Reading List

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.