HKS Faculty Scholarship

Evidence from V-Dem suggests cases of growing illiberalism in recent decades - but also some countries where democracy has proved stable or even strengthened during these years. What has been driving these diverse trajectories? This chapter starts to unpack the theoretical debates and considers new empirical evidence analyzed using mixed methods to explore the links potentially connecting populist governments and backsliding. Part I defines the concept and logic of populist discourse and summarizes the previous theoretical and empirical literature. Part II compares the position of a wide range of political parties towards both liberal democracy and populism. The comparison further confirms that many, but not all, political parties employing populist discourse often oppose checks and balances on executive power, as well as liberal democratic principles, norms and practices. Part III analyses longitudinal cross-national data during the first quarter of the 21st century to determine the dynamic trajectories of democratic regimes worldwide under both populist and non-populist governments. To replicate previous studies in Europe and Latin America, difference-in-difference time-series panel regression models are employed to estimate causal effects through a quasi-experimental technique using observational data from treatment (populist-led governments) and control groups (non-populist governments) in power for heterogeneous periods during the last 25 years. Part V explores the processes of backsliding in more depth, comparing six case-studies of populist governments, including longitudinal trends in the horizontal and vertical checks designed to prevent the executive abuse of power. The selected examples include presidential executives in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, and Donald Trump’s USA, as well as prime ministerial governments in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Narendra Modi’s India, and Jarosław Kaczyński’s Poland. The conclusion in Part VI summarizes the key findings and considers their broader theoretical and policy implications. The chapter provides further evidence confirming the links connecting the rhetoric of populist parties with their endorsement of illiberal policies; at the same time, many exceptions to these findings can be observed, suggesting that diverse varieties of populist parties exist, even among neighboring states. The paper is drawn from Chapter 4 of my forthcoming book on The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding (OUP 2027)

Digital tools now enable crowds to assemble without formal organization, but their long-term impact is understudied. Drawing on 397 events and 15 months of fieldwork, this study compares the two poles of an organizational continuum during Brazil's 2013--2016 protest cycle: leaderless online-to-offline protests, and those convoked by unions and other formal movement associations. I code the main challenger groups on organizational vitality, leadership trajectories, electoral articulation, and policy durability (OLEP) five and ten years past the peak, a longitudinal complement to WUNC, Tilly's contemporaneous measures of protest strength. The two poles scored similarly on worthiness and numbers, differed on commitment and unity, and digital origins shaped but did not determine outcomes. Across left- and right-wing formations, protest groups that invested in membership structures converted mobilization into political influence. The labor federations atrophied, and many once-prominent groups dissolved. I explain these dissolutions as a consequence of means--ends decoupling---activity that proceeds without producing the outcomes it is meant to serve. Digital decoupling specifies the mechanism under technological mediation: action multiplies, while the capacities that produce intended outcomes do not. Mistaking protest activity for the movements it once indexed helps explain a decade of mass mobilization that produced little durable change.

Modern political campaigns decide who to contact using turnout-propensity scores. Practitioners have long argued that these scores “redline” low-scored communities, which campaigns rarely attempt to reach. I examine this claim using person-level records of Democratic campaigns and community-based organizations’ 414 million contact attempts (aimed at 14 million voters in ten battleground states in 2024), matched to validated turnout. Three of every five attempts—and two of every three successful conversations—went to voters already scored likely to vote. Nearly a third of the registered voters in this universe (3.8 million) did not cast a ballot, and 1.43 million of them were never reached by any program. These patterns suggest a self-fulfilling prophecy: low-scored voters go uncontacted, and the abstention that follows becomes the record from which their next score is estimated. Local membership-based community organizations offer one promising response to this dynamic. In 2024, these groups’ contact attempts succeeded at roughly twice Democratic campaigns’ rate among Black, Hispanic, Native American, young, new-registrant, and low-income voters. Each additional conversation is associated with a turnout gain, and the association is larger among voters scored less likely to vote.

Protests constitute a primary way that members of the public express their preferences. Focusing on policy protests in the United States, we use a survey experiment to study how the race of the protesters affects public reactions. We find that relative to white nonviolent protests, Black non-violent protests are perceived as more violent, but that does not dampen individuals’ likelihood of joining the protests. Moreover, Black nonviolent protests, but not white nonviolent protests, significantly move opinion in the direction advocated by the protest. All of the race effects, though, cease to exist when protests are violent. We replicate the results with samples of citizens with connections to civic organizations and elected officials. The findings suggest that the effect of race on protest reactions is conditional, depending on the protest’s goals (e.g., alter perceptions, impact policy) and tactics (nonviolent, violent).

Mass protest has reached record levels, yet the movements producing it have rarely been weaker. Why does so much participation leave so little behind? Most explanations center on recruitment, while retention has received far less attention. Drawing on a year of participation records from 20 organizations across 11 states, paired with prospective interviews and fieldwork, I observe 91,648 attendances by 38,740 people who took civic action beyond voting. I find that 71 percent of these participants act once and do not return within the observation window. Among those whose first participation was a mass mobilization, attrition approaches 90 percent. Across all groups, however, similarly sized events resulted in very different retention rates. I call the capacity behind these differences catchment and trace it to organizational practice. A first event where most of those present are established members raises the probability of return within 90 days by 12.8 percentage points, net of event size and robust to organization-clustered inference. The pattern holds across constituencies and regions, and in 13 years of records from one organization. The strongest organizational correlate of catchment is the share of members embedded in teams.

The North South Rail Link (NSRL) is a proposed underground tunnel connecting Boston’s North and South Stations, eliminating the one-mile gap that divides the regional rail network and prevents through running across Greater Boston and the Northeast Corridor. This study evaluates the economic case for the NSRL by estimating costs and benefits incremental to full Regional Rail implementation and by examining alternative approaches to implementation. Projected incremental benefits substantially exceed incremental costs: under the Maximum Build scenario (two tunnels, four tracks), the NSRL generates 37.6 billion dollars in benefits against 8.0 billion dollars in incremental costs. By replacing terminal operations with through running, the project could reduce average passenger wait times by 71 percent, more than double rail ridership, and substantially expand regional access to employment. Improved connectivity could also encourage residential development around existing stations and broaden the geographic distribution of housing demand, although these effects depend on local land-use policies. Finally, the study introduces a potential phased implementation approach in which the tunnel is built to full Regional Rail specifications and begins with a frequent, dedicated shuttle between the two stations. This could generate benefits immediately upon completion and accommodate additional lines as the system is modernized.

Seventy-six percent of Americans identify as sports fans, and sixty-three percent consider themselves passionate fans. We find that this shared identity powerfully reduces partisan animosity. Using a nationally representative survey and nine pre-registered experiments, we show that shared sports fandom is at least as effective at reducing partisan animosity as shared race, religion, socio-economic status, or region where they are from. This depolarizing effect tempers hostile partisan behavior and is moderated by the centrality of sports fandom to one's identity. Sports fandom is a vital and scalable tool for strengthening democratic society.

Artificial intelligence will probably generate major changes in the US economy, although the nature, timing, and magnitude of those changes are highly uncertain. We analyze a set of long-term scenarios involving different combinations of faster productivity growth, greater income inequality, job displacement, and a higher capital share of income. For each scenario, we assess the implications for federal debt and potential policy responses related to faster economic growth, the distribution of income, support for workers who are laid off, and taxation and ownership of capital. Given the uncertainty surrounding AI’s economic effects, policies that are robust to different scenarios would be especially valuable.

There is an important debate about how much the nationalization of American politics has affected local politics, but less theoretical development of the implications for representation. We provide new evidence on local voting behavior from the largest survey to date of U.S. voters in local elections and develop a new theory of incidental representation that results from nationalization. We show that voting for partisan local offices resembles voting in state and federal elections, with voters' choices strongly connected to their party identification and their views on national policies. In nonpartisan local elections, voters' choices are less strongly related to party identification but remain linked to national policy attitudes. In both types of local elections, voting is only weakly related to attitudes toward local policies. However, because local policy attitudes are correlated with party identification and national policy attitudes, even ``nationalized" voting still allows voters to choose local candidates who match their views on local policies. Our findings thus speak to the nature of representation in local governments.

We develop the concept of, and estimation tools for, durable majority gerrymanders: electoral district maps drawn to reduce an opposing political party's probability of winning a majority in a legislative chamber. Directly interpretable, forward-looking, and motivated by the democratic principle that a party in power should have some chance of losing it, this measure provides new insights into the role of redistricting in state legislative elections. We show that, when map drawers are unconstrained, the ability to create durable majorities is so widespread that at least one party in every state can draw a map where a majority of legislative districts withstand almost any likely future electoral swing. Enacted maps are less durable, due to a combination of underlying geography, voter partisanship, and state-level guidelines. This paper provides the theoretical framework and empirical tools to understand which gerrymandered maps enable state-level majorities to emerge and to endure.