Thursday, September 3, 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm

Co-sponsored by the Labor Politics Related Group 

In-Person | Full Paper Panel 

Participants: 

• (Chair) Katie Rader, SUNY, University at Albany 

• (Discussant) Lesley Lavery, Macalester College 

• (Discussant) Michael T. Hartney, Hoover Fellow, Stanford University 

Session Description: 
Public education and collective action have long been considered foundational pillars for fostering a stable and engaged democratic citizenry. However, as the 2026 APSA theme suggests, the institutions that sustain democracy are currently “under threat” through the muzzling of movement organizers and the dismantling of institutions that hold political leaders accountable. In theory, educated citizens and labor unions may act as a bottom-up defense against such erosion, but they now face an even more hostile legal and political climate, raising questions about how organizations at the intersection of these two pillars are uniquely positioned to protect and reimagine democracy. Each of the papers in this panel addresses the intersection between education, labor, and democracy in distinct ways. From U.S. bureaucratic capacity to teacher organizing in the U.S. and Mexico, the papers in this panel use experimental, quasi-experimental, and qualitative evidence to highlight how public education workers and their organizations address the roots of disorder and division. 

Kaler, Arnzen, Stull, and Moffitt open the panel by analyzing the immediate aftermath of the executive order to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, tracing how the displacement of specialized workers reconfigures labor flows and weakens state capacity. The second paper, by Lyon, Shepardson, Finger, Bleiberg, and Noh, complements this by demonstrating that teacher strikes—often seen as a primary tool for labor influence—can paradoxically lead to decreased voter engagement in relevant local elections. Shifting the focus to strategies for resilience, Chambers-Ju and Trasberg use vignette experiments to identify the frames that help labor organizations build cross-class solidarity and avoid public backlash during disruptive protests. Finally, Hertel-Fernandez investigates how teachers’ unions can build (or rebuild) a communal social identity through year-round organizing programs designed to overcome partisan polarization and member apathy. 

By integrating perspectives on education governance, bureaucratic erosion, collective action, and political behavior, this panel underscores the critical role that education and labor play in the fabric of democracy. The panel incorporates settings at different levels of American federalism—from local school districts to the federal Department of Education—and draws connections that reach into Latin America. Together, the papers in this panel offer a globally relevant analysis of how workers and their organizations might (re)build and sustain our educational institutions and democracy. 

Papers: 

Disrupting Governance: Labor Reallocation after Dismantling the Department of Education 
Lindsey Kaler, Brown University; Cameron Arnzen, North Central College; Niamh Stull, Brown University; Susan L. Moffitt, Brown University 

On March 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order initiating the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), triggering a large-scale reduction in force (RIF) that eliminated more than half of the department’s workforce. These layoffs displaced thousands of workers with specialized expertise in civil rights enforcement, grantmaking, policy implementation, and program evaluation—raising urgent questions about the future of education governance and the education labor market. This paper examines how the dissolution of a federal education bureaucracy reshapes labor flows, bureaucratic capacity, and governance across the U.S. education ecosystem. We focus on two interrelated questions central to the intersection of education and labor politics: (1) what happens to bureaucratic capacity when a federal department is dismantled, and (2) how the redistribution of displaced federal workers reconfigures education policy implementation across federal, state, local, and private-sector organizations? To answer these questions, we leverage a novel dataset containing individual-level employment histories from 2008 to the present, which allows us to trace the career trajectories of the full universe of individuals who have reported employment at the U.S. Department of Education, state education departments, local education agencies, and other education-related organizations. Using descriptive analyses and event-study methods, we track changes in workforce composition, labor mobility, and measures of bureaucratic capacity across four layers of the education ecosystem: federal agencies, state education departments, large local school districts, and private education-related organizations (e.g., advocacy groups, think tanks, and consulting firms). Drawing on theories of bureaucratic labor markets and human capital, we examine whether displaced ED employees are absorbed into state agencies, potentially strengthening state-level governance, or whether expertise flows disproportionately toward private organizations or exits the education sector altogether, signaling a net loss of public capacity. By situating the dismantling of ED within broader debates about federal retrenchment, labor market reallocation, and the politicization of education policy, this paper contributes to political science research on labor, bureaucracy, federalism, and education governance. More broadly, it highlights how sweeping institutional changes redistribute skilled labor and reshape state capacity in unequal ways, with implications for educational inequality, democratic accountability, and the future of public education policymaking. 

How Do Teacher Strikes Affect School Board Elections? 
Melissa A. Lyon, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York; Adam Patrick Shepardson, SUNY, University at Albany; Leslie K. Finger, University of North Texas; Joshua Bleiberg; Hyesang Noh, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York 

Politics of education scholars consider teachers’ unions to be the most influential special interest in education policy (e.g., Moe, 2011), but more recently teachers’ collective bargaining strength has declined after the Janus v. AFSCME (2018) decision put all teachers in a Right to Work context. Subsequent large-scale teacher strikes in 2018 and 2019 brought new attention to different union strategies to influence politics that might become more common in this post-Janus era. Very little research addresses how collective action and labor unions influence mass politics, and relevant theory from recent research in this area and on protests more broadly suggests that strikes may mobilize or demobilize voters in elections. We use an original dataset of school board elections and teacher strikes in two U.S. states to examine whether strikes impact school board election turnout, and among which voter groups. Our school board election data leverage variation over time in voters’ actual voting histories across North Carolina (2013-2022) and Washington State (2013-2021). We process individual voter registration and vote history files to construct school district-level turnout estimates through a new geospatial method. Then, we employ a synthetic differences-in-differences (SDiD) approach (Arkhangelsky et al. 2021) that compares school districts who experienced a teacher strike to synthetic controls built from never-striking units. This strategy produces event study-style estimates of turnout effects each election cycle following a strike. We find that teacher strikes meaningfully decrease turnout in the corresponding, subsequent local school board elections. On average, we find that strikes cause voter turnout in subsequent school board elections in surrounding communities to decrease by 1-2 pp (percentage points). Effects are larger among voters aged 36-60 (who are arguably most likely to have children in school), Democrats, and Unaffiliated voters. Effects are also notably larger in elections off-cycle: depressing turnout by about 7.5 pp on average. Our research stands to make two important contributions. First, we demonstrate that teacher strikes demobilize voters in the subsequent school board election—with some voters experiencing a lasting demobilization effect. Second, we discuss how teacher strikes (perhaps unintentionally) lead to less engagement with traditional means of participating in politics. 

Fostering Solidarity: How Labor Organizations Can Engender Sympathy for Protesting Workers 
Christopher Chambers-Ju, University of Texas, Arlington; Mart Trasberg, Tecnológico de Monterrey 

Why do some labor protests generate broad public sympathy while others provoke resentment? As labor movements become increasingly segmented—between public and private sectors, unionized and informal workers—mobilizing cross-class solidarity has become more difficult, especially when protests disrupt daily life. This paper examines how the framing of labor grievances and protest tactics shapes public support for striking workers, labor unions, and collective action more broadly. We present a series of vignette experiments conducted in Mexico and Colombia, two countries characterized by strong public-sector unions, weaker private-sector unions, and large informal labor markets. Nationally representative online surveys (N ≈ 3,000 per country) randomly expose respondents to realistic protest scenarios that vary by worker sector (public, private, multinational, or informal), employer type, grievance framing (e.g., cost-of-living, labor rights violations), and levels of disruption (e.g., roadblocks, service interruptions). We measure multiple outcomes, including sympathy for protesters, support for unions, willingness to tolerate strike costs, and broader attitudes toward labor solidarity. These experiments will be fielded in February and March of 2026. Building on theories of framing effects and issue crystallization, we hypothesize that grievance-based frames increase support for labor action, while disruption-based frames reduce it—especially for public-sector and informal workers, who face more negative pre-existing stereotypes. We also expect private-sector and multinational-targeted strikes to generate greater sympathy due to perceptions of vulnerability and foreign exploitation. To complement the survey experiment, we will conduct focus groups in working-class neighborhoods in Mexico City and Bogotá to uncover the narratives and causal mechanisms underlying public reactions to labor protests. Together, these methods allow us to assess when labor mobilization fosters solidarity versus backlash, and how unions can communicate grievances in ways that broaden public support across segmented labor markets. 

Thursday, September 3, 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm

In-Person | Full Paper Panel 

Participants: 

• (Chair) Patrick W. Buhr, Vanderbilt University 

• (Discussant) Frances E. Lee, Princeton University 

• (Discussant) Laurel Harbridge-Yong, Northwestern University 

• (Discussant) Steven Rogers, Saint Louis University 

Session Description: 
Elections in the United States have become increasingly partisan over the past four decades, with legislators’ electoral standing increasingly tied to their party or their party’s presidential candidate. How has this development shaped the incentives of legislators while in office? This panel evaluates this question from a range of perspectives, assessing the role of electoral incentives in both the primary and general elections, how legislators signal partisanship or bipartisanship to their constituents, how theories of party power translate to state legislatures, and the changing role of the American president as a party leader. 

Papers: 

Presidential Leadership and Party Conflict in the U.S. Congress 
Patrick W. Buhr, Vanderbilt University 

Elections in the United States incentivize conflict between the president and opposition party. Within Congress, however, presidents are rarely able to advance a legislative agenda without at least some bipartisan support. How can contemporary presidents advance a legislative agenda when they require the support of those with strong incentives to see them fail? Relying on archival research and interviews with elected officials and their staff, I argue that, as elections become more partisan, presidents prioritizing an issue will increase support among copartisans but undermine support among the opposition party. I test the implications of this theory using a granular dataset of appropriations requests and outcomes paired to presidents’ public priorities. I find that, in eras of high partisanship, presidents prioritizing an issue is estimated to decrease their success when the opposition party controls the chamber. These findings suggest that public advocacy from contemporary presidents often backfires, mobilizing the opposition party against their agenda. 

Presidential Politics and Legislators’ Changing Electoral Incentives 
Joshua Baldwin; Jamie L. Carson, University of Georgia 

Classic work on congressional elections shows that members can be punished at the polls for hewing too closely to their party when district preferences diverge from the national party line (Carson et al. 2010). As elections have become increasingly nationalized, however, party loyalty is now largely understood by voters through the lens of the president and national party brands rather than through individual roll calls on discrete issues (Hopkins 2018; Carson, Sievert, and Williamson 2020; Carson et al. 2024). This paper revisits the logic of prior work and examines how the electoral consequences of party loyalty have changed in an era when presidential performance in a district strongly conditions down-ballot outcomes. We argue that the relationship between legislative loyalty and electoral fortunes is now contingent on both district-level presidential vote and broader levels of electoral nationalization. Using data on U.S. House incumbents from the late 1970s through the 2024 cycle, we model how presidential support scores interact with district presidential partisanship and time-varying measures of nationalization to shape incumbents’ general election vote shares and defeat probabilities. Our findings update and extend prior work by showing that, in an increasingly nationalized environment, the electorally “safe” form of party loyalty often means aligning with one’s co-partisan president when he is popular in the district—and strategically distancing when he is not. 

Supporting Losing Candidates and Its Implication for Party Selectorates 
Sarah Anderson, University of California, Santa Barbara; Dan Butler, Washington University in St. Louis; Laurel Harbridge-Yong, Northwestern University; Hans J.G. Hassell, Brigham Young University 

Presidents and presidential candidates play a critical role in shaping the contours of American politics through their efforts to persuade co-partisans (Barber and Pope 2019; Lenz 2013; Nicholson 2012) and to pressure legislators to support their agenda (Neustadt 1960; Kernell 2006). While research on presidential power has focused on persuasion, we argue presidents also influence party composition and co-partisan support by influencing who chooses to participate in subsequent nomination processes. As E.E. Schattschneider (1960) noted, a key determinant of political outcomes is not persuasion, via “a frontal attack by the opposition” (p. 66), but rather “the success that the contestants have in getting the audience involved in the fight” (p. 4). Presidential nomination politics incentivize intra-party divisions and regularly embody the underlying intra-party struggles for supremacy in negotiating the party coalition and its priorities (Cohen et al. 2016; Polsby 1983; see Blum 2020; Cowburn 2024 for similar dynamics in state parties and congressional primaries). When a voter’s preferred candidate does not emerge as the party’s nominee, that individual often faces a party whose priorities and direction may deviate from their preferences. Despite stable partisanship (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002; Green and Platzman 2024) and habit as a major determinant in the decision to vote (Green and Shachar 2000; Gerber, Green, and Shachar 2003), the outcome of the primary election can affect a voter’s perception of the party’s direction and their psychological attachment to the party, in turn affecting who chooses to participate in future intra-party contests. These dynamic decisions about primary election participation can reshape the distribution of preferences of the selectorate and can change future primary election outcomes. We test our argument that outcomes of presidential nomination contests shape future party composition and engagement using two distinct data sources, which help to overcome challenges with studying the impact of primary election outcomes on donors and voters. First, we track campaign donors over time to examine whether the success or failure of the candidate to whom they gave money in the presidential primary affects their likelihood of donating to any candidate in the party’s primary elections two, six, and 10 years later (i.e., during subsequent midterm elections). In other words, are donors to the losing candidates turned off from donating again in the party’s primary? The data also allows us to control for donors’ donation behaviors in the midterm election two years prior to the presidential primary, ensuring that our results are not simply the result of infrequent donors also being more likely to donate to losing primary candidates. Our results show that in 12 of the 14 competitive presidential primary elections between 1984 and 2020, the donors to the losing candidates were less likely to donate in the party’s midterm primary contests two years later (12 of 13 for six years later and 11 of 11 for 10 years later). This reduced likelihood of donating in the subsequent primary after supporting a losing candidate holds for both parties and whether the party’s nominee won or lost in the general election. Second, we leverage data from the from the 2016-2020 American National Election Study (ANES) panel to examine whether 2016 Democratic and Republican primary voters participated again in the 2020 primary. We find that individuals who are less supportive of the winning candidate, whether measured by voting for a losing candidate or by expressing a negative thermometer rating of the winning candidate, are less likely to continue participating in party nomination politics in 2020. Robustness checks and a placebo test examining participation in local politics give us further confidence that our core findings reflect a shift in behavior following a voter being disappointed in who wins the primary. Our findings indicate that the winning presidential nominee shapes the direction of the party by influencing who participates in intra-party contests going forward. As primary voters sort out of the primary selectorate when they do not align with the presidential candidate, the president’s supporters are disproportionately represented in future primary contests. The exit of these disappointed dropouts can change the preferences of the primary electorate to more closely reflect presidential priorities. Such changes can incentivize members of Congress to support the president’s agenda or risk losing in their next primary when facing a partisan electorate that is more likely to support the president’s policy positions. Our work provides clear evidence that persuasion is not the only mechanism by which presidential politics shapes party dynamics and reverberates through the broader political system. 

Performative Bipartisanship 
Mackenzie Ridge Dobson, University of Virginia; Jacob Michael Lollis, University of Cincinnati 

Legislative success often requires bipartisan cooperation. Accordingly, a substantial body of literature examines whether—and under what conditions—bipartisanship occurs. Scholars find that even in an era of strong in-party unity and out-party distinction (Lee 2016), cross-party collaboration persists (Curry & Lee 2020). However, research on bipartisan cosponsorship has largely treated observed instances of cross-party cooperation in Congress as equally genuine. In contrast, we argue that a meaningful share of bipartisanship is performative. Legislators frequently cosponsor out-party bills long after introduction, when the political and procedural costs of bipartisan engagement are lower. By joining at this stage, non-original cosponsors avoid the more demanding work of bill drafting, negotiation, and early coalition formation with an out-party sponsor. To test this claim, we compile more than 2.5 million (co)sponsorship decisions on House and Senate bills from the 98th–118th Congresses, distinguishing original from non-original cosponsors. Our primary measure is the proportion of a legislator’s out-party cosponsorships that are non-original, calculated as post-introduction out-party cosponsorships divided by total out-party cosponsorships. We also examine complementary measures capturing (1) the average time lag between bill introduction and a legislator’s out-party cosponsorship and (2) the share of a legislator’s out-party cosponsorships on symbolic legislation. Preliminary evidence suggests that many legislators rely heavily on post-introduction out-party cosponsorship. We then examine which legislators are most likely to engage in performative bipartisanship and the consequences of such behavior. Overall, our findings underscore the need to distinguish between two theoretically distinct dimensions of bipartisanship—early, higher-cost cross-party collaboration and later, lower-cost signaling—when assessing congressional bipartisanship. 

Procedural Rights and Minority Party Influence in American Legislatures 
Mackenzie Ridge Dobson, University of Virginia; Gessica de Freitas, University of Notre Dame; James M. Curry, University of Notre Dame 

Do formal procedural rights granted to minority parties and their members translate into influence in American legislatures? If so, which rules and under what conditions? Political scientists have produced important work on the consequences of legislative rules. Much of this work centers on majority-party advantages – committee gatekeeping powers, special rules, discharge procedures, and motions to recommit or reconsider – while minority-oriented rights are largely understudied. The exceptions are studies of the filibuster, which is generally viewed as a powerful tool of the minority. Beyond that, we lack a systematic account of when and how minority-party procedural rights translate into influence. Drawing on Binder’s (1997) definition of minority rights, we produce a first-of-its-kind dataset of every state legislature’s minority rights during the 21st century. We then test whether legislatures that allocate more rights enable minorities to exercise more power. We test the effects of individual rights on related process outcomes and the cumulative effect of these rights on legislative outputs. Overall, this paper provides a comprehensive baseline for the scope and consequences of minority-party rights in American state legislatures and informs theories of party power and institutional design.

Thursday, September 3, 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm

Co-sponsored by Division 05: Political Psychology 

In-Person | Created Panel 

Participants: 

• (Chair) Christopher F. Gelpi, The Ohio State University 

• (Discussant) Aidan Milliff, Ohio State University 

Session Description: 
Papers exploring different psychological antecedents to political violence, mostly in the American politics context. 

Papers: 

Diverging Effects of Collective Threat on Democratic Attitudes 
Jiwon Kim, Independent Researcher; Heesun Yoo, Academia Sinica 

Democratic backsliding rarely unfolds uniformly: public support for core democratic values diverges, with civil rights eroding quickly while electoral procedures remain comparatively robust. This phenomenon—democratic decoupling—is especially visible in contexts where governments invoke crime mitigation and security rhetoric to justify illiberal measures. Although security‐threat narratives are known to encourage citizens to trade civil liberties for order, the cognitive mechanism behind these asymmetric shifts in democratic attitudes remains unclear. We argue that moralized motivated reasoning drives this pattern. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we propose that collective security threats heighten binding moral concerns (loyalty, authority, sanctity) without similarly elevating individualizing ones (harm, fairness). Democratic traits aligned with binding foundations—such as strong leadership and institutional unity—thus become more resilient, whereas rights-based constraints weaken. Using a U.S. survey experiment, we show that binding moral foundations mediate democratic attitudes under threat: support for free and fair elections remains stable, while support for civil rights and executive constraints declines. We further demonstrate that framing democratic traits in binding moral terms can attenuate or even reverse the erosive effects of crime narratives, restoring democratic resilience under threat. 

Emotion Differentiation and Support for Political Violence 
Janel Jett, University of Oregon; Emily K. Gade, University of Oregon 

Consolidated democracies globally, including the United States, are experiencing institutional erosion, declining commitment to democratic norms, and a rising tolerance for political violence, raising critical questions about democratic resilience. Why do some citizens respond to political threat and grievance by endorsing political violence, while others are able to channel civil discontent into nonviolent (and historically/empirically more successful) modalities of resistance and political engagement? We suggest emotions are central to this divergence. Emotions can motivate the civic engagement necessary for a healthy democracy, yet they can also intensify hostility, polarization, and support for political violence.   We suggest that individual differences in emotion differentiation (here, the ability to recognize and interpret one’s emotional experience with precision) helps explain when negative political emotions become destructive rather than constructive. Building on existing research linking political emotions to support for political action and political violence, we introduce emotional differentiation as a critical yet underexplored psychological mechanism shaping how citizens process and respond to political threat.   We propose a series of surveys to examine how political emotions and emotion differentiation jointly shape political attitudes and behavioral intentions. Individuals high in emotion differentiation can distinguish between discrete negative emotions (e.g., anger, resentment, guilt), allowing emotional cues to guide more adaptive responses. In contrast, individuals with low differentiation may experience undifferentiated distress, which may impair emotion regulation and increase susceptibility to radical political attitudes and behaviors.   Based on this framework, we advance two core expectations: First, high levels of negative political emotion combined with low emotion differentiation will be associated with greater support for political violence and radical political action. Second, negative political emotion paired with high emotion differentiation will be associated with greater engagement in conventional democratic behaviors, including voting and civic participation, but also engaging in non-violent forms of political resistance (e.g., protest). Together, these findings suggest that democratic vulnerability and resilience depend not only on the intensity of citizens’ political emotions, but on how those emotions are collectively processed and regulated at scale. Understanding how and whether widespread grievances escalate into social polarization and political violence or are more constructively channeled into democratic engagement and nonviolent resistance modalities is a central question of this political moment. 

From Democratic Backsliding to Political Violence: Evidence from Israel 
Tal Shaanan, University of Haifa; Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler, Reichman University (IDC Herzliya); Daphna Canetti, University of Haifa; Julia Elad-Strenger, Ben-Gurion University 

This study examines whether democratic backsliding increases public legitimization of, versus willingness to engage in—political violence against public officials. We draw on two nationally representative surveys (N = 1,200 each) conducted at pivotal democratic junctures: one during relative institutional stability and another amid a severe constitutional crisis. This design captures real-time shifts in political attitudes during an actual episode of democratic decline. Findings show that while legitimization of violence against public officials rose significantly during backsliding, this attitudinal shift did not translate into greater willingness to commit violent acts. Instead, democratic erosion reshaped patterns of non-violent political engagement: opposition supporters and minority groups became more politically mobilized, while government supporters grew less engaged. This study offers two contributions. First, it shows that democratic backsliding expands the moral boundaries of legitimized political violence without directly increasing violent behavioral intentions. Second, it distinguishes between the acceptance of political violence and the willingness to act, highlighting a critical gap between normative support and behavioral escalation. These findings challenge conventional assumptions about the consequences of democratic backsliding, suggesting that it primarily reshapes moral landscapes rather than precipitating violent behavior, with asymmetrical effects across political and ethnic groups. Policy and research-related implications are discussed. 

Political Incivility, Moral Disengagement, and Support for Political Violence 
Bryan Gervais, University of Texas at San Antonio; Irwin L. Morris, North Carolina State University 

Moral disengagement is a psychological process by which individuals cognitively restructure—i.e., rationalize—harmful behavior toward others. Its components include the dehumanization of victims and victim blaming (Bandura 1999). Moral disengagement has been identified as a steppingstone toward violent attitudes because it provides people with the moral flexibility to support violence while maintaining a positive self-image (Kalmoe and Mason 2022, 78–81). As such, the antecedents of moral disengagement have increasingly become a subject of inquiry. One potential explanation for rising moral disengagement—and thus greater support for political violence—is inflammatory political discourse (Finkel et al. 2020, 534). While some work links uncivil discourse to support for violence (Muddiman et al. 2021), evidence regarding in-group elite messaging is mixed. Kalmoe and Mason (2022), for example, find little evidence that inflammatory messages attributed to known in-group elites increase support for political violence; in fact, such messages reduce moral disengagement (141–142). However, uncivil elite rhetoric may bolster moral disengagement not when it comes from the in-group, but when it comes from the out-group. Tolerance for aggression toward the out-group increases when the in-group feels targeted or threatened: satisfaction with in-group aggression rises when in-group retaliation appears justified (Maitner et al. 2007). Individuals angered by perceived insults to their in-group often take satisfaction in retaliatory actions taken by in-group members (Maitner et al. 2006)—a tactic often referred to as “counterpunching.” Moreover, people prefer dominant, aggressive leaders when they perceive threats to group status or intergroup conflict, and these preferences are driven by a desire to overpower out-groups rather than to seek protection (Laustsen and Bang Petersen 2017). There is also evidence that group-status threat increases receptivity to co-partisan incivility in the abstract (Miller and Conover 2015). We present findings from two survey experiments that examine the relationship between exposure to uncivil elite rhetoric, moral disengagement, and support for political violence against partisan out-groups. Results from the first study indicate that moral disengagement positively predicts support for political violence, even after accounting for other known predictors. Consistent with expectations, we find that out-group uncivil elite rhetoric—messaging that targets the partisan in-group by an out-group elite—increases moral disengagement, whereas in-group incivility does not. Our second study, to be fielded in early 2026, will address several limitations of the first. 

What Counts as (In)civility? Civility Norms Inside and Outside of Politics 
Eric Groenendyk, Stony Brook University; Srivardhan Jangili; William Brown, Stony Brook University 

Are shouting, slurs, and aggressive behavior the new norm in American politics, or does civility remain the expectation in political interactions? To answer this question, we distinguish personal beliefs and behavior from social norms. This allows us to evaluate individual acts and beliefs against a shared—and objectively measured—social standard. Results from an original national survey with an embedded priming experiment (N = 1,517) suggest norms of civility remain quite strong. While civility norms appear stronger in the workplace than in politics, clear and consistent norms show up in both domains across all 10 of the behaviors we examined. Moreover, simply priming individuals to think about these norms led study participants to adopt personal beliefs consistent with a higher standard of political civility. These results speak to the danger of inferring erosion of broad social norms from trends in behavior—which may instead be driven by a small subset of the population. In a follow-up study, we ask respondents, some of whom have been primed to consider norms of civility, to imagine either themselves, a co-partisan, or an out-partisan in a politically tense scenario and measure their willingness to engage in uncivil behaviors towards a member of the other party. We expect that respondents will be unwilling to engage in incivility and expect that co-partisans are unwilling to engage in incivility, but that they will expect out-partisans to be willing to engage in incivility. We further expect that norm priming will cause respondents to shift evaluations of their own and co-partisan behavior in the direction of the norm, but not evaluations of out-partisans. 

Thursday, September 3, 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm

Co-sponsored by Division 41: Politics, Literature, and Film 

Virtual | Created Panel 

Participants: 

• (Chair) Adriana Alfaro, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico 

• (Discussant) Adriana Alfaro, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico 

Session Description: 
The papers in this panel explore different ways in which narrative allows us to illuminate the nature of democratic decline and reconstruction. They prompt us to reflect on the challenges for action and survival in the midst of great political tension; on the requirements for democratic representation in the face of polarization; and on the avenues for reinvention in the face of institutional collapse. The panel invite us to travel both in time and space. It takes us to the past to reassess the crises of our present through a different lens. It takes us to the future to reimagine our present with the benefit of speculative hindsight. It takes us to Japan, China, Nepal, Indonesia, the United States, Latin America and more, to get a sense of the multiplicity of challenges and opportunities as we try to understand how we got here and how to rebulid the paths to move forward. 

1. Anneliese Crumley, “When Manga and Marxism Collide: A Marxist Analysis of One Piece” This project explores the intersection of popular culture and political consciousness by analyzing the Japanese manga and anime One Piece as a lens for understanding authoritarian structures, resistance, and the protection of democratic values. While often read as a fantastical story about pirates, One Piece presents a detailed social universe in which hierarchical states, exploitative rulers, and corrupt institutions dominate, providing a rich cultural framework for examining threats to democracy. Through a Marxist analysis, the series reveals dynamics of alienation, commodity fetishism, and systemic exploitation, illustrating how structural oppression functions to reproduce inequalities and maintain the power of ruling elites. 

2. Andreea Mosila, “Epistemic Fragility and Democratic Survival: Lessons from the Three-Body Trilogy” The purpose of this paper is to analyze how epistemic insecurity undermines democratic resilience and to explore alternative frameworks for rebuilding trust in knowledge systems. Using Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy as a speculative mirror, the study draws parallels between the trilogy’s sophon-based surveillance regime and real-world deterrence environments shaped by artificial intelligence, cyber operations, and strategic ambiguity. The research uses narrative analysis and comparative security theory to interpret speculative fiction as political thought. 

3. Tessa Haining, “Out of Many: Theories of Democratic Representation in the ‘Great American Novel’” The paper reads two mid-nineteenth-century American novels – Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and the lesser-known Who Would Have Thought It? by Mexican-American writer María Ruiz de Burton (1872) – for the pluralistic narratives they bring to bear on democratic representation in a rapidly expanding American polity. Drawing on Hanna Pitkin’s normative theories of representation, as well as on instrumental scenes from each novel, it argues that these authors experiment with conventions of literary representation to decouple the symbolic and substantive forms of political representation colocated in the American democratic institutions to which they refer. In exposing through narrative the limits of political institutions and the democratic values that ground them, literature simultaneously builds through its formal considerations a popular theory of representation in response. 

4. Philippe Blanchard, “Reinventing Democracy in a Postapocalyptic World.” This paper intends to show that postapocalyptic fiction’s ‘tabula rasa’, by opening up a space for radical political imaginations, provides insights into how much we still want a democracy and what kind of democracy we want. Using a robust and diverse sample of contemporary postapocalyptic novels, the paper investigates how responsibility for the past catastrophe is attributed to past democratic settings, or lack thereof; how much room postapocalyptic reinventions make for democratic procedures, rules and norms; and, how everyday, smaller-scale characters, situations and actions adopt (or reject) a bottom-up democratic ethos, such as assembly deliberation and vote, power-sharing, respect of minorities or fair justice. 

Papers: 

Epistemic Fragility and Democratic Survival: Lessons from the Three-Body Trilogy 
Andreea I. Mosila, American Public University 

Democracy depends on a shared foundation of truth, transparency, and trust in the systems that produce and verify knowledge. Yet these foundations are increasingly unstable in a world saturated by surveillance technologies, algorithmic manipulation, and disinformation. The result is institutional fragility and a deeper epistemic crisis, a condition in which citizens and states can no longer distinguish credible knowledge from strategic illusion. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how epistemic insecurity undermines democratic resilience and to explore alternative frameworks for rebuilding trust in knowledge systems. Using Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy as a speculative mirror, the study draws parallels between the trilogy’s sophon-based surveillance regime and real-world deterrence environments shaped by artificial intelligence, cyber operations, and strategic ambiguity. The research uses narrative analysis and comparative security theory to interpret speculative fiction as political thought. It integrates concepts from deterrence theory, surveillance studies, and epistemic justice to construct an analytical model of epistemic deterrence, the deliberate use of uncertainty to disable civic reasoning and democratic accountability. The results suggest that the same logic of deterrence that once stabilized military competition now corrodes epistemic trust, transforming information itself into a weapon. Protecting democracy in the twenty-first century requires more than institutional reform. It demands an ethics of transparency and reciprocal knowledge exchange. Reimagining deterrence through the lens of epistemic justice offers a framework for understanding and countering the invisible threats that destabilize democratic societies. 

Out of Many: Theories of Democratic Representation in the “Great American Novel” 
Tessa Haining, Stanford University 

Literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, theorist of discourse and democracy, suggested that the novel contains a theory of itself: the voices of its characters, through their formal system of representation, collectively determine for themselves the norms underlying their public space. If we take the nineteenth-century American novel to be a conceptually political genre, centered around democracy, its norms, and their institutions, then we can say that these American novels contain political theories that should be understood as such. In this paper, I read two mid-nineteenth-century American novels – Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and the lesser-known Who Would Have Thought It? by Mexican-American writer María Ruiz de Burton (1872) – for the pluralistic narratives they bring to bear on democratic representation in a rapidly expanding American polity. Drawing on Hanna Pitkin’s normative theories of representation, as well as on instrumental scenes from each novel, I argue that these authors experiment with conventions of literary representation to decouple the symbolic and substantive forms of political representation colocated in the American democratic institutions to which they refer. Melville’s Moby-Dick, replete with political metaphor for the American “ship of state,” opposes within its authority figures Hobbesian and Rousseauist grounds for political legitimacy, troubling the symbolic status of the “many” and the “one.” Ruiz de Burton, writing from the perspective of inclusion within the polity, juxtaposes both agrarian and market republicanism with the right to self-determination for her home Californio community, fracturing Melville’s model by introducing territorial bounds. Taken together these works posit the relationship between literature and democracy as at once a de-constructive and a re-constructive, or institution-building, one. In exposing through the particular of narrative the limits of political institutions and the democratic values that ground them, literature simultaneously builds through its formal considerations a popular theory of representation in response. 

Reinventing Democracy in a Postapocalyptic World 
Philippe Blanchard, University of Warwick 

This paper intends to show that postapocalyptic fiction’s ‘tabula rasa’, by opening up a space for radical political imaginations, provides insights into how much we still want a democracy and what kind of democracy we want. Whether based on fears of climate change, nuclear war, a pandemic or AI divergence, stories of the end of the world are disturbing, disrupting and total. They tell about life and death, resilience and survival. In particular, postapocalyptic fiction (‘PAF’ hereafter), a fairly distinct genre, explores the dizzying consequences of the demographic, infrastructural, institutional and political vacuum that follows a global destructive event. It describes how survivors handle deprivation, state withdrawal and disorder, then progressively move on to rebuild a world, including a political world—or possibly give up doing so. The radicality of PAF scenarios contrasts with the incrementalism of “transitions” in policies or regimes. It invites us to fully rethink politics instead of amending existing structures and practices step by step. This is akin to the French revolutionaries’ claim that a complete breakup with the Ancien Régime was needed to build a democratic alternative, instead of minor steps that would never allow real change (Gauchet 2007-2017). In other words, the apocalyptic shock simulates an extreme version of our current staggering in front of democracy’s wavering. The former can help make sense of our current situation. Scholars have proposed various competing interpretations of PAF: a death drive (Hefferman 2015) versus the rediscovery of our natural anchoring (Payne 2020); nostalgia of a colonial, racial or patriarchal order (Horvat 2021) versus reckoning of the declining Western hegemon (Bellamy 2014); distraction from real current disasters (Catlin 2021) versus catharsis and preparation to the future (Horn 2018); or again, a reenactment of past national glory and wealth (Bellamy 2014) versus a decentred view from the eyes of marginals and the exploited (Manjikian 2008). Aspects of these approaches can somehow guide the analysis of our current democratic struggles, but how PAF contributes to understand threats to democracy, its weaknesses and resilience remains to be examined in detail. I use a robust sample of contemporary PAF works that is diverse in terms of geographic and cultural contexts of creation (South/North, US/non-US), artistic genres (realist, historical, science/technology-fiction, alien, fantastic, feminist, etc.), audiences and economic models (lettered/amateurs, specialised/commercial) and ideological orientations (conservative/progressist, religious/not religious). I investigate how responsibility for the past catastrophe is attributed to past democratic settings, or lack thereof; how much room postapocalyptic reinventions make for democratic procedures, rules and norms; and, how everyday, smaller-scale characters, situations and actions adopt (or reject) a bottom-up democratic ethos, such as assembly deliberation and vote, power-sharing, respect of minorities or fair justice. I hypothesise that many PAF works express in the first place the ironic, desperate or angry exhaustion in the face of consumerism, individualism, technocracy, neoliberalism, or authoritarianism. Yet I anticipate that PAF works also tackle our democratic uncertainties and conundrums, sometimes implicitly and discreetly, and that they promote (or reject) a variety of conceptions of democracy, which confirms that fiction can contribute to political-theoretical imagination. BELLAMY Brent. 2014. Residues of Now. The Cultures and Politics of Contemporary U.S. Post-Apocalyptic Novels. University of Alberta CATLIN Jonathon. 2021. “Catastrophe Now”. History and Theory 60 (3): 573-584 GAUCHET Marcel. 2007-2017. L’Avènement de la démocratie. Paris: Gallimard HEFFERMAN Teresa. 2015. “The Post-Apocalyptic Imaginary: Science, Fiction, and the Death Drive”. English Studies in Africa, 58:2, 66-79 HORN Eva. 2018. The future as Catastrophe: imagining disaster in the Modern age. New York: Columbia University Press HORVAT Srecko. 2021. After the Apocalypse. Polity Press MANJIKIAN Mary. 2008. Apocalypse and Post-Politics. The Romance of the End. Lexington PAYNE Mark. 2020. Flowers of Time. On postapocalyptic fiction. Princeton University Press 

When Manga and Marxism Collide: A Marxist Analysis of One Piece 
Anneliese Crumley, Indiana University 

This project explores the intersection of popular culture and political consciousness by analyzing the Japanese manga and anime One Piece as a lens for understanding authoritarian structures, resistance, and the protection of democratic values. While often read as a fantastical story about pirates, One Piece presents a detailed social universe in which hierarchical states, exploitative rulers, and corrupt institutions dominate, providing a rich cultural framework for examining threats to democracy. Through a Marxist analysis, the series reveals dynamics of alienation, commodity fetishism, and systemic exploitation, illustrating how structural oppression functions to reproduce inequalities and maintain the power of ruling elites. Simultaneously, a postmodern lens highlights how cultural artifacts may appear revolutionary while remaining embedded within capitalist and hierarchical systems. The narrative structure of One Piece, wherein individual heroism consistently resolves systemic injustices, risks producing audience complacency; yet, paradoxically, the story has inspired real-world political engagement. Across multiple countries, including Nepal, the United States, and Indonesia, protestors have carried the Strawhat Jolly Roger as a symbol of resistance against corruption, censorship, and authoritarian power, demonstrating the capacity of popular culture to mobilize collective action and civic participation. This analysis situates One Piece as both a critique of hierarchical power and a catalyst for democratic engagement, illustrating how cultural narratives can illuminate authoritarian threats, inspire resistance, and provide imaginative frameworks for reimagining democratic participation. By linking fictional depictions of oppression to tangible acts of political mobilization, this study contributes to understanding how media can protect and rebuild democratic norms and practices under contemporary threats. 

Friday, September 4, 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm

In-Person | Author Meets Critics 

Participants: 

• (Chair) Daniel W. Drezner, Tufts University 

• (Presenter) Seth E. Masket, University of Denver 

• (Presenter) Julia Rezazadeh Azari, Marquette University 

• (Presenter) Katherine Krimmel, Barnard College, Columbia University 

• (Presenter) Jasmine Smith, George Washington University 

• (Presenter) Matt Grossmann, Michigan State University 

Session Description: 
Seth Masket’s forthcoming book The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is a real-time investigation of the Republican grassroots during the 2020-24 presidential nomination cycle, using a range of interviews, surveys, and measures of voting behavior. The book argues that, despite much reporting, many local party leaders, even those who were great fans of Donald Trump’s first term in office, were uncomfortable with the idea of nominating him in 2024. They were concerned about his ability to win while there were so many qualified people available to replace him and advance his agenda. Yet these leaders found themselves unable to lead their party in a different direction; a populist conservative Republican electorate had long since made up its mind in Trump’s favor, and party insiders could neither persuade them nor organize around them. The book also spends some time explaining just how the Republican Party got to this point over the past three decades. This panel invites several public-facing scholars to discuss this book and help understand this critical moment in American party politics.  

Friday, September 4, 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm

In-Person | Roundtable 

Participants: 

• (Chair) Natasha Behl, Arizona State University 

• (Presenter) Dipali Anumol, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy 

• (Presenter) Samuel Ritholtz, University of Oxford 

• (Presenter) Jamie J. Hagen, University of Manchester 

• (Presenter) Elisabeth Jean Wood, Yale University 

• (Presenter) Milli Lake, London School of Economics 

• (Presenter) Kate Cronin-Furman, University College London 

Session Description: 
Political Science, for the most part, relies on positivist epistemologies and quantitative methods with a heavy focus on theory-testing. This reliance limits the discipline’s understanding of the lived realities of violence, conflict and politics. By highlighting fieldwork findings and researchers’ embodied experiences, this panel will discuss how feminist field research methods can bring to light dimensions of violence that do not typically receive attention in mainstream political science. In the current moment of rising authoritarianism and feminist backlash, feminist methods help to foreground the fundamentally political nature of violence and resistance. These methods move beyond traditional Political Science to center the experiences of both the researched and the researcher as legitimate agents in the knowledge-production process. Most importantly, these methods attend to normative considerations which are increasingly vital to the broader public relevance of political science, especially amidst the multiple threats to democracy in our present moment. This political moment feels urgent as feminist theorizing, the very tool needed to understand our present moment and imagine an alternative future, is under attack. Feminist scholars are in a position to offer a critical analysis of the current political moment and imagine futures beyond it. 

Friday, September 4, 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm

In-Person | Full Paper Panel 

Participants: 

• (Chair) Dara Z. Strolovitch, Yale Univerisity 

• (Discussant) Cathy J. Cohen, University of Chicago 

Session Description: 
Race structures the U.S. political system. Racial formations shape lawmaking, policy implementation, and institutional configurations. To the extent that social movements are players in the game of democracy, they move within a lopsided board structured by a myriad of inequalities. Indeed, race-class subjugated communities writ large are often exposed not to the U.S. vision of Marshallian, liberal citizenship, but rather to a “second-face” characterized by institutions meant to police, surveil, and punish them. How do social movements navigate this panorama to create political change? What obstacles do they face? And how do our theories of both racial politics and social movements change when we center collective action led by non-whites? This panel seeks to map out an emerging research panorama through the research of four junior scholars working at the intersection of carceral politics, REP (race and ethnic politics), and social movements. 

Papers: 

‘No Estan Solos’: U.S. Immigrant Organizing across Detention Walls 
Ramon Garibaldo Valdez, University of Chicago 

Laying at the intersection of mass incarceration and homeland security, immigrant detention is one of the most punitive, illiberal manifestations of U.S. immigration policy. At the same time, it has emerged as an unlikely site of political contestation from immigrant justice advocates and, most astoundingly, from detained migrants themselves. How have such seemingly powerless populations, including undocumented and incarcerated migrants, managed to organize against a fundamentally authoritarian institution existing within U.S. democracy? This paper analyzes the case of La Resistencia, an organization in Washington state dedicated to the permanent closing of Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. The paper demonstrates that the organization’s success has been achieved thanks to the political work of women whose loved ones have spent time of detention, and who by connecting the inside of the institution with outside resources, have reconstituted themselves into a cadre of organic leadership. Against social movement theories emphasizing large-scale threats and opportunities, the paper demonstrates that the organization has achieved success by confronting the everyday, or quotidian, violence of immigrant detention and its collateral effects. Weathering a myriad obstacles, from the attempted repression of the organization’s founder to brutal crackdowns from private prison companies, La Resistencia’s story is a tale with important lessons to yield about the political knowledge of race-class subjugated communities and the potential to create carceral justice campaigns that advocate in solidarity with imprisoned individuals, rather than on their behalf. 

Love and Protect: Mass Defense Strategies of the NARP 
Jordie Davies, University of California, Irvine; Samantha Canty, University of California, Irvine 

Black people in the United States have persistently experienced overt and covert forms of political repression (Davis 1971; Moore 1981; Davenport 2005; Davenport 2009). In response, Black activists have created political traditions to mobilize and defend their communities. Examples include writing and organizing against lynching, direct action activism for the Black vote in the civil rights movement, and pushing back against targeted campaigns of state repression during the Black Power Movement. Each era of Black organizing works in opposition to some form of state repression. But the Black Power era in particular marked a radical turn in both Black and leftist political organizing, and in response, the federal government created targeted campaigns to repress, incarcerate, and murder Black radicals (Newton 1980; Moore 1981; Payne 2007; Bloom and Martin 2013). This era also contained a rightward national political shift as a backlash to the mass mobilizations and urban uprisings of the 1960s. Black activists, people of color, and leftists of all backgrounds needed to protect themselves from violence and imprisonment. Though the attack on and incarceration of Black and leftist radicals in the US is well documented, rarely is this period understood through a human rights lens (Day and Whitehorn 2001). In this article, we aim to consider how leftist and Black activists at the grassroots resisted human rights abuses through collective action and multi-pronged strategic responses. Specifically, we consider the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression’s (NAARPR) mass defense strategy as a mode of political mobilization and collective action to free political prisoners in the US. In this paper we explore this strategy through legal, press, and protest strategies. We begin this essay with a review of the tradition of mass defense in Black and left movements. “Defense” organizations and, especially, defense committees were a core part of Black and left movements of the 1960s and 70s, in response to increased murder and incarceration of revolutionary thinkers and activists (Dawson 2013; Martin 1985). Furthermore, at this time, the US government purposefully linked advocacy against anti-Black police repression and for Black Liberation with empathy for the Communist Party (Burden-Stelly 2023). In this way, the government aimed to paint advocates for Black liberation as un-American and dangerous. We see these movements as building up and contributing to a tradition of mass defense over time, particularly the history of resistance in the courts, in public writing, and in collective action. We then discuss NAARPR’s mass defense strategy, which we argue comprises three sites of mobilization, including 1) legal support 2) the press and 3) protest. 

‘Stop Asian Hate’ and the Paradox of Racial Justice 
Sonya Chen, Barnard College, Columbia University 

The Stop Asian Hate movement emerged as a historic mobilization in response to anti-Asian hate and violence during the COVID-19 era. At the same time, the movement has been marked by deep internal tensions around whether carceral responses to anti-Asian violence, such as increased policing and stronger hate crimes prosecution, are effective or desirable. These questions have been especially fraught as the Stop Asian Hate movement comes on the heels of the Black Lives Matter movement and its critiques of policing, and as Asian Americans have long wrestled with what their relationship to other communities of color is. In this paper, I focus on Asian American proponents of policing and hate crimes prosecution and ask: how have they constructed Asian American interests vis-à-vis the carceral state? What are the political and ethical consequences of Asian Americans seeking “racial justice” from the carceral state? This project draws upon interviews with Asian American activists in San Francisco CA, Oakland CA, Philadelphia PA, and Washington DC; organizational materials; and newspaper articles. I trace how, for a significant part of the movement, the focus shifted from responding to Trump and other white Republican’s xenophobic rhetoric to a politics of asserting Asian American interests in opposition to “progressive” criminal legal reform. Debates over policing were a site through which Asian Americans were negotiating and articulating their place in the racial politics. While Asian Americans are frequently understudied in the literature on the U.S. carceral state, I situate the carceral state as an important site of Asian American racialization and mobilization. 

Racial Justice, Institutional Pessimism, and the Limits of Policy Engagement 
Micah English, Yale University 

This paper examines how community organizers working for racial justice navigate political engagement under conditions of racialized governance. Drawing on original research from my dissertation, I analyze how organizers rooted in Black and other non-white communities assess the promise and perils of engaging institutions that simultaneously claim to advance equity while sustaining surveillance, punishment, and racial hierarchy (Alexander 2010; Murakawa 2014). Rather than assuming that policy access or institutional recognition are inherently desirable, the paper centers how racial justice organizers define power, success, and political responsibility on their own terms. Based on interviews and fieldwork with grassroots racial justice organizations across issue areas including criminal justice, housing, and public safety, the paper traces how organizers weigh institutional engagement against the risks of cooptation, depoliticization, and harm to the communities they represent. I argue that these organizers operate with a form of institutional skepticism shaped by long histories of racialized state violence and managed inclusion (Cohen 1999; Gilmore 2007). As a result, many prioritize community-based power-building, relational organizing, and collective action outside formal policymaking channels, even as they selectively engage the state when strategic conditions permit (Han 2014; Woodly 2021). By foregrounding the strategic reasoning of racial justice organizers, this paper contributes to social movement scholarship by reframing selective disengagement from policy processes as an active movement strategy rather than political retreat (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). More broadly, it shows how organizing under a carceral state reshapes movement goals, tactical repertoires, and understandings of democracy itself, highlighting the limits of liberal inclusion in addressing racial inequality. 

Friday, September 4, 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm

In-Person | Roundtable 

Participants: 

• (Chair) Emilia Simison, Queen Mary University of London 

• (Presenter) Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Stanford University 

• (Presenter) Steven Levitsky, Harvard University 

• (Presenter) Jennifer McCoy, Georgia State University 

• (Presenter) Thomas Pepinsky, Cornell University 

• (Presenter) Lauren Prather, University of California, San Diego 

• (Presenter) Scott Williamson, Oxford University 

• (Presenter) Sharan Grewal, American University 

Session Description: 
Scholars of democracy and autocracy widely agree that the United States has experienced significant democratic backsliding under the second Trump administration. Trump and the Republican Party have dramatically expanded executive power, eroded civil liberties, attacked political opposition, and sought to reduce the competitiveness of upcoming elections. These domestic political developments have also reverberated abroad, sparking both backlash and support for far-right parties in other countries, and unleashing a more aggressive US foreign policy that has shaped conflicts and upended the international economy from Latin America and Europe to the Middle East and Asia. 

This roundtable, co-organized by the Democracy and Autocracy Section Executive Board and the Authoritarian Political Systems Group (APSG), gathers a selected group of scholars with expertise in democratic backsliding, authoritarianism, and various world regions to discuss these developments and where they may lead in the future. The roundtable will discuss how democratic backsliding has unfolded in the United States, why it has occurred so rapidly, and whether it will generate backlash or authoritarian consolidation. The roundtable will also discuss ongoing and future consequences for international politics, considering the likely effects on international conflicts and economics, as well as the potential impact on democratic resilience in other countries. In short, will the weakening of US democracy accelerate in the years ahead, and will it lead to a more unstable and less democratic world? Or are there reasons to think that these trends will reverse? 

The roundtable will be chaired by Emilia Simison (Queen Mary University), who is a co-organizer of APSG. It has also been organized by Scott Williamson as Chair of the Democracy and Autocracy Section, and Fabio Angiolillo as a co-organizer of APSG. The following scholars have agreed to join the roundtable as participants: Sharan Grewal (American University), Anna Gryzmala-Busse (Stanford University), Steven Levitsky (Harvard University), Jennifer McCoy (Georgia State University), Thomas Pepinsky (Cornell University), Lauren Prather (UCSD), and Scott Williamson (University of Oxford). Between them, these scholars bring expertise in democratic backsliding and authoritarianism combined with detailed knowledge of Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Several of them also have affiliations with think tanks (e.g., the Brookings Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), giving them insights into how policymakers and politicians have reacted to developments in DC and around the world. The roundtable reflects APSA’s theme for 2026 and should be of significant interest to many of the conference’s participants.