable extinction. Our interpretation here proceeds along different lines, with a greater focus on the ways in which contending Jacksonian-era discourses of Indian nomadism are represented in Tocqueville’s text. We argue that Democracy reflects complex and often competing descriptions of inherent Indian nomadism, retreat, and removal, with varying attributions of causal responsibility for disappearing Indian populations. This reading of Tocqueville highlights contentions about Indian removal that are often ignored or neglected in current scholarship, and can therefore help us to better appreciate both his text and his time.
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