Documenting Democracy in Tumultuous Times

These days, everything feels political, and Deborah Schildkraut, the John Richard Skuse, Class of 1941, Professor of Political Science, might agree. Truth be told, she maintains that everything is always political. Accordingly, her research interests are wide, from topics like how liberals and conservatives in the United States feel about democracy to Americans’ psychological and political connections to their states. 

The author of Americanism in the Twenty-First Century: Public Opinion in the Age of Immigration and co-author of States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion, she uses deep datasets of polls and interviews with a wide range of Americans to inform her work.

Everyday Democracy

With so much political polarization at the national level in the U.S., how everyday Americans view and work at democracy is important to understand. In her new book, Everyday Democracy: Liberals and Conservatives and Their Routine Political Lives with Tufts Professor Emeritus Jeffrey Berry and Dean Emeritus James Glaser, Schildkraut investigated areas like political compromise, charity, and volunteering.

“Involvement in community activities—working in one’s church, working at a food bank—provides opportunities for breaking down some of the things that we think divide us,” she said.

States and Identity

One of Schildkraut’s recent studies found that people are more likely to engage in some forms of political activity if they have higher levels of state pride. “If we feel that more political participation is better, then state pride can be beneficial,” she said. “Maybe symbols, like flags, have a role to play in fostering that sensibility.”

Massachusetts is in the middle of a multiyear process to redesign its state flag, for instance. “It has revealed strong and often differing opinions on what images and words best encapsulate the state,” she said. “I’m also starting a new study that looks into whether state pride can reduce partisan polarization.”

Textbook Challenge

How do you tell the story of American politics when the nation’s populace is so divided? For Schildkraut, this question is made more real by current work she and co-authors are doing to update their textbook The Challenge of Democracy: American Government in Global Politics. Take the topic of how a bill becomes law in Congress.

“Norms and informal and formal rules have changed over the past two decades. What a lot of young people learn about how a bill becomes a law isn’t how it works anymore. Describing it gets a lot harder when things are differing so much from how they are normally expected to work,” she said.

Writing an American government textbook that’s nonpartisan has also gotten harder. “How do you write about the events of January 6, 2021, at the Capitol without it seeming partisan? How do you write about the current Congress not fighting harder to protect its constitutional jurisdiction without it seeming partisan?”