It’s not every day that a researcher finds himself at the center of a lavish 12-page magazine feature, replete with glossy photos of his sometimes place of work—a subtropical island. But that’s exactly what happened to Michael Jarvis, a professor of history at the University of Rochester and the director of the Smith’s Island Archaeology Project in Bermuda.

The Smithsonian Magazine’s cover story—“The Hidden History of Bermuda Is Reshaping the Way We Think of Colonial America”—chronicles how Jarvis has been working with Rochester students and local Bermudians over the past 14 years to excavate evidence of one of Britain’s first settlements in the Americas.

This past summer, the magazine sent a writer and a photographer to document the second of Jarvis’s National Endowment for the Humanities–funded excavations in a thick forest on one of Bermuda’s islands:

A few dozen yards away, in a dirty T-shirt, faded camo shorts and black work boots, Michael Jarvis hacked away at thick brush with a gas-powered saw. In this clearing on Smith’s Island, in Bermuda, Jarvis—“Chainsaw Mike” to his students—is unearthing one of the first New World towns built by English colonizers.

Established in 1612, just five years after the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia and eight years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, the original colony on Smith’s Island was short lived—only to reemerge on another, nearby Bermudian island. But the mystery persists. “Its very existence was forgotten for four centuries; even its name remains unknown,” notes Andrew Lawler, who wrote the cover story for the Smithsonian.

Reading histories about the early beginnings of the American colonies—the traditional origin stories of the United States—one is hard pressed to find much, if any, mention of Bermuda.

“When historians have considered it, they usually dismiss it as a curiosity or a failure,” notes Jarvis, who sought to rectify that omission with his latest book, Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).

Yet, for a time, Bermuda was home to more settlers than either Virginia or Massachusetts, and far wealthier. Indeed, it was here that the English first grew tobacco and purchased enslaved Africans to work the fields, a practice that soon spread to American shores.

Rochester students and alumni on their Bermuda field experiences

Emily English ’27 (English Literature and History)
New Bern, North Carolina

“Being a student whose main focus is in textual studies, going and experiencing the physical aspects of history was something I didn’t know I needed. Ever since going to Bermuda, I desire historical academics—not just as a backdrop to my studies in literature. Interacting with objects that hold history in ways I can’t comprehend with just research articles was simply mind blowing. It’s an opportunity to learn in ways that you can’t get from a classroom. Not only was the academic experience new and exciting, but the community I discovered and formed was one I will cherish forever.”

Skyler Frazier ’27 (Archaeology, Technology, and Historical Structures and Art History)
Tallahassee, Florida

“The opportunity to hold history in your hands isn’t one to pass by. Be prepared for hot days of physical labor but also beautiful seaside lunch breaks, and plenty of days off to experience these tropical islands filled with diverse cultures. I went to Bermuda in hopes of confirming my ambitions in archeology—it did exactly that. Due in large part to this experience with the Smith’s Island Archaeology Project (SIAP), I see myself continuing to pursue historical archaeology in academics and later as a career. The community of SIAP staff and the volunteers’ passion and enthusiasm for Bermudian history is absolutely infectious.”

Leigh Koszarsky ’14 (History and Anthropology)
Originally Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, now Charleston, South Carolina

“Initially I was a student with the field school in 2012 and 2013, then a site supervisor for several seasons. I would need to check my passport, but I think I’ve gone eight times in total. After my first field season I took on a history major, which gave me a lot more direction and focus in what I was looking for as a future career. It also gave me a start in database management and cartography—both skills that dominate my current job. Building upon my field school experiences, I went on to get my master’s in historical archaeology from UMass Boston and a graduate certificate in geographic information systems. I am currently a senior geographic information specialist at Brockington and Associates, an archaeology and historic architecture consulting firm in Charleston, South Carolina. There’s no way that I would be in this position today without the Bermuda field school experience.”

Ewan Shannon ’20 (Archaeology, Technology, and Historical Structures and Anthropology)
Staten Island, New York

“What I thought would just be ‘summer school’ turned into a love affair with Bermuda, historical archaeology, and Atlantic history—fundamental to everything else that followed in my academic tenure at the U of R, and beyond. It established for certain that historical archaeology was the path I wanted to follow and gave me a deep appreciation for interdisciplinary collaboration. Initially, I came on as a rising sophomore in 2017. Since then, [history professor] Mike Jarvis was kind enough to hire me as his field supervisor for the full season from May through early July. I’ve been in this role every summer since 2022. My time in Bermuda became a springboard to complete an MA in anthropology at The New School for Social Research in New York City, and I work now as an archaeologist for a cultural resource management company, Environmental Design & Research.”

Being a captain of industry, a politician, or a celebrity won’t automatically make you a cheat. But chances of infidelity are significantly higher among the more powerful, according to a new study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Psychologists from Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, and the US-based University of Rochester conducted a series of experiments and discovered that power dynamics play an important role in how people feel and behave when it comes to being faithful to their spouses or significant others.

Why? Prior research has established that feeling and being perceived as powerful can make people feel more confident and entitled—and likely to act more impulsively. Previous studies have shown that those who possess relatively greater degrees of power have more potential to influence, change, or control another person, or, conversely, to resist another person’s efforts to influence them.

The new study adds to the body of existing research by applying it specifically to intimate relationships, finding that those who feel more powerful are less dependent on others, think more highly of themselves, and are more confident that others find them desirable.

“In a romantic relationship, these power dynamics might lead the more powerful partner to think they bring more to the table than their less powerful partner,” says lead author Gurit Birnbaum, a professor of psychology at Reichman University. “The more powerful might see this as a sign that they have more options outside the relationship and are more desirable partners in general.”

Four tests of relationship power dynamics

The researchers conducted a series of four studies to test how perceptions of relationship power influence a person’s interest in alternative partners. They recruited participants who were in monogamous, heterosexual relationships of at least four months.

• In the first study, as a form of power manipulation, participants were asked to describe either a time they felt powerful vis-à-vis their current partner or a typical day in their relationship. Afterward they wrote a sexual fantasy about someone other than their partner.

• In the second study, following the same power manipulation, participants looked at photos of strangers and decided under time pressure which ones, if any, they would consider as potential partners.

• In the third study, participants described the power dynamics in their existing romantic relationship and rated their own perceived power and mate value compared to that of their partner. Next, participants were asked to complete a task with an attractive person, who was a study insider, and then rated their sexual desire for the insider.

• In the fourth study, both partners in a relationship reported separately each day for three weeks on their perceived relationship power, their perceived value as a partner, and any sexual activities—including sexual fantasies, flirting, or having sex—with someone other than their partner.

The destructive side of power

Across the four studies, the team found that perceptions of power within a relationship significantly predicted a person’s interest in other potential mates—including sexual fantasies, desires, and real-life interactions. That is, people who perceived themselves as having more power in their relationship were more interested in others as potential partners.

“Those with a higher sense of power may feel motivated to disregard their commitment to the relationship and act on desires for short-term flings or potentially other, more novel partners if the opportunity arises,” says coauthor Harry Reis, a professor in the Rochester Department of Psychology and the University’s Dean’s Professor.

People who feel more powerful in their relationship tended to rate their value as a partner higher than their partner’s value, which could become destructive.

“When people feel powerful and believe they have more relationship options than their current partner, they might be more inclined to pay attention to other potentially promising alternatives,” says Reis. “The belief in having other options, like other possible partners, can weaken their commitment to their current relationship.”

The research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation and the Binational Science Foundation.

As a country we are deeply divided. That much we can agree upon. But there may be ways to bridge the chasm, according to a new megastudy published in Science.

The researchers discovered that some attitudes—specifically, support for undemocratic practices (such as trying to curtail free speech, spreading intentional misinformation, or attempting to curb voting in certain precincts) and partisan violence—are clearly distinct from partisan animosity (a strong dislike of or deep distrust between supporters of the opposite party). Thus, lessening animosity does not necessarily lead to a reduction in the other two attitudes.

On the flip side, successful interventions that reduced partisan animosity tended to reduce a host of other problems, such as social distrust, social distance, opposition to bipartisan cooperation, biased evaluation of politicized facts, and support for undemocratic candidates.

According to James Druckman, the Martin Brewer Anderson Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester (one of the six original researchers to start the megastudy), two of the evaluated approaches were particularly effective across outcomes—even for reducing support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence:

1. Correcting misperceptions of the other side
2. Using cues to show that elites, such as political candidates or officeholders, place great importance on upholding democratic norms

“People tend to exaggerate the antidemocratic attitudes or the violent inclinations of the other side. And they exaggerate just how different the other side is from your own,” says Druckman, who is an expert on democracy and political division. “When you provide information or opportunities to interact with people from the other side and learn about some commonality, that seemed to be a pretty effective approach. The focus on addressing misperceptions seems to be very, very useful.”

Megastudy assesses 250-plus approaches

Back in 2019, when Druckman first got involved with the project as a faculty member at Northwestern University, he figured the task ahead would be considerable. Little did he know the gargantuan undertaking it would become.

Pockets of people—academics in various disciplines and civic organizations alike—had begun working on behavioral interventions to address the three most pertinent threats to US democracy: partisan hostility, antidemocratic attitudes, and noticeable support for political violence. But the findings remained fragmented. What was needed was one large, unified collection of ideas where the best could be tested in rigorously controlled, scientific experiments.

The resulting study spans a whopping 32,059 study participants, 252 treatment ideas (whittled down to 25 interventions), 85 coauthors, five countries, and dozens of universities, institutions, and organizations. The researchers come from the fields of political science, sociology, psychology, economics communications, and marketing, as well as from civic organizations.

One approach does not fit all

While most of the tested interventions (self-administered online modules about 8 minutes in length) worked to reduce partisan hostility, only about a quarter successfully lowered support for undemocratic practices. And just one-fifth proved useful in reducing support for political violence.

The degree to which those interventions worked was also telling.

The researchers found that it’s much easier, for example, to reduce a person’s animosity toward someone of the opposite political opinion than it is to reduce someone’s support for political violence. According to Druckman, that’s in part because support for violence is already relatively low, so there’s less room for reduction. Yet, Druckman notes, the minority who supports violence is “likely more extreme in its opinions and, therefore, harder to convince to change its views.”

Of the 25 tested interventions in the megastudy:

• 23 significantly reduced partisan animosity by up to 10.5 percentage points
• 6 significantly reduced support for undemocratic practices by up to 5.8 percentage points
• 5 reduced support for partisan violence by up to 2.8 percentage points

At times, the results were surprisingly mixed.

Druckman tells the story of one video that showed a montage of political violence around the globe—in Venezuela, Russia, and Zimbabwe—where pro-democracy supporters engaged in violent struggles. The video was effective in lessening partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. However, it backfired when it came to study participants’ condoning partisan violence, which the video increased.

“I think people may have thought that you need a kind of defensive violence to counteract the tearing down of democracy, perhaps, but it’s hard to say for sure,” Druckman notes.

Which megastudy interventions work best?

The answer may depend on what specific undemocratic problem you are trying to address.

Partisan animosity

Highlighting sympathetic, politically dissimilar people and emphasizing their common ground was effective in reducing partisan animosity. For example, a top-scoring intervention (“correcting division misperceptions”) involved watching a four-and-a-half-minute Heineken commercial from 2017, titled “Worlds Apart.”

In the video, perfect strangers of diametrically opposite views are paired: a feminist with a man who equates feminism with “man hating,” a homophobic man with a transgender woman, a climate activist with a climate change denier.

The twist? They get to know each other first and find commonalities before they are revealed to each other as holding views the other abhors. Then they are given a choice: walk out or discuss the issue over a beer (no points for guessing the brand). In the video, every single person opts for the discussion, which looks civilized and friendly.

The second-highest scoring intervention (and a close second to the Heineken video) came from a team that includes Cameron Hecht, then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and now an assistant professor in the University of Rochester’s Department of Psychology. Hecht focuses on developing solutions to societal problems, such as disparities in academic motivation, mental health issues, and, yes, political polarization.

His team’s approach—titled “common exhausted majority identity”—managed to reduce partisan animosity by more than 10 percentage points. How? The researchers gave study participants information that reframed polarizing content from news and social media companies as a calculated manipulative strategy. They explained that this strategy is designed to artificially deepen political division and manufacture outrage—because companies use manipulation as a tool to maximize and maintain their own audiences.

The team’s intervention, which uses text, images, and voiceover narration as part of an online module, takes advantage of people’s reactance, a well-established psychological concept in which any blatant attempt to change a person’s behavior is likely to result in negative reactions and push back.

The researchers used the participants’ natural reactance to harness it against someone else.

“We show them how they’re already being manipulated by a third party, in this case news media, and explain that the way to fight back against that control and regulation is to engage in the behavior that we think is good and beneficial,” says Hecht.

Undemocratic practices

Correcting misperceptions about another person’s political views and instead highlighting the risk of a democratic collapse was especially effective in lowering support for undemocratic practices.

The highest scoring intervention here (titled “correcting democracy misperception”) asked participants eight questions about what they thought people from the other party believed when it came to democracy-undermining actions. Participants then guessed the other side’s willingness to use violence, to reduce the number of polling stations in unfriendly districts, or to accept the results of elections if they lost.

After each guess, participants received the correct answer, based on recent surveys. The answers clarified that most supporters of the other party do not, in fact, condone actions that undermine democracy and instead also support key elements of democracy.

Meet your experts

James Druckman
Martin Brewer Anderson Professor of Political Science

An expert in political behavior and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Druckman studies public opinion formation, political polarization, political and scientific communication, political psychology, and experimental and survey methods. He has published approximately 200 articles and book chapters. His latest coauthored book, Partisan Hostility and American Democracy: Explaining Political Divisions and When They Matter (University of Chicago), was published in 2024.

• Learn more about Druckman.

Cameron Hecht
Assistant Professor of Psychology

Hecht’s research “seeks to identify psychological processes that contribute to societal problems, develop theory-based interventions that target these processes, and identify the features of contexts that enable these interventions to be effective.” His recent studies have been published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Learn more about Hecht.

It’s election season, when candidate lawn signs sprout in yards and political messaging seeps into news feeds. With early voting underway in a contentious presidential race, many Americans are preparing to visit their polling place to cast their ballot (and score their “I Voted” sticker). Some will party (or not) like it’s 1907, if one can trust the Election Night in the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester.

Yet for other voters, Election Day is just another Tuesday.

What does voter turnout mean?

Technically, “voter turnout is the number of people who cast ballots in any given election,” says Mayya Komisarchik, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Rochester.

In the United States, the voting-eligible population comprises citizens of the right age, who are not convicted of a felony—though this depends on state law—and not mentally incapacitated. “But it’s hard to get that granular with numbers, so the voter turnout rate is typically calculated as the number of ballots cast divided by the voting-age population,” she says. “If high turnout is the harbinger of a healthy democracy, we want a high percentage of voter turnout.”

Since 1980, voter turnout for US presidential elections has fluctuated between 50 to 65 percent of eligible voters—with the exception of 2020, when it reached a record high of 67 percent. (Midterm elections draw significantly fewer voters.)

“Turnout in the US is not super-high relative to other democracies, like in Australia, where voting is compulsory with a fine for not participating,” says Komisarchik.

Even without a slap on the wrist, why aren’t more US citizens voting?

“Given that we’re talking about 51 different electoral systems (each state plus Washington DC) with multi-pronged processes, various restrictions, and lots of contestation, the voter turnout rate doesn’t surprise me,” says James Druckman, the Martin Brewer Anderson Professor of Political Science. “States vary dramatically in terms of their registration laws, early voting policies, access to polls, even when absentee ballots are counted.”

Scheduling is also a factor: In some places, local elections are timed to coincide with midterm or presidential ones, while in other places they are staggered in different years.

Add to this tangle the country’s history of constricted ballot access and voter suppression, through legal means and otherwise: literacy tests with subjective scoring, character witnesses (also subjective), and recent challenges to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. The finer points of “electioneering” can even penalize distributing water at a polling line.

In the lead-up to Election Day, here are several key points about voter turnout and why it’s important.

Voter “decline” is often really voter disenfranchisement.

Extending the franchise—or giving more people the right to vote—is one way to influence voter turnout.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution acknowledged the right of formerly enslaved African American men to vote. Fifty years later, in 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, legally guaranteeing American women the right to vote, a longstanding goal of the women’s suffrage movement. (Susan B. Anthony was a key player in the movement. On November 5, 1872—well before the 19th Amendment’s ratification—Anthony marched to the polls near her home in Rochester, New York, demanding to vote in the presidential election. She cast her vote, but was subsequently arrested, charged, and indicted.)

Conversely, disenfranchising people can also affect voter turnout.

“Because we often divide voters by the entire voting-age population, voter turnout appeared to decline through the 1970s, 80s, and 90s,” says Druckman. “In reality, this is explained by the growing disenfranchisement rate of felons.”

Only in Maine, Vermont, and Washington, DC, do people convicted of a felony never lose their right to vote. In other states, convicted felons are ineligible to vote either while incarcerated, for a period of time after release, or indefinitely.

When it comes to the calculus of voting, participation trumps “pivotality.”

In US elections, some states are reliably “blue” or “red”—that is, the results of the state elections tend to be more Democratic or Republican, respectively. By contrast, “purple” or “swing” states are those where either the Democratic or Republican candidates could win a statewide election. In these so-called battleground states, the difference between winning and losing can come down to a few thousand—or even hundred—votes.

Why, then, would anyone in a blue or red state bother to cast a ballot, knowing their vote isn’t pivotal to the election results? Is the act of voting an irrational one if you know your vote isn’t pivotal?

Enter the rational choice theory, a scientific model of political behavior that assumes people make decisions based on their calculations of costs and benefits. William Riker, an American political scientist at the University of Rochester from 1962 to 1993, is considered the founder of rational choice theory. He used economic and game-theoretic approaches to develop mathematical models of politics, including the Riker-Ordeshook theory of the calculus of voting. In doing so, he founded an entirely new subfield of political science in the 1960s—one that continues to influence the discipline today.

“Rational choice theory is an umbrella term for considering instrumental motivations that voters might have. In other words, what compels a person to vote?” explains Scott Tyson, an associate professor of political science at Rochester.

Those motivations could vary anywhere from getting personal satisfaction from participating in the democratic process to thinking your vote will make the difference in a particular election. The latter “is a narrower definition of instrumentality,” says Tyson. “What is the likelihood that I am pivotal in this election? If my vote is pivotal for Candidate A, that means half of all voters will vote for Candidate B. And that means that public opinion is more divided than I thought. So, when my vote ‘matters’ the most, my knowledge that it’s ‘right’ may be the least secure.”

Voting behavior has evolved from private decision to team sport.

“More recently, voting has taken on an event-based, participatory aspect,” says Tyson. There’s a difference between attending a concert or game in person versus streaming it on YouTube. “It’s just not the same,” he says. Likewise with voting today.

The aforementioned Riker-Ordeshook model of political science—also called the paradox of voting—ascribes most of the benefit of voting to the act itself, rather than to the outcome of the election. Even when a voter knows they won’t change the outcome, they still get some value from the act—whether that’s securing the coveted “I Voted” sticker or posting a selfie on social media (after clearing the electioneering zone, of course).

According to Tyson, today’s political advertisements reinforce the notion of voting behavior as a team sport or stadium concert, rather than reflective decision-making. “Very few ads seem designed to persuade independent voters to cast their vote one way or another,” he says. “Instead, they seem to ask: ‘Are you going to turn out for your candidate on Election Day? Will we see you in the arena?’”

From drizzle to deluge, the weather forecast matters for voter turnout.

“On a rainy and cold day, people are less likely to stand outside the polling place in long lines,” says Komisarchik. And when handing out water and snacks is perceived as risky, people may not wait outside on sweltering Tuesdays, either.

Extreme weather events can impact voting behavior even more profoundly. “Sometimes there are natural disasters right around Election Day, like tornadoes, where officials need to consolidate voting places as shelters,” says Komisarchik. For example, during the Super Tuesday Democratic Party presidential primaries in 2020, severe tornadoes in Nashville, Tennessee, forced the closing and consolidating of polling stations, leaving voters and election officials scrambling to navigate both dangerous conditions and thorny logistics.

Younger people tend to vote less (sorry, Bernie).

“Voting habituates,” says Druckman. “The key determinant of voting in any given election is whether you have voted before.”

So, which voters reliably show up to exercise their civic duty?

“In general, the people who are most likely to turn out—and turn out in most elections, from presidential to midterms to primaries to local races—are college-educated suburban homeowners,” says Komisarchik. “They are stakeholders, who have lived somewhere for a long time and put down roots.”

Turnout rates also increase along with voters’ level of education.

Younger voters between ages 18 and 29, conversely, tend to vote less. “This is the bane of Bernie Sanders’ campaign. If your life is in flux without a fixed address, you’re less likely to vote.”

People over the age of 45 are the highest-propensity voter, Komisarchik says. And despite efforts to enforce (and protect) the Voting Rights Act, “racial gaps do persist. By and large, it’s still the case that white voters are most likely to turn out.” Data shows that the most significant drop-off is for Hispanic voters, specifically for midterm elections.

Low voter turnout used to benefit Republicans. Now it favors Democrats.

“Political scientists used to think that low-turnout elections were marginally better for the Republican party,” says Komisarchik. “Historically, it was the case that all college-educated homeowner suburban votes were Republican. But in the Trump years, there has been a realignment and those places now tend to go Democrat.”

One of the largest advertising investments late in Trump’s campaign, she notes, has been anti-transgender attack ads. Komisarchik says, “That does not look like an effort to win back suburban voters who value affordable childcare or accessible health care.”

This realignment will likely persist for a while, she says, with political, societal, and historical implications still playing out in real-time.

Same-day registration boosts voter turnout.

Same-day registration allows voters to register and vote at the same time, usually on Election Day itself. This voting option, currently available in 23 states and Washington, DC, is the strategy that “consistently has the most positive impact, from what I’ve seen,” says Komisarchik.

For states without this option, campaigns should try the opposite tactic. According to Komisarchik, research on voter turnout suggests that one way to reduce the “mental load” for voters is to encourage them to make a written plan in advance.

“This includes when they will vote, the confirmed location of their polling place, and how they will get to the polls. Providing them with rides, registration information, and other means to reduce their ‘mental load’ will also help,” she says.

Without a paper trail, trust in elections and democracy suffers.

If voting migrated online for convenience, would turnout improve? Maybe—but don’t count on seeing a ballot box icon next to the Amazon button on your home screen.

“The tricky thing about voting is that if we removed all logistics and other ‘costs,’ it would be easier,” Komisarchik allows. “People could vote from the convenience of their homes. However, we also need elections to be secure, auditable, and verifiable—with a ‘paper trail.’ Cybersecurity experts tell us that the most secure way to vote is on paper.”

The tangible evidence of a paper trail makes it more difficult for a foreign power or bad actors to interfere, she explains, while simplifying post-election audits. “They would have to break into polling stations and steal the physical ballots, as opposed to remotely hacking a server. In a world of eroding trust and mounting disinformation, paper ballots actually give us security.”

Meet your experts

James Druckman
Martin Brewer Anderson Professor of Political Science

An expert in political behavior and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Druckman studies public opinion formation, political polarization, political and scientific communication, political psychology, and experimental and survey methods. He has published approximately 200 articles and book chapters. His latest coauthored book, Partisan Hostility and American Democracy: Explaining Political Divisions and When They Matter (University of Chicago), was published in 2024.

• Learn more about Druckman.

Mayya Komisarchik
Assistant Professor of Political Science

Komisarchik’s research interests cover representation, voting rights, race and ethnic politics, policing, immigration, and political incorporation. Her recent work has addressed changing electoral rules in southern counties in the wake of the Voting Rights Act, the lasting effects of Japanese-American internment, representativeness in policing, and the political incorporation of immigrants to the United States. Her work appears in the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Politics.

• Learn more about Komisarchik.

Scott Tyson
Associate Professor of Political Science

Tyson’s research focuses on formal political theory, political economy, conflict, authoritarian politics, external validity, and experimental design. He has authored or coauthored scholarly articles that have appeared in the Journal of Politics, American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Political Science Research and Methods, and PS: Political Science and Politics.

• Learn more about Tyson.

Philip V. McHarris presents a reimagined world without police in his latest book, Beyond Policing (Legacy Lit | Hatchette, 2024).

Tackling thorny issues with evidence, data, and personal stories, McHarris’s research delves into the weight of policing on people and communities and makes the case that many routine police reforms often only lead to more police.

“What if our response to crisis wasn’t about control but about care?” McHarris, an assistant professor of Black studies at the University of Rochester, writes. “How can we create conditions where safety is a shared responsibility? How can we design justice so that no community is routinely oppressed? Envisioning such a world isn’t just a daydream; it’s the first step toward building a society where violence and fear no longer dictate our lives.”

ABC News, which interviewed McHarris about his book, called his examination of the history and impact of policing “not just a surface-level critique, but a comprehensive analysis.”

Across the country, efforts to “defund,” downsize, or abolish police departments gained traction after national unrest in 2020 prompted by the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, and later the death of Daniel Prude at the hands of police in Rochester, New York.

In the wake of Prude’s death, for instance, the city of Rochester launched the Person in Crisis (PIC) Team, a unit meant to supplement police interactions with people exhibiting signs of mental distress. The team was inspired by a nonprofit mobile crisis intervention program called CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets) that has handled mental health calls in Eugene, Oregon, since 1989.

Lawmakers who support such initiatives argue that many social welfare tasks handled by armed police officers—responding to drug overdoses and working with people dealing with mental illness or homelessness, to name a few—would be better carried out by trained social workers or medical professionals.

McHarris’s research and commentary related to race, policing, and social justice has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and other major media outlets, and has inspired reform efforts.

McHarris joined the Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester in 2023. His current book project, Brick Dreams, is an ethnography-based manuscript focused on the New York City Housing Authority and contemporary realities and challenges of public housing in America.

Below are his responses to a few questions about Beyond Policing and his related research during an interview.

Q&A with Philip V. McHarris

In a world without police, who would people call to report a crime or seek immediate assistance, like a victim of domestic abuse?

McHarris: A world beyond policing is one where communities have robust infrastructures of care in place, and where the conditions that lead to harm are addressed long before they escalate. In the case of domestic abuse, for instance, specialized services—such as crisis response teams, mental health professionals, and both rapid and long-term housing support—would be readily available and adequately funded. These services would be community-rooted and trauma-informed, unlike current policing models that often exacerbate harm for vulnerable populations.

It’s also crucial to note that at least two studies have found that 40 percent of police households experience domestic violence, four times higher than the general public. The power that police officers hold shapes their ability to engage in unchecked violence, both on the streets and within their homes. This points to the reality that police are not best equipped to respond to domestic violence, especially when many people living in police households need interventions themselves.

Beyond this, we need new ways of understanding harm, violence, and conflict—moving beyond limited frames of crime as metrics of concern around safety, which I discuss in Beyond Policing. So, the real question is, who do we call when there is a need for help? Moving beyond police means envisioning a system where prevention and response are prioritized by trained responders and community safety approaches, rather than relying on a system that often perpetuates harm.

Does the world you imagine still have some law enforcement functions?

McHarris: The vision of abolition emphasizes addressing the root causes of violence and harm and developing non-carceral safety systems, rather than relying on reactive, punitive systems. This means building approaches that not only prevent harm from occurring in the first place but also address extreme situations if they arise in very different ways.

However, these approaches must be built from the ground up, centering true community safety—not violence or control. Instead of traditional policing models, this would involve comprehensive, community-driven responses rooted in care, conflict resolution, trained teams, and accountability.

So, in short, no. There are mechanisms of safety and accountability, but they do not mirror the logics or formations of policing today.

Is there a better word than “defunding” to describe the redirection of funds from policing to alternative models?

McHarris: “Defunding” is often misunderstood, but it stems from the divest/invest strategy, which emphasizes redirecting resources away from punitive systems and toward life-affirming ones. “Defund/fund” may be more descriptive, though rallying cries like “defund the police” don’t always carry the full framework.

It’s important to note that when schools, health care, libraries, parks, or anti-poverty programs are defunded, there isn’t an uproar. But when police power—which is at the root of police violence, not merely training or superficial reforms—is challenged, it becomes contentious.

The core issue is that challenging police power is what will ultimately allow us to build a safer world. Addressing violence and harm holistically means working toward a world beyond these systems of harm.

Is a world without police realistic?

McHarris: This question gets to the heart of abolitionist thinking. Abolition is a long-term project to build safer, healthier, and more equitable communities. What is often considered “realistic” is shaped by our current structures, but many things once deemed impossible—like the abolition of slavery—were realized through sustained movement and imagination.

Abolition asks us to reimagine safety beyond punitive responses and to create conditions in which police are no longer necessary because the root causes of harm, conflict, and violence—such as poverty, inequality, and disenfranchisement—are no longer in place.

Many people would have told Frederick Douglass that the abolition of slavery was unrealistic and impossible. But as Douglass himself said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Just as the vision to abolish slavery required imagination, struggle, and an unwavering belief in the possibility of a more just world, so too does the abolition of policing and the carceral state.

Abolition challenges us to envision a future where safety is not rooted in punishment, but in justice and care. A world without police may seem distant now, but, like the struggles of the past, it is through sustained movement and collective action that the impossible becomes reality. As geographer and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said, “In order to undo the forces of violence shaping our everyday lives, we would have to change everything.”

Abolition is not simply about removing harmful systems, but about transforming society at its roots to create the conditions for true safety and flourishing.

Picture this: You’re at a bar when someone starts hitting shamelessly on your spouse or significant other, who doesn’t flirt back. As the scene unfolds, your base instincts kick in—annoyance, anger, jealousy—followed by a heightened sexual desire for your partner. You’re ready to reclaim the attention that should be rightfully yours, correct?

Not necessarily, according to a new study in the Journal of Sex Research by researchers at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, and the US-based University of Rochester. Instead, the researchers discovered a surprising twist: despite the fact that your significant other did not reciprocate the advances, your own attraction to your partner begins to wane, and your desire to continue investing in that relationship diminishes.

At first glance, the reaction seems paradoxical, notes the study’s lead author Gurit Birnbaum, a professor of psychology at Reichman University. A substantial body of prior research has shown that when searching for a partner, we frequently rely on social cues. One such cue, known as mate choice copying, occurs in both humans and animals. Think of it as a shortcut to identifying desirable partners: seeing others interested in a potential mate often makes that person appear more attractive and desirable.

But the simplified formula of “more attention equals more desire” doesn’t seem to apply to established relationships.

”The problem is, once we have established a relationship, we become concerned about something called mate poaching—the idea that a competitor might lure our partner away,” explains coauthor Harry Reis, a professor in Rochester’s Department of Psychology and the University’s Dean’s Professor.

While the bulk of earlier research had largely focused on the initial stage of mate selection and the start of new partnerships, this latest study looks at the effects of unsolicited flirting on an established relationship.

Research has shown that people tend to use a mix of positive and negative approaches to keep their partners close. Giving gifts and spending quality time together are examples of positive tactics, says Birnbaum, while controlling a partner’s time is a negative approach.

What happens next is important.

“When a partner’s likelihood of being attracted to someone else is perceived as high, such as when they receive attention from others, people tend to abandon the positive tactics,” says Birnbaum.

Indeed, the fear of losing a partner may trigger a cascade of defensive reactions designed to protect us from hurt, including emotional distancing and withdrawing investment in the relationship, hoping to soften the blow if our fears materialize.

These defensive distancing responses, says Birnbaum, are designed to avoid a “potential blow to one’s self-esteem from rejection rather than risk further attachment to a partner whose commitment could be compromised by rival suitors.”

Three experiments put unsolicited flirting to the test

The team tested Israeli participants’ reactions across three separate experiments, using visualization, virtual reality, and recall techniques.

Participants in all three studies were in monogamous, mixed-sex relationships of at least four months. They were exposed to situations in which their real-life partners received unsolicited flirtatious advances. (All three experiments used control groups in which the participants’ partners encountered a neutral interaction with another person). Then, participants rated their sexual desire for their partner, their interest in deterring potential rivals, and their own relationship-maintaining efforts as expressed, for example, in the kind act of taking over a chore for their partner.

For the first experiment, 244 participants (126 women, 118 men) were asked to imagine a scenario where someone else showed interest in their partner (without the partner’s reciprocation), or interacted neutrally (for the control group). Next, participants were instructed to describe a sexual fantasy about their partner in a narrative format. Independent raters coded these fantasies for expressions of desire for the partner and the degree to which participants prioritized their partner’s pleasure over their own sexual desires. The team considered lower values as signs of defensive distancing and sexual disengagement.

In the second experiment, the researchers used virtual reality to create a realistic, yet controlled environment to study participants’ reactions to unwanted attention towards their romantic partners. To that end, 132 undergraduate students (66 women, 66 men) put on VR headsets and were transported to a bustling bar where they watched their real-life partners interact with a virtual stranger, who either flirted with their partner or remained neutral. Using VR, the team was able to create a safe environment to study the very real emotions of jealousy and possessiveness—without the risk of study participants’ coming to blows or causing a bar brawl.

In the third experiment, 190 participants (101 women and 89 men) were asked to recall and describe a past episode in their relationship where someone had either expressed unreciprocated interest in their partner or had interacted with their partner in a neutral manner.

The team found that study participants reacted to a stranger’s showing interest for their partner by feeling less desire for their partner, a reduced interest in investing in the relationship, and an increased interest in thwarting potential rivals.

Flirt at your own risk

The study’s biggest takeaway for your everyday romantic life? “Don’t flirt with others if you want your partner to be happy with you,” says Reis.

“While some might try to make their partner jealous by seeking attention from others, possibly to feel more desired or secure, our research shows this tactic often backfires,” echoes Birnbaum. “Instead of strengthening the relationship, it can damage the very connection it aims to enhance.”

The study is supported by the Israel Science Foundation, the Binational Science Foundation, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

While some thrive on the energy, sounds, and smells of large metropolitan areas, Tanya Bakhmetyeva and Stewart Weaver decidedly do not. Equally, lush tropical beaches hold little sway for them. Instead, cold, sparse landscapes are their ticket.

Kitted out with ice picks, ropes, harnesses, crampons, carabiners, and trekking poles, they have been collecting information in high-altitude mountain ranges together since 2017, sometimes at elevations of 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) and higher. Frequently, their research destinations are rich in vista but poor in vegetation.

The personal and professional lives of Weaver, a University of Rochester professor of history, and Bakhmetyeva, a professor of instruction in the Department of History and the associate director of the University’s Humanities Center, regularly collide. Married for 13 years, the two often collaborate on projects rooted in the history of climate change. Their research alternatively takes them deep into historical archives or high atop mountain ranges, including the Austrian Alps in Europe, and the Himalayas and the Pamir Mountains in Asia.

“People ask us all the time how we can live, work, and then travel together,” Bakhmetyeva says with a laugh. “For us it’s great.”

Until the disruption caused by COVID-19, the couple had spent the summers of 2018 and 2019 collecting oral histories from the people in Ladakh, a trans-Himalayan region in the far north of India that is experiencing drastic climate change at an extraordinary pace. In 2019, Weaver won funding as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow to work on the “Climate Witness: Voices from Ladakh” project, an effort to preserve the rich culture and history of the locale and its people in oral history form—before it’s too late.

In his Carnegie application, Weaver describes the harrowing backdrop to their research—torrential rains that wrecked the region on August 5, 2010: “A violent cloudburst dumped fourteen inches of rain on Ladakh, accustomed to getting just three inches of rain in a year.”

The results in Leh, the main town, were catastrophic, he writes: 255 people killed, more than 800 injured, and thousands left homeless. Barely five years later, flooding recurred on an even wider scale, destroying buildings, roads, fields, and orchards all over the region.

Yet while Ladakh “suffers from too much water, it also suffers from too little,” says Weaver. Declining snowfall and glacial recession have diminished the region’s water reserves and wreaked havoc on the local agriculture.

The couple’s oral history work in Ladakh didn’t go unnoticed. In 2021, together with Daniel Rinn, who had earned a PhD in history from the University a year earlier, their project won the Public Outreach Project Award from the American Society for Environmental History.

From pastime to profession

As a teenager, Weaver lived with his family for several years in New Delhi, where his father was posted as an educational consultant for a foundation. Mountain ranges beckoned.

“I’ve been a hiker and mountain climber all my life,” says Weaver—first in the Himalayas with his family, later as an adult in the mountains of Wyoming, Colorado, California, and now Europe. He’s been a keen reader of mountain and mountaineering literature as long as he can remember.

LISTEN: Visit the team’s oral history archive Climate Witness: Voices of Ladakh

Weaver would later add to the genre himself, coauthoring with Maurice Isserman Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes (Yale University Press, 2008). The book not only won the National Outdoor Book Award for History and Biography that year, it also marked a departure from Weaver’s previous research specialty of British history, which he taught at Rochester for many years.

“Increasingly over time, I’ve become more interested in environmental history, the history of exploration, and now most recently, the history of exploration and science,” Weaver explains. “Now, I’d say I’m a historian of mountains and alpinism.”

Meanwhile, Bakhmetyeva’s route to the mountains was slightly more winding. Born in Ukraine to Russian parents, she and her family moved back to what was then the Soviet Union, coming to the United States in 1995. Her first book was about a Russian émigré and her famous 19th-century Parisian salon. Today, Bakhmetyeva jokes that her academic interests have moved from the indoors to the outdoors.

At Rochester, she’s taught a course on the politics of nature, focusing on issues of race, gender, and the environment. She has a particular research interest in ecofeminism, a branch of feminism that examines the interaction of gender and the environment.

Part of that research was a project about hunting. Specifically, Bakhmetyeva, a vegetarian, was writing about the role of hunting and nature and its importance in Soviet diplomatic relationships under Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964. Taking foreign leaders and diplomats on hunting expeditions, Soviet apparatchiks used these outings, she argues, to display their “marksmanship and physical prowess” to present themselves to their foreign counterparts as “potent leaders and desired allies.”

One day, while working in the office she shares with Weaver in the attic of their Rochester home, Bakhmetyeva was reading about a historical character, Nikolai Krylenko. Besides being a regular hunter in earlier times with Vladimir Lenin (and as a Soviet politician proved one of the cruelest Russian Bolshevik revolutionaries), Krylenko was also a serious mountaineer who was a climbing leader in the famed 1928 German-Soviet Fedchenko expedition. Incidentally, that exploration was the first to survey the enormous Fedchenko glacier completely, determine its course, and establish its astonishing length. Her interest piqued, Bakhmetyeva kept reading. Soon she stumbled across a German climber-scientist, Richard Finsterwalder, whose name sounded somehow familiar.

She recalls, “I tuned to Stewart and said, ‘Wait, isn’t this guy I’m reading about here in the scientific mountain expedition one of your guys, too?’”

Indeed, Weaver had written about Finsterwalder decades earlier in the context of a 1934 German expedition to Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest mountain in the world, located in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Finsterwalder would become the couple’s first point of professional convergence.

“From that we started unraveling the story of glaciers and it snowballed from there,” says Bakhmetyeva. As the couple charted more environmental history projects, one geological feature in particular caught their attention—ice.

“Of all the ominous signs of our climate crisis, none has so strong a hold on the public imagination as the loss of ice, as the collapse of the polar ice sheets, and the ever-accelerating melt of the world’s glaciers,” the duo told fellow historians in 2023 at the History of Science Society meeting in Chicago.

In some respects, glaciers have become the latest endangered species, a bellwether of global warming. Climate scientists like to point out that ice has no political agenda—it simply reacts to external forces. But the two Rochester historians argue for another dimension: “Glaciers shape not just our physical landscapes, but also our social and cultural ones,” says Weaver, noting that the ways in which societies have understood and interpreted glaciers have changed throughout history.

A new area of inquiry—the ‘ice humanities’

While climate scientists are documenting the physical loss of the world’s glaciers and are racing to find ways to slow it, environmental historians like Bakhmetyeva and Weaver are collecting and preserving human history—and the history of glacial science—in the face of rapid climate change. The emerging area of inquiry has its own name: ice humanities, a term popularized by two academics, Klaus Dodds and Sverker Sörlin, in their book Ice Humanities: Living, thinking and working in a melting world (Manchester University Press, 2022).

It can be confusing, admits Bakhmetyeva, who says the couple has been asked numerous times “what exactly” they—as historians—have to do with glaciers, which seem to fall squarely into the purview of geologists and environmental scientists.

The new field, which belongs under the larger umbrella of the environmental humanities—itself a consolidation of several fields that happened about 25 years ago—is trying to advance knowledge of how glaciers (and with it snow, permafrost, sea ice, and icebergs) came to be understood, and to offer a cultural perspective on the role of glaciology (the study of glaciers) in climate studies. In other words, historians document the natural history of ice, its socio-historical importance, and the work of glacial scientists throughout the ages. “Ice humanities” describes a plethora of humanistic inquiries by artists, historians, philosophers, and literary scholars alike, with the idea of throwing wide open the doors to scholarship that transcends the separate silos of classic academic disciplines and allows for meaningful transdisciplinary research.

Part of Weaver’s and Bakhmetyeva’s research, for example, seeks to answer how Tajiki people, and indigenous communities in general, think of glaciers, at times disconnected from the larger, global questions about climate change. How have they projected their own cultural history of Tajikistan onto the world’s largest glaciers? What role do glaciers play in the cultural imagining of the Pamiri people?

Beyond the artistic and cultural meaning, the couple studies how glaciological knowledge was produced historically, how it gained scientific credibility, and what political forces shaped the study of glaciers as a distinct discipline.

Of particular interest to ice historians are key moments in the 19th and early 20th centuries that laid the foundation for modern glaciological and climate change research. One such moment, Weaver and Bakhmetyeva argue, was the emergence of scientific glacial mapping.

The founding fathers of glacial cartography

For Weaver, researching the history of glacial science marks a return to research he originally undertook nearly 20 years ago for Fallen Giants. The name Finsterwalder keeps popping up again and again in the couple’s research.

Avid outdoorsmen, mountaineers, and master glacial mappers, the Bavarian mathematician Sebastian Finsterwalder (1862–1951) and his son, Richard Finsterwalder (1899–1963), brought more than just their apt surname to the profession (the German root word “finster” translates to “dark” or “gloomy,” while “wald” means “forest”). They also successfully applied improvements in early remote sensing technology to high-altitude photogrammetric surveying, including using stereo photogrammetry from which they created early 3D images for their glacial cartography.

The elder Finsterwalder was the first to draw a topographically accurate map of a glacier, the Vernagtferner in Austria, in 1889.

“That’s the moment when glaciers became scientific objects, and that glacier map became the basis for climate research, available for longitudinal studies,” notes Bakhmetyeva. Indeed, glacial climate scientists today still refer to these 135-year-old Finsterwalder maps.

“For all their pioneering scientific photogrammetric accuracy, they came up with very beautiful maps that were informed by a deep knowledge of the older ways of rendering glaciers as beautiful, magnificently sublime things,” says Weaver about the founding fathers of glacial cartography.

Meanwhile, Bakhmetyeva, drawing on her background in gender studies, traces connections between early glacial science, glacial cartography, and an “explicitly masculinist ethos of heroic adventure” in the Finsterwalders’ work, which went beyond mere mapping.

“To earn authority as a glaciologist took becoming a mountaineer and putting one’s body on the line as a vicarious scientific instrument,” the duo argues in a forthcoming paper. Before the advent of photography, it also took becoming an artist to be able to preserve the evidence of firsthand observation, and to document the extent of glacial movement over time.

About a hundred years later, the Rochester historians are now retracing many of the Finsterwalders’ physical expeditions and scientific contributions—from the Alps, to the Himalayas, and Pamirs.

“We’ve been to the very huts where the older Finsterwalder stayed, the very valleys that he hiked with his equipment to chart, survey, and map these glaciers,” says Weaver. Being on site, he notes, provides meaningful context to the diaries of Sebastian Finsterwalder’s Alpine excursions, maps, and diagrams. “It adds a whole new level of intuitive understanding and actual physical comprehension of the landscapes he explored,” Weaver says.

Tracing the history of the Fedchenko Glacier

The couple’s latest research takes them to the remote Pamir Mountains, located mostly in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan with fringes that extend into Afghanistan, China, and Kyrgyzstan.

The mountains are home to thousands of glaciers, and it’s difficult to overstate their importance as the region’s natural water towers. According to NASA, nearly 90 percent of people in Central Eurasia rely on melted mountain waters for agriculture, energy, and drinking water.

Even among the range’s myriad glaciers, one stands out: the 48 mile-long Fedchenko, the one that the Soviet-German team measured and surveyed in 1928, and the world’s longest non-polar glacier. (As part of Tajikistan’s ongoing de-Russification program, the glacier was renamed Vanch-Yakh in 2023, but most sources are still using the old, historical name.)

Armed with a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) research award, Weaver and Bakhmetyeva joined the PAMIR Project, an international collaborative dedicated to developing an interdisciplinary understanding of the high-mountain region of Asia.

“At a time when glaciers are fast disappearing, we return by way of the Fedchenko to the moment of their appearance in both the scientific and cultural imagination,” the duo wrote in their NEH application. The idea is to offer a cultural perspective on the role of glaciology in climate change studies—subjects that have been “hitherto neglected by humanists and humanistic social scientists,” they argue.

In 2023, at the official kickoff meeting for the PAMIR Project in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the couple worked alongside geographers, cartographers, glaciologists, biologists, and geophysicists. Yet, a visit to the actual glacier has so far remained elusive for them. The region is remote and hard to access—on foot it takes weeks to reach, and evacuations are nearly impossible, notes Bakhmetyeva.

Helicopters seem the obvious answer, but politics got in the way. The lack of Tajiki pilots able to fly them and the subsequent wrangling over Swiss pilots flying in Tajiki airspace meant the plan turned into a “bureaucratic political storm” that has been dragging on for two years now, according to Weaver.

What makes the glaciers in the wider Pamir region so interesting to scientists and humanists alike is the curious fact that they melt and recede much more slowly than other glacial regions in the world. In the 1990s, scientists discovered an idiosyncrasy—the so-called Karakoram Anomaly (named after the eponymous mountain range)—whereby glaciers in the adjoining mountain ranges of the Karakoram and the Pamir remain largely unchanged, or even show small ice gains, in contrast to the marked retreat of other glaciers around the world.

“There’s something relatively stable here that intrigues everyone,” says Bakhmetyeva. “Understandably, there’s a lot of desire to understand it.” The duo is hoping to finally set foot on the glacier some time next year.

The timing may prove auspicious: The United Nations has designated 2025 as the launch of a “Decade of Action” to preserve glaciers. Dushanbe is at center, playing host to a large symposium on glacier protection.

Meanwhile, on the so-called roof of the world, 350 square miles of cold and unspoilt Fedchenko are beckoning, a call that Weaver and Bakhmetyeva find hard to resist.

United States tariffs on China increased in 2018 during the Trump administration, prompting a trade war with the economic powerhouse. Since coming to office in 2020, President Biden has maintained those tariffs. Nonetheless, expectations of a prolonged trade war were low during the Trump years, yet have remained high during Biden’s term in office.

What accounts for this discrepancy?

To answer this question, University of Rochester economist George Alessandria and his coauthors analyzed historical data to construct an economic model predicting the probabilities of a prolonged trade war. That model takes into account parallels with the US-China trade war during the presidential tenures of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, from 1977 to 1981, and 1981 to 1989, respectively.

The conclusions, which Alessandria calls counterintuitive, are discussed in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper titled “Trade War and Peace: US-China Trade and Tariff Risk from 2015–2050.”

Alessandria, an expert on international trade, attributes the differing probabilities of a prolonged trade war to the changing expectations of individuals and firms.

Q&A about the trade relations between US and China

What is a trade war in economics?

• A trade war occurs when two countries impose higher tariffs or taxes on imported goods or services from each other, which increases the cost of those goods or services, and shifts purchases away from these goods to other sources.

Alessandria: There’s no technical definition of the term trade war. It’s like obscenity; you know it when you see it. Essentially, a trade war exists when one country tries to get another country to pay more for its goods. That’s done by imposing tariffs (essentially taxes) on imports. For a true trade war to exist, both countries need to be imposing higher tariffs.

Probably the best-known trade war happened during the Great Depression. In June 1930, the United States raised import tariffs through the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. The aim was to protect American businesses and farmers, but then the rest of the world ended up raising their import tariffs. The net effect was a reduction in global trade and an even worse world economy.

How do trade wars typically affect the US and global economies?

• Trade wars raise the price of imported goods and lead consumers and firms to substitute for those higher-priced products. That substitution builds more or less through time depending on how long people expect a trade war to last.

Alessandria: At the most basic level, trade wars raise the cost of buying a set of goods from certain trade partners. This leads firms, and ultimately consumers, to buy less of these products. They shift to other sources, which could be other trade partners or domestic producers. Trade then falls, particularly on the most affected products. Trade wars work in the opposite way of trade peace and free trade agreements, such as the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement, an updated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. These agreements open markets by reducing or eliminating tariffs on select goods moving in either direction.

The effect on the aggregate economy of a trade war is harder to sort out. Economists have found that raising tariffs will in general lower economic activity, lower real income, and reduce jobs. However, in the short-run you might get a boost in economic activity since you might have to hire more workers to adjust production lines and supply chains. Those investments are needed to offset some of the higher costs of doing business.

What happened after the Trump Administration imposed tariffs and COVID-related exclusions on thousands of Chinese imports in 2018 and 2019?

• As expected, the United States reduced its purchases of the goods with increased tariffs. But, importantly, the initial shift away was relatively small because the tariffs weren’t viewed as likely to last for very long.

Alessandria: No one really thought Trump was going to raise the tariffs; they thought he was just posturing. But once Trump raised the tariffs, everyone—economists, policymakers, pundits, firms, the general public—assumed he was just trying to get a deal, or that the tariffs would go away when he left office. In other words, people figured, “Sure, Trump raised tariffs, but it’s likely only for a year or two.”

In the meantime, in true trade war fashion, China raised its tariffs on US exports. They also lowered tariffs on exports from other, non-US sources to shift trade away further from the United States while mitigating some of the effects on their consumers and producers.

Why did the US-China trade war accelerate under President Biden, even though he didn’t raise tariffs?

• By not reducing tariffs, President Biden and the Democrats indicated to consumers and firms that tariffs would remain higher longer than expected—subverting their expectations.

Alessandria: When Biden didn’t reduce tariffs—which he could have done on day one of taking office, but didn’t—people’s expectations changed. As a result, Biden and the Democrats were perceived as being more anti-trade than originally thought. People and firms realized that the trade war between the US and China was a big deal after all—and that tariffs would likely remain high a lot longer than expected.

I’ll give you an analogy. Suppose there’s going to be a tax holiday during which sales taxes are temporarily reduced or eliminated. Knowing that information, fewer people would buy dishwashers in advance. But once the tax holiday comes, many more people will buy dishwashers. A rational person would wait for the tax holiday in order to save money. Economic decisions—by individuals, by firms, and by nations—are based on a combination of information about what’s happening today and expectations of what will happen in the future.

What lessons from the Carter and Reagan administrations helped you understand today’s trade war?

• There are parallels between the trade reform of 1980 and the increased tariffs of 2018, with the responses to both being similar in magnitude and trajectory. But the big takeaway is that expectations about a leader’s trade policy position can have an outsized impact on trade relations between countries.

Alessandria: In terms of trade flows, we see parallels between the decrease in tariffs in 1980 and the increase in tariffs in 2018. The trade responses before and after these two reforms are similar in magnitude, but in the opposite directions. The 1980 reform took a while for people to believe it would last, and so trade grew slowly and only really picked up in Reagan’s second term. Trade then really grew a lot. We’re at a similar stage right now. We’re buying less from China, but we haven’t cut back as strongly as we could.

The other thing we learned is that trade policy reflects wider geopolitical concerns. It was a complicated relationship between the US and China going back to 1949 with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The US had backed the Nationalists, under Chiang Kai-shek, over the Communist forces, which eventually won. Soon after, we were on opposite sides of the Korean war. The result was a long period of hostile relations between the two countries.

Years later, ping-pong diplomacy—the exchange of table tennis players between the US and China in 1971—paved the way for Nixon to visit China the following year, which began the return to normal trade relations.

Then at the end of 1978, when China got a new government under Deng Xiaoping, then-President Carter decided to recognize China, which meant establishing official diplomatic relations. But the thawing of relations with China went against the more conservative wing of the Republican party, which Reagan saw as an opportunity to strongly position himself as anti-communist.

When the tariffs fell under Carter in 1980, people started buying more Chinese goods. Once people start buying more stuff, firms typically start trying to find more customers and making investments to tailor products to consumers in those export markets. And that second round of growth comes because firms think that the tariffs are going to be low in the future. After Reagan was elected, trade between the two countries suffered because of expectations that the new president would increase tariffs. Trade relations, however, did begin to improve five years later after Reagan visited China. But the initial downturn in trade relations was largely based on expectations.

Tariff increases announced by Biden in May were expected to take effect on August 1. What role (if any) does Biden’s decision in July to end his presidential re-election campaign have on the economic conflict between the US and China?

• Changing candidates probably doesn’t change the Democratic Party’s approach on trade policy, but it would be worthwhile to hear about this issue from the candidates in the lead-up to the election.

Alessandria: I don’t think the outlook on trade policy changes much with Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee, although it would be good for the candidates to discuss these issues. Our economic model recovers estimates of switching between trade war and trade peace from the actions of the firms most affected by these tariffs. These firms probably thought there was a chance that Harris could be president when making their decisions. It would be good for Harris and Trump to debate this issue.

How long do you think the current trade war with China will last?

• Based on the way firms have been changing suppliers, our model predicts there is a less than 20 percent chance the trade war is over by 2025.

Alessandria: Our model estimates that the US-China trade war has a 17 percent chance of ending in 2025, so it will most likely last at least four or five more years. Of course, there’s always a chance that something will break this logjam. It was a big surprise in 1971 when Nixon lifted a 21-year trade embargo on China. Nixon was attempting to get us out of the Vietnam War, and he was hoping the Chinese, who were supporting the Vietnamese, could put some backroom pressure on Vietnam. But it’s not clear what factors exist today that could pull us out of the current trade war.

So, is one party or the other tougher on trade?

• The researchers find a bigger increase in the expected path of tariffs under Biden than under Trump. This is counterintuitive since tariffs rose under the Republicans and did not change under the Democrats.

Alessandria: Our research allows us to recover a time-changing probability of the tariffs the US will apply on Chinese goods. Using those probabilities and the tariffs that products face in war and peace, we can forecast an expected path of future tariffs. And we can make these forecasts at various points in time. In other words, we have a forecast before Trump is elected; when Trump leaves office; and today. These forecasts differ because the trade war has continued and the outlook has shifted based on the state of the economy and relations between the two countries.

Using changes in the path of those forecasts, we can attribute policy changes to different administrations. We find that while Trump raised tariffs, because they were expected to come down quickly, and he changed the distribution of product specific tariffs, when he left office the path of tariffs had fallen compared to when he entered office. In contrast, the path has shifted up under Biden. Some of this is counterintuitive since Trump raised tariffs, but it’s important to remember that firms always believed there could be a US-China trade war and expected tariffs to go up in the future—it just hadn’t happened for a while.

Meet your expert

Professor of Economics George Alessandria is an expert on international trade and finance. Prior to joining the University of Rochester faculty in 2014, he was a senior economic advisor and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. His research interests are in macroeconomics and international trade. In his use of dynamic models to study trade flows, Alessandria and his peers pioneered a new approach to the field of international trade that allows us to understand the effects of business cycles on trade. Through a microeconomic analysis of the behavior of firms, Alessandria’s work has given insight into what were long-standing puzzles concerning the slow response of trade patterns to economic volatility. He has published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Monetary Economics. He has served as an associate editor at some of the most prestigious journals in economics.

• Learn more about Alessandria.

Studies have shown that using dehumanizing language to refer to political opponents—whether directed at the actual candidates or their supporters—has a destabilizing effect on democracy in the United States. According to James Druckman, the Martin Brewer Anderson Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester, negative rhetoric has changed how both elites and average citizens talk about politics. It has also affected average people’s political attitudes and their willingness to engage in politics.

“Even worse than the toxicity is the moralization, which I think can really lead people to want to disengage from politics,” says Druckman.

Yet, what separates us may not be as great a schism as we think, argues Druckman, a coauthor of Partisan Hostility and American Democracy: Explaining Political Divisions and When They Matter (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

“The perception of the divide in this country is greater than the divide itself,” he says. “Those perceptions dwarf the actual divides.”
In an interview, Druckman discusses polarization, the roles of elites in maintaining—or weakening—US democracy, and the effect of moralizing language on political discourse.

Listen to the interview or read the transcript below.

Transcript of interview, recorded June 24, 2024.

Host Sandra Knispel, communications specialist at the University of Rochester: Thanks for joining us. I’m Sandra Knispel for the University of Rochester, and with us today is James Druckman, who is an expert on democracy and the Martin Brewer Anderson Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester. Welcome, Professor Druckman.

James Druckman, professor of political science at the University of Rochester: Thank you for having me.

Knispel: What do you make of the fact that several top Republican candidates have so far refused to pledge that they will accept the outcome of the November election results? Is that something that, as a political scientist, worries you?

Druckman: Yes, I think that it’s worrisome insofar as even the most minimal definition of a democracy requires an electoral transfer of power when it’s appropriate. And so, you know, any concern that elites would not conform to that expectation is concerning. On the other hand, you know, there are obviously political-rhetorical reasons to do that. Insofar as a lot of the people that have not pledged to accept the election outcome are people who are vying to become the vice-presidential candidate for Trump. You know one likes to hope that it’s a bit of playing games rhetorically. But it certainly is concerning insofar as it can lead citizens then to not anticipate acceptance of the outcome.

Knispel: Do you think once one of them will have been picked as a VP, they will turn around and play by political rules again or by democratic rules again?

Druckman: I certainly don’t think they will through the election. I think the hope is that once the election is over, you know, and there will probably be legal challenges—potentially on either side—regardless of who wins the election. And once that process goes through, the hope is that most elites will accept the outcome of the election.

Knispel: I’d like to dig a little bit in about the role of elites, though, because I saw that you were writing about elites, the role of elites. And if I remember correctly, you said it’s what the elites do, rather than what public opinion thinks, that determines the strength or the health of our democracy.

Druckman: You know, ultimately, the institutions of democracy are upheld by elites who are making the laws, following the expectations of the democratic norms, and enforcing those norms. And so in that sense, the elites are playing the most proximate role to maintaining the stability of democracy. The question, though, is the extent to which citizens will be okay with elites eroding different democratic institutions. And the more leeway that elites get in that erosion process, the more they might exploit that for their own ends, either because they are authoritarian in themselves or they have some self-interested reasons to try to erode those systems. So I do think citizens can serve as a backstop to democratic erosion. But, ultimately, it’s the elite decisions that are probably are the ones that are going to decide the health of a democracy.

Knispel: And we should probably backtrack—what do you mean when you say “elites”?

Druckman: You know, I think of elites as elected officials but also kind of those who work in government. We can also think of elites as people who head interest groups, journalists, kind of, you know, people whose professions revolve around government and politics.

Knispel: Do you see a weakening of democratic norms among your students?

Druckman: I guess two answers. One is, if you step back, and you kind of look at what larger data collections would suggest—they do suggest kind of an age change insofar as younger voters, not just in the US but around the world, do seem more accepting of actions that a lot of people would construe as democratically erosive. And so, for example, you know, kind of restricting voting to favor your party or censoring people from the other party. And, you know, it’s not a surprising outcome insofar as if you think about the environment in which the current generation of young voters grew up. They grew up in the 21st century, where you saw a more polarized environment, you saw a lot of antidemocratic actions take place around the world, you saw erosion around the world. So, they’re kind of socialized into an environment where democratic norms are not taken as seriously as in previous generations. And I think a related concern is apathy. I think that is something I’ve seen in the classroom, generally speaking, insofar as I think a lot of younger people—they’re tired, they’re tired of politics, they’re tired of the conflictual nature. You know, by definition, politics is conflictual, but it’s gotten somewhat toxic. And I think even worse than the toxicity is the moralization, which I think can really lead people to want to disengage from politics, right? If they’re going to take a position and then kind of be yelled at as being incorrect—in a moralizing fashion so that they’re taking a position that others see is just fundamentally wrong—you know, that’s not a real incentive to want to engage in political discussions. And so, in that sense, there is a bit of a disengagement going on. And I have seen that in the classroom.

Knispel: I know you’ve done some work on that moralization that you just mentioned. And you found that the way that we see and that we talk about the opposition has changed. How so?

Druckman: This is a trend that’s been going on for at least about 30 years now. I think in the US we kind of saw that starting to change in the mid-1990s, where there was a shift in political rhetoric and there had been kind of research done on looking at the conversations that go on in Congress and how they speak to one another. And there’s been a shift towards less substantive conversations and much more painting the other side as the enemy and kind of morally corrupt on basic values of the country. That kind of carries over. And that kind of moral rhetoric then kind of spreads more quickly. That changed in how elites talk about politics. We also saw, obviously, a dramatic change in the communication mechanisms through which people are getting information, right. So, people were starting to get access to the internet, cable television was profusing all over the country, and then, of course, social media. And what we do see is that moralized rhetoric and toxic rhetoric, particularly about the other side, spreads much more quickly in social media, and, you know, that can have downstream effects on people’s political attitudes but also their willingness to engage in politics.

Knispel: And so, you’ve got apathy on one hand. And we also saw from recent opinion polls, and we’ve seen it in action on January 6—that sort of greater tolerance among voters for violence. Is that coming from the rhetoric, the toxic rhetoric?

Druckman: I really liked the way you kind of differentiated: You kind of see apathy on one hand, and then you kind of see something quite extreme on the other hand because, I think, that really nicely captures the threat right now to democracy, at least when you think about the population insofar as you have one group of voters who might be quite extreme, and they hold extreme opinions, and they’re willing to engage in extreme action—and that there could be kind of a response to that if there were other engaged voters that were willing to kind of take up and counter that. But if there’s a large group of voters who don’t want to engage, that gives a little bit more leeway to people who are more extreme. And yeah, it’s difficult to pinpoint causal relationships between particular lead actions and attitudes of the populace. But, you know, I think it is fairly clear that one of the underlying correlates of having violent attitudes is the willingness to dehumanize the other side. And we’ve certainly seen an increase in dehumanizing language amongst elites.

Knispel: How did we come to that?

Druckman: I mean, I think it really kind of began with the change in rhetoric. And I should say, I mean, there is an interesting historical component when I say, “change in rhetoric,” because it’s not like American politics, you know, was remarkably civil historically. As an aside, there is kind of this question of what were politics like before, you know, the 1940s and the 1950s when social science really started to study these types of things, and it’s certainly a possibility that we had this kind of particularly unique era, from kind of post–World War II through the end of the 20th century, where it was a little bit more civil than it had been in the past. So relative to kind of that era, you know, I think we started to see this change in rhetoric in the mid-1990s. And then we, you know—two things, I think, happened. One is, we saw politics kind of spread into lots of other areas of life that hadn’t been kind of part of politics before. And so, you know, that includes not only social decisions insofar as people’s willingness to kind of socialize with people from the other side. So, two examples of that—they have the studies of, kind of, “how upset would you be if a child of yours married somebody from the other family?” and they have data on that from the 1950s and 1960s. And, you know, people aren’t particularly upset about that. And, you know, by the 21st century, people are extremely upset about that possibility. And so, you know, it starts to spill over into those parts of life. And then you kind of have politicians more willing to kind of exploit the language that, you know, seems to kind of galvanize support. And I think part of that is an intersection of the advent of the Internet, which allowed politicians to directly speak to voters. You know, we often think about kind of technological change and the change of communication—from newspapers to radio to television and to cable television and to the internet. And I think one thing that’s really unique is once you got to the internet, and particularly social media, there [were] no longer journalists serving as kind of a middle person that could add some civility or balance, you know, giving politicians that direct access to speak to voters. In theory, that might sound very good, because then it’s untarnished, and it might be more authentic. But it also gives the possibility for politicians to release the type of rhetoric that galvanizes people from the extremes. And so, you know, I think that’s what we’ve seen.

Knispel: So maybe before we get to what can be done, let’s put a pin in that one. People say we’ve never been more polarized here in this country than we are now. Is that with the exception of the Civil War? Or is that actually really true?

Druckman: Yeah, that’s a great question. And obviously, people talk about polarization a lot. And I think what we’ve seen amongst, you know—I want to differentiate it in a few dimensions—I mean first we want to talk about kind of the difference between elected officials and voters. And what we see in elected officials quite clearly in Congress is that there has been a growth in the polarization of their issue positions over time, you know, starting kind of in the 1980s to the 1990s, we see that the Republicans and Democrats have become more divided on most issues and more homogenous in their beliefs on those issues. But again, it’s an interesting thing because in some sense it was that period from 1950 to the end of the 20th century where they were notably less divided. They had been as divided before, if you go back in history, and that’s something we actually do have a historical record on because we know what the roll call votes were, historically. And so when it comes to ideology and issue positions, elites have certainly become much more polarized but not necessarily more polarized than they once were.

If we go back historically, there’s a different type of polarization, which is disconnected from ideology or issue positions. And that’s just kind of how much you dislike the other party. And so political scientists call that “affective polarization” or “hostility.” And with that, we don’t have the historical record that we have on roll call votes. But we do have data going back into the early 1970s. And those trends suggest quite clearly that there has been a monotonic increase in polarization. So, we don’t really know what elites are doing on that type of polarization. But we know that voters have come to really dislike the other side more and more with every election cycle. That has been a constant linear trend since the 1970s. So, in that sense, there has been an increase in polarization.

Knispel: So do you think the US then is in danger of becoming ungovernable because you said that with every election cycle the polarization has gotten worse? Is it going to get worse and worse and worse—to the point where we are ungovernable?

Druckman: It’s a difficult question to answer. I mean, in some sense, governance is not working very well right now. Right. Congress has been very kind of dysfunctional, not passing legislation—in the last term, at least. I think it’s a question you want to ask about as “kind of ungovernable in the short term” or “kind of in the long term.” And I think in the long term there’s no reason to think that it would be ungovernable insofar as we will see a kind of new generation of people vying to become president. And we just don’t know what those individuals are going to kind of look like. You know, in the short term, I think we have to think about what is the composition of the government going to look like. You know, we have the presidential election; we also have the Senate and the House, you know, and what’s going on in the states? It’s a complex question because governance kind of occurs at so many levels of our lives, right? We can kind of talk about—is it going to become ungovernable at the local level? At the state level? At the federal level? Usually, when we talk about that, we’re thinking about the federal level. It depends on—is there going to be divided government or not? You know, in some sense, a divided government will lead to less things getting done. But there are certain necessary things that will get done. I think, regardless, we even saw this, you know, in the last four years: We did see some bipartisanship agreement, at least early in Biden’s term, such as the Inflation Reduction Act. You know, I think in that sense, governance will continue but will probably be a lot less efficient than it could otherwise be, at least in the near term.

Knispel: Let’s talk about election denialism. With the last election, we know that about one third of US voters still believe, and those numbers haven’t shifted, that President Biden is illegitimate—that he did not win the election—despite all proof to the contrary. So where does that leave us if Joe Biden were to win second election? Would most Republican voters just continue to consider him illegitimate?

Druckman: I think it’s entirely likely that a large bucket of those voters would continue to view him as illegitimate. It will depend somewhat on exactly what the outcome looks like. And again, kind of what the litigation will look like after that. I guess there’s the question of, kind of, what are the consequences of that belief? The fearful consequences are that people stop following laws or, you know, engage in violence. I don’t think we’ve seen widespread evidence of that. But I also don’t want to minimize that we have seen certainly an uptick in political threats and political violence at all levels—in local levels and national levels. And I think that there probably is a connection between those two things. And so I think there is definitely a concern about that. You know, I started off, and [to answer] your first question: When you deny an election that’s perhaps the gravest threat to democracy—since, again, you know, at any level—you have to have a transfer of power to have a democratic system. If there’s a large number of citizens who kind of hold the belief that a particular president is not legitimate, but the rest of the system is kind of working as it has since Biden’s election, you know that’s not necessarily a direct threat to democracy. It depends on kind of how they’re acting on those beliefs. And it doesn’t seem that, you know, the 33 percent, or whatever the percentage is right now—at some point it was much higher—were taking to the streets and continuing in January 6–type actions. And so in that sense it wasn’t a direct threat to the continuing of democracy. But it is certainly a direct threat to the functioning of democracy. So I’m drawing this distinction between how well democracy is functioning versus whether democracy is falling apart entirely. And again, very importantly—not to minimize—it’s a direct threat to the lives of people who are potentially the victims of violent actions or violent threats, which, again, we have seen just an enormous uptick in. You know, it’s hard to not imagine that that’s directly connected to the rhetoric and also claims of illegitimacy. And so that’s a grave concern. And, you know, we see that people are much less likely to want to be election judges this cycle. [There are] a lot of threats to elected officials of all types.

Knispel: Now, I know you’re not in the business of forecasting. You’re a scientist. So, bear with me and tell me if this is a fair question. How likely do you think, based on the observations and the data that you have, that there could be another January 6 uprising after this next election cycle?

Druckman: I mean, I presume that there were a lot of lessons learned from January 6 for police and other security. I think, depending on the outcome of the election, you could certainly see some movement towards that. But I suspect that there will be much more kind of preemptive measures taken and much more anticipation of what could potentially happen. I would kind of think that it’s probably not particularly likely that you’re going to get an event like that. And I will—I’ll give you an example of where that’s coming from. So, you might recall on Inauguration Day, there was enormous concern that there was going to be political violence. And, you know, I think you saw people on the far right were certainly suggesting that there should be political violence; they were suggesting there would be political violence in cities around the country. I think you saw a huge amount of effort put in by local law enforcement and federal law enforcement to kind of prevent any type of political violence on that day, and the day went off with no violence. I remember that day quite well because we were all kind of very interested about that possibility. And so, I think, because we’ve learned that lesson, I think that, you know, security, local police, they don’t want to see political violence on that level. So I think it’s fairly unlikely we’ll see that. I think the greater concern are these upticks in isolated incidents of violence that aren’t necessarily what we call “mob violence” but violence that goes on in locations because it’s become fairly normalized, as we’ve kind of discussed and, you know, that could obviously do a lot of damage to individuals. It might not be as grave of a threat to the existence of the system, but it certainly is pretty concerning, you know, in terms of violence and harm that it can do.

Knispel: We talked a little earlier about what you think would happen if Joe Biden won a second term and in the context of acceptance, widespread acceptance as a legitimate leader. Let’s turn this around. What if Donald Trump wins the election? Do you agree with those who say that US democracy would be really in acute peril?

Druckman: I mean, I think it’s an open question. I think Donald Trump has obviously indicated clear antidemocratic attitudes and antidemocratic actions. He’s made very clear in, kind of, his plans for the second term that he would deconstruct a lot of the executive administration and do away with many departments. And, you know, in that sense, I think the government that we’d be looking at would look quite different potentially from the government that we are experiencing today. You know, I think it will come down to the extent to which how far can he go, given kind of legal precedent and kind of what the legal system will allow? And then we also, kind of, have the federalism as another check on federal power. And so, you know, how far would states go in kind of the devolution of democratic procedures? And I think that it is definitely something one should be worried about. I don’t think it is deterministic. I don’t think the election of Donald Trump necessitates that democracy will cease to exist. I think it is something that one can worry about. And I think that is something one should worry about. I think there will be a lot of reaction in terms of trying to go to steps to prevent certain devolution of norms by people who care about democracy. And so, you know, I think it’ll depend on kind of the response to that. I do think he’s made clear that he is going to take steps to do away with certain democratic norms.

Knispel: Does a sitting US president have the right to close or do away with federal departments?

Druckman: That’s a legal question that I don’t know the exact answer to. You know, there were only three departments at the start of the country. And so I suspect there are procedures to do away with departments. And so it is part of the executive branch, and the president oversees the executive branch. And so in that sense, yeah, I think a president could do that.

Knispel: Now, you said it also comes down to how, I guess, the populace—we the people—respond, or how other elites respond. Are you confident that they will respond, that they will take a stance if there is an outright power grab by a sitting president?

Druckman: Yes, I am confident that there will be a response. I mean, it kind of comes back to—why I was talking about it—it will also depend at the federal level to, kind of, what does the composition of Congress look like. And so, you know, in the end Congress controls the purse strings. And so that, kind of, limits what the executive can do. I do think that there will be a response. I think that there will be lots of efforts undertaken to try to bring attention to any antidemocratic efforts that are being taken. There are certain things that presidents can do, like the power to pardon. I don’t think there’s any way around that. And so, if Trump is reelected and he wants to really pardon everybody who was arrested from January 6, I don’t think there’s a lot that anyone can do about that. But there are other things, you know; if Trump wants to kind of do away with the Department of Education, for example, he might be able to do that. But, you know, states could take countermeasures. You could start to try to move some of those oversight responsibilities within other departments to try to, kind of, keep funding for education as it was. The legal establishment will play a large role in this kind of what is allowable or not allowable. But I do think there’ll be a pretty strong effort to kind of at least make it transparent to exactly what’s going on. I think what’s been part of the difficulty of this campaign for the Democrats is that they’ve tried to make it very transparent to voters what the plan is for Trump, and I don’t think that’s resonating with voters very well. I think if Trump is elected and then starts to take actual actions that people might find concerning, you know, then that messaging might be more resonant with voters. And, you know, you could see kind of a change in kind of who’s elected at the state level. If Donald Trump was elected, I wouldn’t say that, you know, it’s just going to kind of immediately be the end of democratic government.

Knispel: But we also know that a democracy usually doesn’t just walk over a cliff. It’s that slow drip and erosion.

Druckman: Absolutely. Right! Which is why I don’t think that we’ll see this kind of sudden change, but it will be the kind of this continued slow drip somewhat. And so it will depend on the extent to which there are efforts made to kind of stop the slow drip. And, you know, make sure people are enfranchised, make sure that information is still getting out, that journalism is still able to kind of report. You know, I think those are, kind of, some of the greater threats to the extent that an administration can try to censor the press is something that’s, you know, a grave threat. I think the extent to which they’re going to disenfranchise different populations is one of the gravest threats…

Knispel: Do you mean through gerrymandering?

Druckman: …through gerrymandering, or, you know, explicit voter ID laws that are kind of draconian, you know, moving polling places around so it’s difficult to vote, doing away with early voting—things like that.

Knispel: If I asked you what would be sort of the top three or top four—in your book—areas that are most at risk for democratic weakening, what would you say?

Druckman: Yes, that’s a great question. I mean, I do think kind of the threat to kind of the flow of information is particularly concerning. And so, you know, I think, you know, we’ve often talked about kind of the media’s serving as a fourth estate: that [there are] the three branches of government and the media. And we do know that it’s essential for any democratic polity to have a freedom of the press. And, you know, without that you start to do away with democracy. So, I think that’s certainly something to keep an eye on. You know, especially the media system is obviously kind of splintered, given the profusion of media outlets. And so there’s kind of the threat of the censoring of media outlets and kind of giving them access to governmental information. And then [there are] kind of efforts to make sure people are getting kind of that information. So, I think that’s definitely something I would put up there as a concern.

I think another concern is kind of disenfranchisement—you know, both in terms of kind of explicit voting rights but also kind of rights to protest, kind of rights to assemble, you know, First Amendment rights. What we’ve seen historically is, you know, as rights come and come, you know, there’s then kind of a backlash to the extension of those rights. And you know, we’ve kind of been in an era of the backlash in the last, you know, decade or so. And so, you know, I think that’s another thing to, kind of, watch really closely, especially as the population continues to diversify. And as that happens there’s often a kind of a backlash in terms of trying to not let people who are from diverse backgrounds get the rights as easily. So I think that’s certainly a concern.

I think another concern is a kind of institutional trust. You know, one thing that we have seen, which is, I think, quite alarming when we talk about polarization—when I talked about it earlier, I talked about kind of the feelings between the two sides—Democrats versus Republicans. I think one of the really grave concerns that we’ve seen is that we have a set of institutions that govern society or make society work, and that includes the military, police, scientific institutions, educational institutions, doctors, hospitals, the press. And what we’ve seen over time, right, if you go back to the 1970s or the 1980s, you know, the trusts in those institutions were fairly high, and they were fairly homogenous—it didn’t really matter if you were a Democrat or Republican. If you look at it today, the trust is still pretty high, higher than a lot of people might suspect, like people still generally trust scientists. The trick though is—it’s become very polarized. And so right now we kind of see this across institutions. So, like, when it comes to science—if you go back to the 1970s, Republicans had a bit more trust in scientists than Democrats. And now you see this out of all the institutions that’s the institution that’s polarized the most, and you see this massive gap in trust. So even if average trust is not low, you see this big divide on trust. And we can see that when you look at other institutions; you can see it when you look at educational institutions, the press, the military, police. What that means is that people are going to follow the dictates of those institutions in different ways. And they’re going to kind of interact with one another in different ways and kind of follow different types of advice. Obviously COVID kind of exemplified the problems that can arise when you get a polarization of trust—in science in that case. Right, we kind of saw one side following scientific advice and the other side not following scientific advice. And, you know, one of the consequences was, regardless of what side you’re on, you saw a massive discoordination, which, you know, undermined the ability of the country to respond. And so that would be a third area.

You know, a fourth area—very quickly—would be kind of educational institutions and the extent to which those have also become quite polarized. And this kind of comes back to, you know, the point I made earlier about the socialization processes that are going on for kind of current generations of people in school. And I think that’s a concern because educational institutions do have a civic mission—they have a civic responsibility to produce citizens. And though in that sense we expect there to be some kind of civic education, what that civic education looks like is under very intense debate. It’s always been under debate, but it’s become intensified. You kind of see on one side, on the left, you see kind of much more emphasis on talking about the plight of people who have been historically disenfranchised and kind of the experiences they’ve gone through. And on the right, you kind of see trying to think about history in the way that had been taught, kind of, in the 1950s, in the 1960s. And so you have very different visions of what education should look like. And, you know, that’s obviously become very intense, especially at the local level, as we kind of saw around things like critical race theory, we saw, particularly in Virginia, you know, a few election cycles ago. And you know, that’s, that’s really problematic for the young people who are in school and kind of what that’s going to do to them as citizens and kind of coming back to, they’re either going to kind of, you know, again, I think the way you characterize it was really apt, you kind of end up with people who are engaged but fairly extreme—or disengaged. And that’s not a functional society. So I think those are the four areas that I would be most worried about.

Knispel: So, now you’ve laid out all the problems, and there are many. And it’s so depressing. Let’s circle back to what we started with earlier—which is what can be done. What can people like you do? What can other institutions do?

Druckman: It’s a hard question, you know, and I think…

Knispel: There’s no silver bullet; we understand that.

Druckman: Yes, exactly. There’re a few things to keep in mind. I think first you want to contextualize it insofar as, you know, when I did talk about kind of that polarization of trust in these institutions…if you put aside the political institutions—so obviously, like if you have trust in the presidency or the executive—that flip flops around [depending] on kind of who controls the presidency. But, you know, trust in those institutions that I listed off before—like science and education and military and police—it’s polarized, and that’s really concerning. But the trust is higher than most people realize. And so there is still kind of a level of trust that a lot of people don’t recognize. The perception of the divide in this country is greater than the divide itself. So there are divides, and then there [are] perceptions of divides. And those perceptions dwarf the actual divides. And so one of the things that, you know, ideally we can try to do—is try to get people to perceive the other side as not as distant from themselves as they might think they are. And that might kind of facilitate engagement. So that leads to the question of like, well, how do we correct, kind of, [that] misperception, especially given [that] people live in very different media ecosystems? And, you know, again, that kind of comes back to educational institutions, which is why I do worry a lot about educational institutions but also kind of local civic institutions and kind of, you know, being a gathering place for people to kind of interact with one another from different perspectives. And so, I think, you know, putting kind of more weight on kind of local solutions to things is an important thing to be thinking about.

One of the uplifting things is you do see this proliferation of these civic organizations that are trying to address this thing. There’s one in Rochester called Civic Genius, which does all kinds of activities to try to bridge divides between—it might be Democrat and Republicans, it might be Israelis and Palestinians—they tried to kind of bring different sides together. And I think those can be quite impactful. I don’t think you’re going to see—oh suddenly, like, “oh, things are harmonious.” But, you know, given the counterfactual of what it might look like without those types of organizations, you know, we’re probably in a better place for the existence of those organizations. And so I think that’s one positive thing that’s going on. I think, to the extent that we can try to get educational institutions to, you know, not buy into kind of some of the polarizing rhetoric that has gone on and [to] remember kind of a mission of educational institution—there is a mission to create democratic citizens. And so we should all kind of remember that. You know, obviously, it’s been a trying year for educational institutions, and kind of trying to figure out exactly the best way forward is, I think, a challenge for educational institutions. So those are all kinds of behavioral interventions where we’re trying to kind of alter people’s beliefs or their attitudes.

There are kind of these more kind of meta questions of kind of the institutions of democracy. I think one thing that’s become clear is that the institutions as devised in 1789 were not necessarily, you know, anticipating some of the population movements that we see today. So we have, you know, things that are clearly antimajoritarian institutions, like the composition of the Senate and the Electoral College. I think we can have these discussions about like how can we change those institutions. I think those are kind of healthy discussions to have. You also don’t want to just be spending all your time having those discussions while democracy fades away because the realistic situation is that changing those institutions is probably not going to happen given what it takes to change those institutions. And so, I think you have to kind of think about what are ways that we can kind of work within those institutions to try to have healthier conversations. And I do think that there are elites that kind of recognize that and kind of want to work within those institutions. I think we can kind of see that at the state level; we can kind of see there are certain individuals in federal government that can work that way. And so, you know, I do come back to, you know, we will get a new generation of leadership, and what that generation will look like will be very important.

I’ll kind of end with a quick anecdote. My first class I ever taught was right before the 2000 election, and I talked about the Electoral College—nobody had ever heard of it. They thought it was fanciful that this would be a relevant thing. And then, of course, the 2000 election, you know, Gore won the popular vote but didn’t win the election. And, you know, that was kind of a signal of a change in kind of how politics operated. And I think now, you kind of [can] talk to anybody and they understand what the Electoral College is. They understand more about democracy. And, you know, having those conversations at a time when a lot has happened to make one worry about democracy is a positive response. And so, in that sense, the hope is that we kind of can rely on civic organizations, we can rely on media, and we can rely on educational institutions to form somewhat of a bulwark against [the] kind of erosion that could be going on. And so I think what is left out of a lot of conversations about democratic decline is the role of these civic organizations, and I think that’s an important thing that political scientists and more general conversations need to pay attention to.

Knispel: Looking ahead—25 years from now—will we have a healthy democracy in this country?

Druckman: I would guess that we will. I don’t know how much I would, you know, bet on that. But, you know, I think the institutions are designed in a way to have checks and balances, which I think can become very handy, which is kind of interesting in and of itself insofar as those same checks and balances can lead to a lot of gridlock and a lot of frustrations. And it’s not necessarily a great system in terms of how democracies function because it’s really hard to get things done. But at the end of the day, that could be a saving grace of democracy insofar as we have the branches checking each other—we have the state governments checking the federal government, and then, you know, we have these civic organizations. The hope is that those will help sustain democracy. And so, you know, I like to be more optimistic on this front. And so I think people want democracy. They have different interpretation of what that means. But I think that there is some general agreement at the end of the day—and so that’s the hope.

Knispel: Let’s finish on that positive note. Thank you so much, Professor Druckman, for this interview.

Druckman: Yes, thank you.

Knispel: That was James Druckman, professor of political science at the University of Rochester, and I’m Sandra Knispel for the University of Rochester. Thank you so much.

It is obvious to almost everyone living in America that partisan hostility has reached a fever pitch.

But how much does that matter to everyday life in the United States? After all, partisanship is as old as the country itself.

A new book by some of the foremost scholars on polarization, including James Druckman, the Martin Brewer Anderson Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester, offers an answer to that question by distilling empirical evidence as to the consequences of partisan animus.

The upshot? Partisan hostility alone is unlikely to lead to the collapse of American democracy. But it nonetheless does have a deleterious effect on democracy and could erode democratic institutions and functioning over time.

How is detailed in Partisan Hostility and American Democracy: Explaining Political Divisions and When They Matter, published on June 12 (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Its authors, in addition to Druckman, are Samara Klar, of the University of Arizona; Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, of the University of Michigan; and Matthew Levendusky, of the University of Pennsylvania.

The book’s release coincides with the ramp up to the presidential election, which pits President Joseph Biden against former President Donald Trump in a rematch that is already nibbling at the connective tissue that binds Americans.

Indeed, a 2022 Pew Research Center study found that most enrolled Democrats and Republicans use words like “immoral,” “dishonest,” and “unintelligent” to describe their counterparts on the other side of the aisle. Most Republicans surveyed also called Democrats “lazy.”

“I think that is something to be fearful of, the normalization of what can devolve into dehumanizing, inciting rhetoric,” Druckman says. “It has consequences for what people think of other groups. It has consequences for what people think of democracy.”

Druckman and his coauthors offer a nuanced evaluation of when and how partisan animosity matters by drawing on panel survey data from 2019 through 2021—tumultuous years marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, mass demonstrations for social and racial justice following the murder of George Floyd, the insurrection at the US Capitol, and two presidential impeachments.

They found that partisan hostility has degraded politics by politicizing previously non-political issues, such as questioning science and expertise and government agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, and undermining compromise. They argue that those things alone are not necessarily enough to undermine democracy, though, because they found that hostility does not directly relate to the most egregious actions, such as support for violence.

But, they warn, party leaders and elected officials can gradually get away with taking undemocratic actions as a response to the lack of compromise. This is, in part, because partisans holding high levels of animosity for their counterparts and blind loyalty to their party either endorse such behavior or do not recognize it as facilitating the erosion of democracy.

In the end, the authors conclude, the future of American democracy depends on how politicians, more than ordinary voters, behave.

“In a stable democracy such as the United States, citizens can, in theory, act as a check,” they write. “But if animosity undermines functioning and even a few (political) elites exploit frustrated citizens for a power grab—under the guise of getting things done, disingenuously attributing blame to other citizens, or referencing relatively less democratic outcomes in the past—democracy becomes imperiled.”