Search results

"There is a palpable sense of crisis in Western democracies. The rise of right-wing populist parties across Europe, the erosion of constitutional checks and balances in Hungary and Poland, and the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK have all stirred significant alarm regarding the present state of democracy and prospects for its future. And political leaders and would-be leaders have not hesitated to stoke perceptions of crisis in pursuit of their own ends. However, on the whole, Europeans in 2019 were just as satisfied with the working of democracy as they had been 15 years earlier. Trust in national parliaments and politicians remained virtually unchanged. While "angry opponents of immigration" dominated the headlines, most Europeans' attitudes toward immigration were becoming significantly warmer, not more hostile. In these and other respects, the conventional wisdom about a "crisis of democracy" in contemporary Europe is strikingly at odds with evidence from public opinion surveys. Drawing from a major survey of European public opinion, Bartels summarizes broad trends from 2002 through 2019, focusing on attitudes commonly taken as symptomatic of a "crisis of democracy," including dissatisfaction with the workings of democracy, distrust of political elites, ideological polarization, and antipathy to European integration. He finds, with remarkable consistency across issues, that the European public does not see their democracy as in crisis. Bartels then goes on to show how these findings complicate the sense, for instance, that the surge in support for right-wing populist parties is driven by a "demand" for such groups from the public. Rather, this and other troubling changes has much more to do with the "supply" of groups within the political elite. It is these elite groups, Bartels ultimately finds, that have contributed to the erosion of democratic norms and institutions in places like Poland and Hungary-not an increasingly restive European public"--

This innovative study blends sophisticated statistical analyses, campaign anecdotes, and penetrating political insight to produce a fascinating exploration of one of America's most controversial political institutions--the process by which our major parties nominate candidates for the presidency. Larry Bartels focuses on the nature and impact of "momentum" in the contemporary nominating system. He describes the complex interconnections among primary election results, expectations, and subsequent primary results that have made it possible for candidates like Jimmy Carter, George Bush, and Gary Hart to emerge from relative obscurity into political prominence in recent nominating campaigns. In the course of his analysis, he addresses questions central to any understanding--or evaluation--of the modern nominating process. How do fundamental political predispositions influence the behavior of primary voters? How quickly does the public learn about new candidates? Under what circumstances will primary success itself generate subsequent primary success? And what are the psychological processes underlying this dynamic tendency? Professor Bartels examines the likely consequences of some proposed alternatives to the current nominating process, including a regional primary system and a one-day national primary. Thus the work will be of interest to political activists, would-be reformers, and interested observers of the American political scene, as well as to students of public opinion, voting behavior, the news media, campaigns, and electoral institutions

""We are the 99%"" has quickly become the slogan of our political era as growing numbers of Americans express concern about the disappearing middle class and the ever-widening gap between the super-rich and everyone else. Has America really entered a New Gilded Age? What are the political consequences of the growing income gap? Can democracy survive such vast economic inequality? These questions dominate our political moment--and Larry Bartels provides answers backed by sobering data. Princeton Shorts are brief selections taken from influential Princeton University Press books and pro

Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that "the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it." More than 40% agreed that "a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands." (In both cases, most of the rest said they were unsure; only one in four or five disagreed.) I use 127 survey items to measure six potential bases of these and other antidemocratic sentiments: partisan affect, enthusiasm for President Trump, political cynicism, economic conservatism, cultural conservatism, and ethnic antagonism. The strongest predictor by far, for the Republican rank-and-file as a whole and for a variety of subgroups defined by education, locale, sex, and political attitudes, is ethnic antagonism—especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The corrosive impact of ethnic antagonism on Republicans' commitment to democracy underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics.

The logic of electoral competition suggests that candidates should have to adopt moderate issue positions to win majority support. But U.S. presidential candidates consistently take relatively extreme positions on a variety of important issues. Some observers have attributed these "polarized" positions to the extreme views of the parties' core supporters. I characterize the issue preferences of core Republicans, core Democrats, and swing voters over the past three decades and assess how well the positions of presidential candidates reflect those preferences. I find that Republican candidates have generally been responsive to the positions of their base. However, Democratic candidates have often been even more extreme than the Democratic base, suggesting that electoral polarization is due in significant part to candidates' own convictions rather than the need to mollify core partisans. Neither party's presidential candidates have been more than minimally responsive to the views of swing voters.

America's political response to the Great Recession was surprising to pundits but mostly consistent with patterns familiar to political scientists. Ordinary citizens assessed politicians and policies primarily on the basis of visible evidence of success or failure. Thus, in 2008, the president's party was punished at the polls for the dismal state of the election-year economy. The successful challenger, Barack Obama, pushed policy significantly to the Left, as Democratic presidents typically do, provoking a predictable "thermostatic" shift to the Right in the public's policy mood. In 2010, slow economic recovery and public qualms about ideological overreach exacerbated the losses normally suffered by a president's party in midterm elections. In 2012, Obama was reelected—as incumbents almost always are when their party has held the White House for just four years—thanks in part to a modest but timely upturn in the income growth rate.