{"id":505562,"date":"2021-12-08T12:31:20","date_gmt":"2021-12-08T17:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=505562"},"modified":"2021-12-08T12:31:20","modified_gmt":"2021-12-08T17:31:20","slug":"why-dont-all-politicians-resort-to-antidemocratic-tactics-to-stay-in-power-505562","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/why-dont-all-politicians-resort-to-antidemocratic-tactics-to-stay-in-power-505562\/","title":{"rendered":"Why don\u2019t all politicians resort to antidemocratic tactics to stay in power?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 style=\"width: 85%; font-weight: bold; line-height: 135%; margin-bottom: 0.5em;\">A Rochester team introduces the idea of \u2018democracy by deterrence\u2019\u2014and shows why it might be weakening in the United States.<\/h2>\n<p>American democracy is in crisis\u2014a majority of scholars and the public agree. Allegations of unfair voting practices, such as voter suppression and gerrymandering, abuses of executive power, and mounting concerns about the legitimacy of elections have become regular occurrence in the United States, rather than isolated events.<\/p>\n<p>If we accept the premise that politicians and political parties generally want to stay in power, then why would they ever<em>\u00a0forgo<\/em>\u00a0dirty tricks to win elections? The answer may simply boil down to this: fear of revenge.<\/p>\n<p>Worries over retaliation by the opposition party can deter the incumbent party from using antidemocratic tactics to win, argue a team of political scientists\u2014the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/\">University of Rochester\u2019s<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sas.rochester.edu\/psc\/people\/view.php?fid=5\">Gretchen Helmke<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sas.rochester.edu\/psc\/people\/view.php?fid=1540\">Jack Paine<\/a>, and their former colleague <a href=\"https:\/\/politicalscience.unc.edu\/staff\/mary-kroeger\/\">Mary Kroeger<\/a>, now at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.unc.edu\/\">University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill<\/a>. But, they warn, under certain conditions this natural \u201cdemocratic deterrence\u201d may break down.<\/p>\n<p>In their recent paper, <a href=\"https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/ajps.12668\">\u201cDemocracy by Deterrence: Norms, Constitutions, and Electoral Tilting<\/a>,\u201d published in the <a href=\"https:\/\/ajps.org\/\"><em>American Journal of Political Science<\/em><\/a>, the team argues that a self-enforcing democracy requires political parties to refrain from exploiting legal opportunities to tilt electoral rules: informal norms of mutual restraint and formal constitutional rules are fundamentally intertwined into a \u201clogic of deterrence.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBy circumscribing how far each party can legally bend the rules, these legal bounds create reversion points if mutual forbearance or restraint\u2014if you will\u2014collapses,\u201d says Helmke, a professor of political science and one of the cofounders of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/brightlinewatch.org\/\">Bright Line Watch<\/a>, a non-profit watchdog organization of leading political scientists who monitor US democratic practices from a comparative perspective<em>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<h3><strong>What is \u2018democracy by deterrence\u2019?<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>The phrase conveys the idea of a dreaded \u201ctit-for-tat\u201d spiral. Republicans, for example, might forgo using antidemocratic tactics where they disenfranchise Democratic-leaning groups of voters, to avoid a scenario in which Democrats respond by disenfranchising some Republican-leaning voter groups. The team outlines three key factors for understanding the principle of democracy by deterrence in the US: scope, asymmetric\u00a0legal bounds, and partisan sorting.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em><strong>Scope.<\/strong><\/em> The US has well-established norms of adhering to judicial interpretations of a written constitution, which means a military coup or the refusal to hold scheduled elections is near inconceivable. Yet, despite hard legal bounds<em>\u00a0<\/em>in the Constitution, there\u2019s still considerable legal scope to tilt the electoral playing field. Unlike most developed democracies, the US has no national elections commission, and state politicians have considerable leeway to determine who can vote, and to draw boundaries for congressional districts in ways that give their own party an advantage, a practice known as gerrymandering.<\/li>\n<li><strong><em>Asymmetric <\/em><em>legal bounds<\/em>.<\/strong> Limits on legally permissible actions don\u2019t necessarily affect both parties equally\u2014one side might enjoy more scope to bend the rules than the other, which can cause democratic deterrence to fail because the party with the advantage is less fearful of punishment by the other side.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Partisan sorting.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>Implicitly, the US Constitution favors some groups over others. Despite various federal amendments that have expanded voting rights, the scope of voting rights has narrowed for some groups through practices such as excluding former felons, requiring photo identification to cast a ballot, and the purging of voter rolls. While all of these tactics are legally viable, they are empirically tied to race, the political scientists note. Black and Hispanic voters in particular, they argue, face greater hurdles than white voters when politicians impose restrictions along these dimensions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Says Kroeger: \u201cIf race is highly correlated with party identification or high partisan sorting\u2014the party that disproportionately receives more support from white voters enjoys greater legal scope to disenfranchise supporters of the opposing party. In the US right now, that\u2019s the Republican Party.\u201d Conversely, she adds, \u201cif race were not highly correlated with partisan support, the Republican Party would perceive fewer gains from using these tactics, which ultimately would make \u2018democracy by deterrence\u2019 more effective.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3><strong>How \u2018democracy by deterrence\u2019 breaks down<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>As part of their formal model of \u201cdemocracy by deterrence\u201d the team stipulates that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>if legal bounds are symmetric between parties, they deter electoral rule bending by making each party\u2019s threat to punish transgressions by the other likely.<\/li>\n<li>if legal bounds become sufficiently asymmetric, however, the foundations for restraint crumble. Asymmetries emerge when some groups (a) are more vulnerable than others to legally permissible electoral distortions and (b) groups that are more vulnerable vote overwhelmingly for one party over the other.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The Constitution, of course, was not written with parties in mind. But according to Helmke some features of the constitutional order give disproportionate weight to some citizens, which then translates into an advantage for parties: \u201cIf the rules make it easier to gerrymander urban districts as opposed to rural districts and Democratic voters tend to live in urban districts while Republicans tend to live in rural districts, then the constitutional order ends up giving the GOP an advantage when it comes to gerrymandering, even if both parties want to engage in the practice.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The political scientists focus specifically on gerrymandering and voting rights\/voter suppression in the post-Civil Rights era. The fact that seat allocation is not based proportionally on the percentage of votes that each party receives tends to favor the fewer rural voters (largely Republican) over the larger number of urban voters (largely Democratic), resulting in strong asymmetry. While voting districts must be equally sized, be contiguous (without gaps between members of the same district), and not be artificially dispersed, there is no requirement that the percentage of seats held by each party in a state must correspond to the percentage of votes that each party receives.<\/p>\n<p>The team notes that the lack of proportional representation makes it easier for Republican politicians to concentrate large numbers of Democratic voters into a small number of districts that are almost entirely Democratic. As with voter suppression, there is a failure of deterrence; Republicans can pursue this strategy with impunity, and Democrats are largely powerless to retaliate, they write.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cGerrymandering and vote suppression are two key areas of contemporary American electoral politics that really threaten our fundamental principles of democratic representation,\u201d says Paine, an associate professor of political science whose research focuses on authoritarian politics.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAnother troubling development,\u201d Paine adds, \u201cis that these asymmetries are now affecting another sacred democratic principle\u2014conceding electoral loss. Republicans increasingly seem inclined to use their advantage in statehouses to gain leverage over vote counting in the 2024 election.\u201d This practice can undermine the public\u2019s trust in fair elections\u2014a necessary hallmark of a stable democracy.<\/p>\n<h3><strong>What can be done to prevent antidemocratic rule bending?\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>Reducing the legal scope for antidemocratic tilting and fixing asymmetries in the US Constitution is difficult. According to the team, the hurdles for passing federal amendments are high, and the current Supreme Court majority has consistently chosen not to intervene on charges of voting rights or fair districting violations.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut we cannot begin to understand the maladies in contemporary US politics without understanding how deterrence can uphold democracy, and why deterrence is failing in many facets of American politics,\u201d warns Helmke.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3><strong>Read more<\/strong><\/h3>\n<div class=\"large-up-3\">\n<div class=\"column\" style=\"padding-left: 0px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/republican-and-democratic-voters-agree-on-need-for-generous-covid-19-relief-470462\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/fea-blw-covid-relief.jpg\" alt=\"illustration of red and blue strings frayed and pulled apart with one tied back together in a knot.\" \/><strong>Republican and Democratic voters agree on one thing\u2014the need for generous COVID-19 relief<\/strong><\/a><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: .9em;\">Bright Line Watch\u2019s February 2021 survey finds that voters support COVID-19\u00a0relief spending, but partisan divides remain over the election and impeachment.<\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"column\" style=\"padding-left: 0px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/democratic-indicators-plummet-amid-racial-justice-protests-and-pandemic-450682\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/2020_BLW_survey_GettyImages-1215364790-e1606852476424.jpg\" alt=\"illustration of Statue of Liberty wearing a surgical mask.\" \/><br \/>\n<strong>Watchdog report: US democratic indicators plummet amid racial justice protests and pandemic<\/strong><\/a><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: .9em;\">Bright Line Watch analysis (Sept. 2020) finds erosion \u201cacross the board\u201d on measures of democratic principles and how well the US is abiding by them.<\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"column\" style=\"padding-left: 0px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/partisanship-bright-line-watch-vote-democrat-republican-356912\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/fea-bright-line-watch-partisanship.jpg\" alt=\"photo of two voting booths side by side, one read and one blue\" \/><br \/>\n<strong>Would you vote for a Democrat who behaves like a Republican?<\/strong><\/a><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: .9em;\">In a recent experiment, a group of political scientists has found that when choosing a candidate, party affiliation outweighs a candidate\u2019s policy positions and their support for democratic norms for both Democrats and Republicans surveyed.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Rochester team of political scientists introduces the idea of \u2018democracy by deterrence\u2019\u2014and shows why it might be weakening in the United States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":942,"featured_media":505582,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[456],"tags":[21462,29492,18572,16072],"class_list":["post-505562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-culture","tag-department-of-political-science","tag-gretchen-helmke","tag-research-finding","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Why don\u2019t all politicians resort to antidemocratic tactics to stay in 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Gerrymandering is one of the tactics that Rochester political scientists have focused on in a new study that shows how \u2018democracy by deterrence\u2019 may be breaking down in the United States. 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