America after Trump: from “clean” to “dirty” democracy?

In recent years, the debate about the state of democracy in the United States has split political scientists into two camps: those who believed that American democracy was stable, and those who feared that former President Donald J. Trump might engage in significant violations of executive authority, such as using a declaration of national emergency to postpone elections. In this article, we argue that this debate rests on an overly simple juxtaposition between democracy and authoritarianism, and has misidentified the true danger faced by American institutions. The United States is in the process of becoming a less functional democracy in which both major parties retain a feasible prospect of winning elections but the nature of their competition is transformed in a manner that undermines the informal norms of healthy democratic life. This entails a shift from “clean” forms of competition which largely take the rules of the democratic game for granted towards what we term “dirty” democracy, in which competition consists, to a significant extent, of attempts to change the rules of the democratic game

Youth and the populist wave

If the values of younger citizens and voters are the trend of the future, in what direction do they point? Scholars have long noted a decline in political engagement and knowledge among youth in developed democracies, with the fear that this may undermine the stability of liberal institutions. However, youth electoral behaviour appears inconsistent: in much of continental Western Europe, younger voters support populist parties of both left and right, but in the United States and the United Kingdom, only left-wing populist movements benefit from youth mobilization. We explain this divergence by arguing for a distinction between democratic apathy and democratic antipathy. Democratic apathy is characterized by scepticism regarding the value of democratic institutions, low turnout and lack of interest in politics, whereas democratic antipathy involves the active embrace of illiberal movements hostile to pluralistic institutions. In societies where youth do not face economic and social discrimination, democratic apathy is the more common trend, whereas in parts of continental Europe where youth face systematic social exclusion, apathy has become active antipathy. </jats:p

The signs of deconsolidation

Americans have long been growing dissatisfied with the state of their political system. As survey researchers have chronicled over recent decades, an overwhelming majority of citizens now believes that the United States is “headed in the wrong direction.” Trust in such major institutions as Congress and the presidency has fallen markedly. Engagement in formal political institutions has ebbed. The media are more mistrusted than ever. Even so, most scholars have given these findings a stubbornly optimistic spin: U.S. citizens, they claim, have simply come to have higher expectations of their government

Why the Future Cannot Be Predicted

In recent years, public-opinion scholars have raised concerns about declining satisfaction with democracy's performance and, in some countries, eroding democratic support. While these trends raise questions regarding democratic stability, other scholars have suggested that measures of social liberalism offer a more optimistic picture. Social-liberal values are rising globally, they assert, and since the presence of such values have correlated with past democratic transitions, a bright future for democracy awaits. However, in this article we find little evidence to link social liberalism to democratization—or even that social-liberal values are rising outside of existing democracies. While there are good reasons to envisage a future wave of democratic transitions, such global-values measures cannot inform their timing, location, or rationale