Below is a reading list that addresses crucial themes related to the Democracy in Troubled Times Initiative.
Featured Speakers
Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler. 2018. Prius or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide. Boston: Mariner Books.
James Druckman and Elizabeth Sharrow. 2023. Equality Unfulfilled: How Title IX's Policy Design Undermines Change to College Sports. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Danielle Allen. 2023. Justice By Means of Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Eddie Glaude, Jr. 2024. We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Efrén Pérez and E. Enya Kuo. 2021. Racial Order, Racialized Responses: Interminority Politics in a Diverse Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dara Strolovitch. 2023. When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
On Backsliding
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown.
Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman. 2020. Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy. St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
Nancy Bermeo. 2016. “On Democratic Backsliding.” Journal of Democracy, 27(1): pp. 5-19.
Nancy Bermeo. 2003. Ordinary people in extraordinary times: The citizenry and the breakdown of democracy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Jacob Grumbach. 2022. Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Robert C. Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, and Kenneth M. Roberts (eds.). 2021. Democratic Resilience: Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
History of U.S. Democracy
Alexis de Tocqueville. 2003. Democracy in America. London: Penguin Classics.
Rogers Smith, 1993. “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America.” The American Political Science Review 87(3).
W.E.B. DuBois. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Adolph Reed. 2022. The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives. London Verso Books.
Cedric de Leon, Cedric. 2019. Crisis! When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Dean Robinson. 2001. Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Polarization
Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler. 2018.. Prius Or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide. United States: HarperCollins.
Lilliana Mason. 2018. Uncivil Disagreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik. 2020. “Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States.” American Political Science Review, 114(2): 392-409.
Geoffrey C. Layman, Thomas M. Carsey, Juliana Menasce Horowitz. 2006. “Party Polarization in American Politics: Characteristics, Causes, and Consequences.” Annual Review of Political Science 9: 83-110.
Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner. 2015. Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
James Druckman, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, Matthew Levendusky, and John Ryan. 2024. Partisan Hostility and American Democracy: Explaining Political Divisions and When They Matter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
What is Democracy?
Robert Dahl, Ian Shapiro, & José Antonio Cheibub (eds). 2003. The Democracy Sourcebook. London: The MIT Press.
Jeremy Waldon. 2009. “A Majority in a Lifeboat.” Boston University Law Review. 90: 1043-2010.
Seyla Benhabib (ed.). 1996. Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Philippe Schmitter and Terry Karl. 1991. “What Democracy Is...and Is Not.” Journal of Democracy, 2(3): 75-88.
Astra Taylor. 2019. Democracy May Not Exist But We'll Miss it When It's Gone. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books.
Angela Davis. 2005. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. Chico, CA: AK Press.
The Right to Vote
Alexander Keyysar. 2009. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.
Amel Ahmed. 2015. Democracy and the Politics of Electoral Systems Choice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
David Bateman. 2018. Disenfranchising Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dawn Teele. 2018. Forging the Franchise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jesse Rhodes. 2017. Ballot Blocked: The Political Erosion of the Voting Rights Act. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen. 2006. Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Intergroup Relations
Monica McDermott. 2006. Working-class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp. 2013. When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact. New York. Taylor & Francis.
Arlie Russell Hochschild. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. NewYork: New Press.
Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley. 2022. Work in Black and White: Striving for the American Dream. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.