Democratic Vulnerabilities and Pathways for Reform

Abstract

A democracy is in trouble. even before the 2016 election, the united States had slipped in international democracy rankings, losing its long-held stature as a “full” democracy and joining the “flawed” democracies (economist Intelligence unit 2020; V-Dem Institute 2021). Scholars of democracy around the world have identified several key weaknesses in American democracy, such as an increasingly dysfunctional government and fraying social cohesion, that undermine the regime’s accountability and responsivness. For decades, political scientists have observed key threats to democracy that have been on the rise: political polarization; conflict—incited by racism and nativism—over the boundaries of American citizenship and the civic status of those in different social groups; soaring economic inequality; and executive aggrandizement (Mettler and Lieberman 2020). the confluence of these threats fueled the candidacy