A key rule of democratic politics is that judges should be independent of political interference. Judicial decisions should be contested in courts of appeal, not in the court of public opinion or through Congressional sanctions, such as impeachment proceedings and investigations.

Court-baiting and attacks on judges

That is not what is happening in America today. Donald Trump routinely insults judges who rule against him, calling them “corrupt,” “a disgrace,” “unpatriotic,” “unamerican,” and “an embarrassment.” He has also called on judges to be suspended and disbarred. His main complaint is not about procedure, but about their decisions. Donald Trump goes after judges when he dislikes the outcomes of the case.

And these complaints have been heeded. The US Department of Justice is compiling lists of “egregious” judges for review. Republicans in Congress have filed articles of impeachment against several federal judges (here, here, here). One of those resolutions cites a judge’s political contributions and public comments as grounds for removal. At the same time, there is evidence that the US government has systematically ignored judicial orders altogether.

Republican attacks on judges are more serious because the party holds power. But this has been a bipartisan tactic: Democrats have threatened to impeach conservative Supreme Court justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts. Scholars call this practice “court baiting”: politicians refer emotionally charged cases to the courts, and when the decision doesn’t go their way, they question the authority and legitimacy of judges. When such tactics are used, the primary loser is democracy and the rule of law. To be sure, the blame for “court-baiting” rests with political elites who knowingly abuse the power they hold. However, the American public is not exactly an innocent bystander. And here is how.

People don’t always disapprove of questioning judges’ legitimacy

Most citizens do not believe that penalizing judges for decisions politicians don’t like is legitimate. However, my research finds that people’s rejection of such penalties against judges is soft and malleable, and influenced by people’s prior attitudes and the direction of the decision.

When people dislike a judge’s decision, they become less likely to reject undemocratic penalties against judges, such as investigations of their private lives and conduct, impeachment, and removal. They are also less likely to object to elected officials ignoring judicial decisions.

Back in 2019, long before this wave of attacks on judicial independence, I ran an online survey experiment. I randomly assigned people to read a short story about a judge who decided on either an uncontroversial, popular issue (requiring insurance carriers to cover pre-existing conditions) or an emotionally charged issue that tends to divide people (flying the Confederate flag in public places). Among those respondents assigned to the Confederate flag story, half were told that the judge allowed the locality to fly the flag in public places, and the other half that he allowed the locality to ban it.

“Jefferson County Courthouse, Beaumont, Texas 1805311219” by Patrick Feller, CC BY 2.0

Respondents were then asked whether they supported or opposed imposing undemocratic penalties on the judge, such as investigating the judge’s personal life and finances, requiring the judge to resign, investigating the judge’s political activity, and considering the decision null and void. These are all the actions the federal government is taking today.

If the public approached these penalties as a question of democracy, they would strongly disagree with such actions, regardless of the judge’s decision. As Chief Justice Roberts said in 2025, disagreement should be adjudicated by filing an appeal, not by endorsing penalties against judges whose decisions we don’t like.

Identity influences attitudes towards punishing judges for their decisions

Yet my results show that people became less likely to reject such penalties when the decision threatened their identity. Specifically, the results show that racial conservatives (those who oppose race-conscious policies) inched closer to endorsement of penalties when the judge allowed the ban of the Confederate flag. They go from an average of 19 points of predicted support to 45 points of support (where zero support means rejecting every proposed penalty and 100 means endorsing all of them). The change we see suggests a shift from rejection to ambivalence. Racial conservatives no longer reject penalties; rather, they register a “maybe”.

This is not a shift that happens only on the right; racial liberals moved in the same direction, with the same intensity, from rejection to ambivalence when the judge is described as allowing the locality to fly the flag (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – Predicted mean support for undemocratic penalties among white Americans

This is not simply a partisan effect: within Democrats and Republicans, racial liberals and conservatives moved in this direction.

What is more, As Figure 2 shows, Latinos and especially racial liberals show similar responses to their white counterparts, shifting from 29 percentage points to 58 percentage points from the health insurance ruling to the Confederate flag upholding ruling. Latino racial conservatives show a more muted response to the judge’s ban decision, likely because this issue structures the Black-White divide and is not a salient concern for this group.

Figure 2 – Predicted mean support for undemocratic penalties against judges

This demonstrates that White and minority respondents approach judicial independence through their identities rather than as a question of democratic principle. Much like Trump, their understanding of judicial bias is not based on a judge’s deviations from proper procedure, but on the substance of the decision.

Public support for democratic principles is fragile

The preferences of racial conservatives and racial liberals in my study are not morally equivalent. One side wants to remove a symbol of racial hate from public property; the other wants to keep it flying. But forbearance toward judges is meaningful precisely because it must hold when our grievance is a just one. If the rule bends whenever the cause is compelling, it is not a rule; it is a preference.

To be sure, most people do not shift from rejection to outright support for investigations, impeachments, and removals when they encounter a judicial decision they dislike. That is the good news. However, our tendency to shift to ambivalence — neither support nor opposition — of such penalties exposes a vulnerability in the public’s support for democratic principles that can be exploited by political elites.

My study does not test whether elite endorsement of undemocratic penalties against judges whose rulings they disfavor may push co-partisan citizens to endorse them as well. However, existing research on how the partisan public responds to elite violations of democratic norms (here, here) and even to political violence strongly suggests that people will follow their leaders and endorse violations of the rule of law.

Court baiting has real consequences for judges

Why does ambivalence matter if most people still reject undemocratic penalties? Because ambivalence is all an official who lacks respect for democracy needs.

Four of the seven penalties I asked about are investigations: of a judge’s finances, of their political activity, and of their family’s finances. None requires proof of wrongdoing to inflict damage. A judge under investigation hires counsel at their own expense, on a public salary, and recovers nothing when the inquiry ends in nothing. Their family’s records become public, and their reputation is impugned.

And judges cannot answer back. The professional norms that protect judicial neutrality forbid a judge from defending their reasoning outside the courtroom. The rules that make judges impartial are the same rules that leave them vulnerable. This is what makes a Justice Department list of “egregious” judges dangerous. Court-baiting is not political theater. Opening a file does not require a public that endorses punishment. It only requires a public that has stopped objecting.

• This article is based on the paper, “Judicial Independence on Trial: Judicial Decisions on Culturally Charged Issues and Public Support for Undemocratic Penalties on Judges” in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.
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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.

The post Americans’ support for judicial independence may depend on whether they like the judge’s decision first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

Robert Kennedy Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement campaigns on a promise of personal empowerment: Americans who may justifiably feel left behind by detached and often underserving healthcare institutions have the absolute right to decide what’s best for themselves, regardless of what the experts say. But how has this idea been put into practice? We’re now a year and a half into RFK Jr’s tenure as US Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the effect of his MAHA cure is starting to show. Americans aren’t being handed more control over their health; rather, they are now more easily able to make uninformed decisions due to the erosion of the entire system itself.

The trustworthiness of a public institution doesn’t disappear overnight. It decays through growing confusion: leaders who come and go, advice that shifts without explanation, and official information that doesn’t feel so official. On all three fronts, the story of RFK Jr’s management is of an institution being hollowed out from within.

Normalizing the revolving door

In late July 2025, Susan Monarez was appointed as the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Less than a month later she was fired by the White House after reportedly refusing to endorse vaccine policy changes she felt lacked scientific backing. Her removal triggered a wave of resignations among senior CDC officials, several of whom said that they could not remain while the agency’s science was being censored. This case is just one example of the revolving door of officials being appointed and later removed for not being aligned with the MAHA agenda.

Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill, a former Silicon Valley investor with no medical background, stepped in as acting director after Monarez. By February 2026 he too was gone, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Jay Bhattacharya taking over the CDC on an interim basis. For most of this year, essentially, the nation’s most important public health body has operated without a permanent, Senate-approved leader. The coming days will reveal if the current pick for director, former Deputy Surgeon General, Dr Erica Schwartz, will be confirmed.

This constant instability creates a murky environment for public health workers, clinicians and state officials across the US who depend on the CDC’s provision of a clear policy strategy. What we’re seeing is likely not incidental: this game of CDC director musical chairs has been a flagship occurrence of RFK Jr’s tenure ever since his appointment. This “structured” leadership instability blurs the lines of where policy is heading or who has the authority to set it, fragmenting the accountability that lets the public know whose judgment informs nationwide public health advice.

The legitimization of scepticism

RFK Jr’s championing of self-governance and vaccine hesitancy became institutionally legitimized through his rebuilding of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee. In June 2025, Kennedy dismissed all seventeen sitting members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the expert panel whose recommendations determine vaccine eligibility and insurance coverage. He replaced them with a smaller group that included several well-known vaccine sceptics. Further appointments followed through late 2025 and into 2026, and the committee’s governing charter was rewritten in ways that disproportionately reframed its task around vaccine risk rather than the balance of risk and benefit. Media outlets displayed contrasting reactions to the news, creating a climate of confusion and mixed signals.

The framing of all this, as seen on US Department of Health & Human Services HHS website, is the restoration of public trust. But installing figures who have built their reputations questioning vaccines can only augment existing scepticism and further confuse those on the margins. Vaccine hesitancy has been on the rise in the US and has become increasingly a matter of political debate marked by a clear partisan split. The difference now is that this scepticism that in the past seldom bested scientific arguments has now been institutionally legitimized, allowing RFK Jr’s counter narratives to migrate from the margins to the centre.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Minneapolis Press Conference” by Chad Davis, CC BY 4.0

Championing freedom by removing it

Publicly, Kennedy has consistently dubbed himself a “freedom of choice” figure who has no intention of taking vaccines away from those who want them. The reality, however, is far more complicated. Over the course of 2025, the federal government narrowed its COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, with the Food and Drug Administration limiting approval of shots largely to adults over 65 and younger people with qualifying health conditions. Because pharmacies in many states can only administer vaccines that sit on the CDC’s recommended schedule, many healthy adults who want to be vaccinated against COVID-19 now must go through the extra hurdle of first acquiring a doctor’s prescription.

These changes caused nationwide inconsistencies. Some pharmacy chains restricted shots to those meeting the new criteria; governors in states such as New York issued executive orders to preserve access; dozens of states moved independently to let pharmacists vaccinate without a prescription. For an ordinary person, the practical question “can I get this vaccine?” no longer has a national answer. And when answers are provided, they are no longer simple and direct: vaccine eligibility now depends on age, health status, state of residence, and so on.

RFK Jr’s freedom of choice rhetoric is therefore quite tricky. No one is being formally denied a vaccine, and personal freedom remains technically intact. But exercising this right of choice has now been made far more complicated, troublesome, and potentially more expensive than it ever was previously. The empowerment narrative used by RFK Jr to resonate with the medically underserved communities is now actively working against the very people it claimed to serve.

Casting doubt over data

RFK Jr’s erosion of trust does not stop at policy, reaching government data itself. Following executive orders issued in the administration’s first days, federal health agencies took down or modified many of their own webpages and datasets, from youth risk behaviour surveys to HIV prevention guidance. A federal judge ordered that these resources be restored, however, what returned was in some cases stamped with an unprecedented disclaimer. Visitors to certain restored CDC pages, such as the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey System, the US’ premier health behaviour survey, are now met with a banner explaining that the datasets and related information are online only because a court required it, additionally declaring that any information on the webpage “promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from truth,” that the administration “rejects” it, and that the page “does not reflect reality.”

This is bizarre; a government agency is publishing its own verified, previously authoritative public health data while simultaneously instructing the reader to not believe parts of it. While the disclaimers focus specifically on gender ideology-related information, the effects of these statements risk eroding trust in the institutions collecting the data altogether. Researchers analysing these banners have described the practice as a form of official disinformation: the state using its own platform to cast doubt on the evidence it is legally obliged to provide. This entire situation can have dangerous spillover effects on public trust and institutional authority, as well as on research that uses such data. If the CDC itself is telling you its data is not to be trusted, then what is left to rely on?

The systematic erosion of institutional trust

The developments RFK Jr has spearheaded in the institutions he oversees are not simply a series of single, unrelated controversial decisions. They represent a systematic erosion of the institutions and their accompanying assumptions most Americans have always treated as fixed points: that the CDC director is a credible and credentialed scientist, that vaccine recommendations reflect expert consensus, that official data can be believed. These assumptions, which have become increasingly questioned ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, are now being challenged by the government itself.

RFK Jr’s approach seemingly works through a steady flow of public health ambiguity and quiet contradiction: nothing is quite settled and no source is quite trustworthy. This context creates the type of environment where counter-narratives based on pseudo-science can proliferate, and where a figure promoting “freedom of choice”, now on the inside, can produce the very conditions that make institutional distrust feel reasonable.

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The post RFK Jr’s undermining of vaccine science and official data is eroding institutional confidence in American healthcare first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

Indian Americans are among the fastest growing and most politically engaged immigrant communities in the United States, and for decades they have voted reliably Democratic. That allegiance has begun to erode as Republican support among Indian American voters rose from 21 to 26 percent between 2020 and 2024. Core Democratic identification fell from 56 percent to 47 percent, matched by gains in Republican-leaning voters. The 2024 election also revealed a pronounced gender divide: two-thirds of Indian American women voters backed Kamala Harris compared to only half of male voters, while Trump support increased to 39 percent among males versus 22 percent among females. Among voters under 40, males were nearly evenly split, while females favored Harris by 60 percent. Against this backdrop, several Indian Americans have moved into the most visible tier of Republican politics: Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy as 2024 presidential candidates, Kash Patel as FBI Director, and Harmeet Dhillon as the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the US Department of Justice.

The contemporary Republican coalition, particularly under Trump, has grown more openly nationalist and more skeptical of immigration and identity politics. All four figures have faced overt racism from within their own party, Trump mocking Haley’s birth name, or conservative activist Ann Coulter telling Ramaswamy that she would not have voted for him “because you’re an Indian.” The hostility and resistance to conservatives of color raises several important questions about identity, race and religion.

How do these leaders of color reconcile tensions within their own party, and how do they present themselves as fully American and fully conservative within a movement still organized, implicitly or explicitly, around whiteness and Christian identity? How can conservatives of color navigate their ethnic, religious, and immigrant identities within the Republican Party and how can minority politicians find acceptance and success in a party that has traditionally emphasized assimilation, nationalism, and color-blind approaches to race? Case studies of the experiences of Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Kash Patel and Harmeet Dhillon can help us to understand these questions.

What the case studies show

Each figure manages identity differently, but the strategies form a pattern:

Former Governor of South Carolina and 2024 president candidate, Nikki Haley converted to Christianity, anglicized her given name, and at one point listed her race as white on an official document. Her public rhetoric minimizes ethnicity almost entirely, favoring a generic American success narrative.

Entrepreneur and 2024 president candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, takes the opposite tack on the surface, speaking openly about his Hindu faith, but he frames Hindu values as essentially interchangeable with Christian ones, a move that lets him court evangelical conservatives without religious conversion.

FBI Director Kash Patel rarely addresses his ethnic background publicly, reserving it for largely ceremonial moments. His public identity is built instead around combative, militaristic, anti-establishment rhetoric that foregrounds conspiracy theories.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon is visibly and consistently Sikh in public settings, yet her legal career has centered on dismantling diversity initiatives, restricting voting access, and opposing civil rights protections, pairing religious visibility with policy positions that work against many of the protections those same communities have historically relied on.

“Nikki Haley” by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0

Religion and meritocracy are used strategically by South Asian Republicans

A major finding of my study is that all four politicians manage their identities strategically, in different ways. Some emphasize their cultural or religious backgrounds when it is politically useful, while others downplay those aspects of their identity and focus instead on shared conservative values. For all four figures, ethnic and religious identity functions less as a source of solidarity and more as a strategic resource, something to display, downplay, or reframe depending on what the political moment requires. Religion in particular becomes a vehicle for belonging and all lean on narratives of individual merit and hard work, which has the effect of sidestepping any sustained discussion of structural racism.

I also find that all four leaders strongly promote ideas of meritocracy and self-reliance presenting their own success stories as evidence that hard work and determination are the keys to advancement, rather than focusing on structural barriers or systemic discrimination. They tend to support narratives that emphasize individual responsibility over collective solutions to inequality, side-stepping a valuable opportunity to address and redress systemic inequities. Identity functions less as a source of political solidarity and more as a tool that can be emphasized, reshaped, or muted depending on the political context.

Balancing heritage with conservatism

Success within Republican politics appears to require a careful balancing act between maintaining aspects of one’s heritage while demonstrating alignment with conservative norms. The presence of conservative leaders of color is good optics for the party overall to indicate to a larger audience that the Republican Party welcomes all Americans, but that is where the “belonging” ends. These leaders are expected to follow the party’s approach and work to decimate diversity policies, deny systemic racism, sexism, and homophobia, reinforce attacks on immigrants and immigration, and dismantle civil rights gains for minoritized populations.

Another key theme is respectability politics. While these politicians present themselves as disciplined, hardworking, law-abiding, and successful immigrants to gain acceptance within conservative political circles, they create distance from other minority groups and from discussions about ongoing racial inequities. Respectability politics encourages these leaders to consciously abandon controversial aspects of their identity to align with conservative norms of success, morality, and nationalism. Ultimately, respectability politics enables Indian American Republicans to navigate the racial tensions in conservatism, securing partial acceptance while reinforcing racial and cultural hierarchies that keep them conditional insiders. Acceptance into a dominant political culture is often conditional on minimizing or distancing oneself from the aspects of one’s identity, or one’s community, that the dominant group finds threatening or inconvenient. By this account, these leaders enter conservative political life precisely by not challenging its underlying assumptions.

Representation without transformation

The prominence of these four figures should not be read as evidence that the Republican Party has become more racially inclusive in any structural sense. Rather, it shows that there has been what might be called representation without transformation: visible diversity at the top that leaves the party’s underlying ideological commitments largely undisturbed. This is a form of conditional belonging, these leaders are accepted, but only to the extent that they continue performing an acceptable version of difference. Increasing diversity within political parties does not necessarily lead to changes in existing power structures. Although these Indian American leaders bring greater racial and religious diversity to the Republican Party, they work within established and acceptable conservative frameworks rather than challenging them. This type of political assimilation raises broader questions about representation and belonging. Can minority politicians can ever be fully accepted when race, ethnicity, and religion continue to shape perceptions of who is considered a “real” American. While these leaders have achieved significant political success, their acceptance may remain conditional and tied to their willingness to conform to dominant cultural expectations.

There is a growing need to understand minority conservatism. As Indian Americans and other Asian American groups become more politically diverse, we will need to pay closer attention to how race, religion, class, immigration history, and identity shape political choices and leadership styles. These four Indian American Republican leaders gained political legitimacy through different combinations of assimilation, cultural expression, religious identity, and meritocratic narratives. Their experiences reveal both the opportunities available to minority politicians and the challenges of navigating institutions where acceptance is often linked to conformity with dominant cultural norms.

• This article is based on the paper, “Negotiating Legitimacy: South Asian Republicans and Strategic Assimilation” in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.
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The post How South Asian Republican politicians use strategic assimilation to negotiate their legitimacy with conservatives first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has engaged in multiple covert operations across the world. The goals of these covert operations by the US intelligence community on behalf of the government have been twofold. First, the government has foreign-policy objectives it wants to achieve – overthrowing a hostile regime, bolstering a friendly regime, or providing concessions for American companies. Second, the government also has domestic-policy goals from covert action like maintaining support from swing constituencies and rewarding core constituencies. Often, these come in conflict with Congress, which has its own priorities. What does research tell us about how these priorities are perceived, and how the executive and legislature come into conflict?

In new work we explore two case studies from the Cold War period – Operation PBSUCCESS in Guatemala in 1954, and support for the Contras in 1981-1983 – to demonstrate the domestic dynamics at play between Congress and the executive. These two case studies are useful as they bookmark the contrasting relationships between institutions during the Cold War. In the 1950s, the domestic audiences for covert operations were hawkish members of Congress who wanted more overt action. By the 1980s, however, members of Congress – many of whom were elected in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate – were much more wary of executive branch action, and covert action was designed to support right-wing ideological goals without drawing attention. These new members of Congress were much more aligned along partisan, rather than hawkish or dovish, ideological goals.

Operation PBSUCCESS in Guatemala

In the 1950s, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations employed a series of covert actions to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected President of Guatemala. In 1953, the CIA kept influential Senators informed about an operation to put added pressure on the Guatemalan government. At the same time, hawkish Senators gave speeches about the threat of Communism in Central America, and Guatemala specifically, with Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) tabling a resolution to embargo Guatemalan coffee if there was evidence of Communists in the Arbenz government causing price increases.

The administration wanted to remove suspected Communists – and ultimately the Arbenz government – but was worried about an escalation that would lead to overt conflict and the use of American troops. They were particularly nervous about Congress becoming too eager for intervention, and administration liaisons in Congress worked to shut down further investigations and resolutions. This created an almost paradoxical situation in which, having raised Congressional awareness of the alleged threat posed by Guatemala, and having relied on Congress to make the public aware of this threat, the Administration worked to rein-in hawkish members of Congress who could threaten the secrecy or undermine the conduct of the operation.

Credit: Gobierno de Guatemala, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Gobierno de Guatemala, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The result was Operation PBSUCCESS in 1954: a small force, run by military officer Carlos Castillo Armas and trained in Honduras by the CIA, conducted an incursion into Guatemala. The CIA relied on propaganda and psychological warfare, primarily via the clandestine station Radio Liberación. The Guatemalan military, instead of fighting the rebels, declared that it would not engage with Armas’ force, and instead began pressuring Arbenz to resign or be overthrown. The successful operation pacified Congressional hawks, who were selectively disclosed details of the operation to show the administration was taking their concerns seriously.

Our analysis of 112 Congressional speeches from the period revealed that most Members of Congress were harsh in their discussion of Guatemala. Notably, this was a bipartisan phenomenon: opposition Democrats and governing Republicans were equally likely to have a negative view of Guatemala in the run-up to the covert operation.

Reagan and the Contras in Nicaragua

By the 1980s, the relationship between the presidency and Congress had changed dramatically. Far from using covert operations to pacify hawkish legislators, the executive used covert action to hide its agenda from legislators. Gone were the days of selective disclosure; even prominent committee members in the Senate and House adopted an adversarial stance.

The Reagan administration came to power in 1981 with plans to expand the Carter administration’s efforts to oppose the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. By December 1^st, these efforts resulted in a plan to fund and offer military training to opposition leaders – nicknamed the Contras – with the goal of overthrowing the Sandinistas. Like with Guatemala in 1954, the administration selectively revealed information on the emerging covert operation with leaders in Congress – one instance being known as the Casey Brief. By this time, presidential “findings” regarding covert operations had to be presented to Congress and CIA Director William J. Casey was called multiple times to update Congressional committees.

However, news reports – including a detailed story in Newsweek – led backbench members of Congress to introduce legislation initially banning funding for any activity that might lead to the overthrow of the Sandinistas (the so called first Boland Amendment). The spring and summer of 1983 led to more revelations about abuses by the Contras, and about the Reagan administration’s efforts to circumvent Congressional constraints on its support for the Contras. This led to Congress placing more and more restrictions in amendments to defence and intelligence legislation, culminating in the Intelligence Authorization Act of December 1983, and further legislation in October 1984, banning all aid to the Contras and other affiliated organizations.

Growing cross-partisan conflict

Throughout, backbench members of Congress spoke out vociferously against the covert operation, much more so than their colleagues who sat on intelligence committees. Using a dataset of nearly 3,700 speeches from the Library of Congress (Figure 1), we show how these backbenchers gradually converged with committee members on a decidedly more negative sentiment towards supporting the Contras – in other words, backbenchers were initially more opposed to aid towards the Contras, but over time legislators on intelligence committees came to be opposed as well.

Figure 1 – Predicted sentiment of congress members during various time periods

While not as overtly partisan as today, clear fault lines between Republican and Democratic Members of Congress emerged in the wake of the scandal. In 1984, Republican “Movement Conservative” and future Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, publicly chastised congressional leaders:

“As you know, there has been a great deal of concern recently about Congressional undermining of U.S. foreign policy. One example that has been cited is the March 20th letter you and nine other members sent Comandante Daniel Ortega. On Tuesday, April 24th, I will be taking a Special Order to discuss this and other examples of Congressional interference in the effective Figure 2. Number of speeches by committee interference of America’s foreign policy. Since this has become a matter of public concern, your participation in this Special Order would be helpful in explaining why you sent the letter and why you felt it appropriate to communicate your opposition to U.S. policy.”

By 1986, relations between Congress and the White House had frayed so much that Congress launched investigations into allegations the administration was trafficking arms to Iran to illegally fund the Contras, leading to dozens of indictments and convictions

Covert action today

These examples studies help establish the transition away from covert operations as a vehicle of selective disclosure for hawkish constituencies, and more towards an adversarial, partisan conflict between branches of the US government. The current placid relationship between Congress and the White House will not last; Republican deference to Donald Trump’s arrest of Nicolas Maduro, or the undermining of left-wing governments across Latin America and Europe, will eventually be replaced with cross-partisan conflict. Moreover, even deference to those within one’s own party may eventually be replaced with clear inter-branch conflict as Congress may attempt to reassert itself as a co-equal branch in coming years.

Future administrations will attempt covert action as foreign policy, with domestic audiences at least partly in mind. Whether those administrations are successful will depend on their ability to placate Congress; knowing whether Congress is more, or less, hawkish on intervention is critical.

• This article is based on the papers, “Secrecy and the politics of selective disclosures: the US government’s intervention in Guatemala” in Intelligence and National Security and “From Consensus to Fracture: Reagan, the Contras, and the “Politics of Intelligence Oversight” in American Politics Research.
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• Please read our comments policy before commenting. 
• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.

The post Partisan conflict pushed Congress from supporting US covert operations in the 1950s to strong opposition in the 1980s first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

In February 2025, Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail reported how an Alberta-based forestry worker, Phil Morrow, brought a Ukrainian war refugee, a dog named Donbas, home to Edmonton. Dog’s like Phil’s can enter the country with a simple vaccination certificate, but Canada will not let other Ukrainian rescue dogs enter, even with a blood test confirming immunity to rabies.

Rabies, or hydrophobia, is a fearsome disease, accounting for nearly 60,000 yearly human deaths worldwide, almost entirely from dog scratches or bites. Before Pasteur developed a vaccine in 1885, a dog bite was a death sentence. Once clinical symptoms occur in humans, rabies is still 100 percent fatal. With the development of a rapid blood test for rabies antibodies in 1973, it became possible to scientifically confirm rabies immunity, and post-vaccination pre-entry titre testing became the “gold standard” recommendation for importing dogs from rabies-endemic countries.

The United States has been free of dog-mediated rabies since 2007. After the Centers for Disease Control’s ongoing reliance on easily forged foreign paper vaccination certificates led to a rabid dog import in 2019 and again in 2021, the US abruptly banned all imports from 113 rabies-endemic countries (Figure 1). This would later serve as the model for Canada’s own rabies import ban.

Figure 1 – US dog important bans

The US rolled back its dog import ban, but Canada did not

However, there was an immediate outcry and pushback from rescue organizations, breeders, researchers, the diplomatic and military communities, as well as members of Congress. And, after receiving more than 120,000 written comments, many highly critical, the CDC revised its regulations to better align with World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) guidance, including allowing dogs with successful rabies antibody tests to be imported from high-risk countries.

Canada has been free of dog rabies since the 1960s. In July 2021, and again in January 2022, a rabies-positive dog arrived from Iran. Both met Canada’s requirements for rabies vaccination certificates, but the certificates were either falsified or the vaccinations failed. The two cases triggered public health responses involving 25 health units, 66 people exposed, and 51 requiring post-exposure treatment.

Concerned about a 400 percent increase in dog imports since 2013, Canada’s Deputy Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Howard Njoo, urged a temporary import suspension to allow a careful review and consideration of additional measures, including the WOAH recommendation for rabies antibody titre testing for imported dogs. He called rescue dogs “a particular focus of public health concern, given that they are often in poor health, [and] have unknown status with respect to rabies disease.” Ontario’s Chief Veterinarian, Dr. Cathy Furness, and its Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kieran Moore, made similar recommendations, and advocated stronger import rules for all classes of dogs. However, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s (CFIA) response, a complete ban after just two cases out of thousands of annual imports, exceeded what was asked for. CFIA’s 2022 import prohibition applies to all “commercial” dog imports from high-risk countries, including rescues, and the Government declared there were “no exceptions.”

Did Canada choose prohibition despite what the science says?

Canada’s import ban on dogs from over 100 countries is now the most restrictive of its kind in the world. It departs from WOAH guidance that has safely protected the UK, EU, and other countries, from rabid dog imports for a quarter of a century. For example, as many as 300,000 dogs have safely entered the UK annually under its WOAH-based Pet Travel Scheme.

Despite Canada’s “no exceptions” claim, personal pets and assistance dogs can still be imported notwithstanding the prohibition on commercial imports, and only require simple vaccination certificates. As the ban took shape, Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau was advised that “rescue organizations [are] not expected to be supportive,” and CFIA President Dr. Siddika Mithani told the Health Minister the affected groups were “expected to vocally oppose this measure,” while noting it “would not affect personal pet dogs travelling with Ukrainian refugees.” The Government later confirmed it would “accommodate personal pet dog imports whenever possible.”

Animal Justice and Soi Dog Canada challenged the ban in Federal Court, urging WOAH’s science-based approach, and titre testing. Soi Dog Canada’s president, Lisa Wagner, documented the options CFIA rejected, including titre testing, and argued that Canada simply chose a prohibition over scientifically supported alternatives. CFIA responded by focusing on its resource constraints, explaining “that there are no animal handling or inspection facilities at Canadian airports, nor are there designated workers to care for animals being held.” In October 2025, Justice Russel Zinn ruled the ban was neither irrational nor unreasonable, but declined to say whether it was the best policy. “At most, the alternative measures identified by the Applicants were options available to but ultimately not adopted by the Agency.”

Following the decision, Animal Justice wrote to CFIA on behalf of more than 50 domestic and international rescue groups, asking whether the agency might modify the import ban, much as the US did when the CDC replaced its own “temporary suspension” with science-based measures based on WOAH guidelines. Canada’s Chief Veterinary Officer, Dr. Mary Jane Ireland, simply responded that it was “important to note that … the two countries have different … import policies.”

Containment theatre

The risks from the Iranian imports and from pet and assistance dog imports are the same, but CFIA’s exceptions swallow the rule. Relying solely upon a foreign paper certificate is precisely the failure that produced the Iranian cases. A rescue or commercial dog that can prove it poses no risk with a titre test is banned, while a pet from the same high-risk country with a rabies certificate of unknown validity is welcome. Moreover, as no one agency tracks personal imports, the risk they present is unmeasurable. CFIA’s stated aim of preventing “the importation of even one rabid dog” is more containment theater than fact.

This is not new. The investigators in the Iranian cases recommended uniform controls on “all categories of dogs.” And in 2016 a National Canine Importation Working Group report criticized the country’s poor record-keeping, the absence of data, monitoring, or meaningful control over companion animal imports, and the absence of any federal or provincial quarantine facilities anywhere in Canada. It also declared uniform requirements for all dogs a “high priority,” and concluded imports should be managed, not banned.

The actual rabies risk comes from the few imports where a dog cannot be shown to be protected, yet the ban blocks thousands of rabies-free dogs while admitting untested and unverified personal pets. Implementing WOAH’s recommendations, especially titre testing, would address that real risk. It is past time for Canada to update its controls, and reasonable importers stand ready to help.

The issue is greater than administrative policy. “It’s not just a dog,” Phil Morrow was quoted as saying, “It’s what that dog represents.” It’s compassion for a “poor soul caught in … a brutal conflict,” by “people who … wanted to be part of something, just because it was good.” And it’s a recognition that the value of a life, human or animal, street rescue or war dog, should not be determined by rules based solely upon lines on a map.

Donbas Credit: Olga Ivashchenko for The Globe and Mail. Used with permission.

• Featured image: Rabies Virus Colorized transmission electron micrograph of rabies virus particles (green). Image captured at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: NIAID; Photo by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Unsplash
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The post Canada copied America’s dog import ban but not its science-based fix first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

In the United States, racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented among politicians at all levels of government. This underrepresentation is particularly alarming given that most Americans under 18 are now people of color and that the country is projected to become majority-minority by the mid-2040s. It is also striking when coupled with the current judicial and political landscape. This year, the US Supreme Court struck down what remained of the Voting Rights Act, namely Section 2 minority vote-dilution claims, in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), rendering it, in the words of Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion, a “dead letter.” In response to the decision, not only Louisiana, but also Tennessee, Alabama and Florida, have swiftly moved to racially gerrymander their districts and to eliminate minority-held seats. The situation is so dire that up to 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and 11 percent of the Hispanic Caucus is at risk of losing representation due to redistricting shifts following the decision.

This context highlights the urgency with which scholars should be unpacking the sources of minority underrepresentation. Past research on the underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities has pointed to the supply of candidates as a primary issue and has focused on how electoral institutions and the demographic composition of districts shape the emergence of minority candidates. Other work on the drivers of why people run for office has pointed to emerging political ambition as a trait critical to shaping people’s willingness to pursue political careers. In the past, scholars have noted that there exists a racial gap in political ambition, though others have challenged these findings.

Our new research helps settle this debate, and our findings cut against the conventional wisdom in ways that matter for how we think about the future of American representation.

Black and Latino Americans express more political ambition than white Americans

Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, one of the largest and most racially diverse public opinion surveys ever conducted in the United States, we find that Black and Latino Americans are significantly more interested in running for political office than white Americans. Black respondents expressed interest in running at a rate of 16 percent and Latino respondents at 17 percent, compared to 14 percent for white respondents. Asian Americans were least likely at 12 percent. Far from lacking political ambition, some of the groups most underrepresented in American politics are among the most eager to serve.

What makes this finding especially striking is what cannot explain it. We tested the full range of factors political scientists typically examine, including socioeconomic status, education, income, political interest, ideology, partisanship, and past civic engagement. None of these factors account for why Black and Latino Americans express higher levels of interest in running than their White counterparts. Whatever drives their underrepresentation, then, it is not a shortage of willing candidates. The barriers lie outside potential minority candidates, not within them.

Participation in racial justice movements are driving the ambition gap

The one factor that does explain the racial gap in political ambition is participation in movements for racial justice. Respondents who had attended a Black Lives Matter (BLM) rally, donated to BLM, participated in a march for immigration reform, or donated to immigration reform campaigns were dramatically more likely to express interest in running for office. Having attended a BLM rally was roughly three times more common among those interested in running than those who were not. Notably, this connection holds even once we consider the other things that usually shape who is willing to run for office, such as a person’s income and education, how closely they follow politics, their ideology and partisanship, and how active they already are in civic life.

Crucially, Black and Latino Americans were far more likely than white Americans to have participated in these movements. It is this combination, high engagement in racial justice activism and a strong relationship between that activism and political ambition, that accounts for the gap we observe. When we account for participation in racial justice movements in our statistical models, the gap between Black and Latino Americans and white Americans disappears entirely.

Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash

The gap is driven by younger generations of Americans of color

The ambition gap is not evenly distributed across age groups. It is driven almost entirely by younger generations. Among Gen Z respondents, Black Americans were nearly nine percentage points more likely than their white generational peers to express interest in running for office. Among Millennials and Gen X, the gaps were smaller but still present. Among older generations, the racial differences largely vanish.

This generational pattern makes sense when we consider who has been most engaged in recent racial justice movements. Gen Z and Millennial Black and Latino Americans participated in BLM protests and immigration reform activism at far higher rates than their older counterparts, and at far higher rates than white Americans of the same age. Gen Z is also the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in American history. The intersection of that diversity with elevated political ambition and high rates of civic activism suggests that the pipeline of future minority candidates is not empty. It is fuller than it has ever been.

What this means for future political recruitment

These findings have direct implications for political parties and other groups working to close the racial representation gap among the political class. The problem is not a shortage of willing candidates among minority communities. The ambition is already there, particularly among younger Black and Latino Americans who are galvanized by participation in movements for racial justice. What is needed is closer scrutiny of the structural barriers that prevent willing candidates from entering the electoral process, barriers related to political networks, party endorsements, and the considerable financial costs (such as fundraising networks) of running for office.

Our findings also suggest that racial justice movements are doing more political work than is typically recognized. Looking beyond their immediate policy goals, movements like Black Lives Matter, the Palestine solidarity protests, and the Fridays for Future climate protests, appear to be building a generation of politically ambitious Americans who are both younger and more racially diverse than the current political class.

The current 2026 midterm has a great example of this dynamic. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old woman of color and Democratic Socialist from New York, had been organizing for Palestinian rights since her undergraduate days at Columbia University, where she helped co-found Columbia University Apartheid Divest in 2016 and later helped organize the campus Gaza encampment in 2024. She channeled her activist experience directly into a congressional campaign, defeating a five-term incumbent in New York’s 13th District in June 2026.

Beyond examples, however, whether the political ambition of this young class of Americans of color translates into candidacy at scale will depend in large part on whether the legal and institutional environment makes room for it. It is worth remembering that within the majoritarian US, the creation of majority-minority districts has been crucial for the descriptive representation of communities of color. Again, given the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, which has now dismantled protections for such representation, that is now far from guaranteed.

• This article is based on the paper, “Race, Protest, and Political Ambition: Exploring How Age Intersects with Race to Shape Office Seeking Ambitions”, in The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.
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The post Racial justice movements mean that the candidate pipeline of young Black and Latino Americans is fuller than ever first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

• This article is part of our ‘The 2026 Midterms‘ series curated by Peter Finn (University of Greenwich). The series explores the run-up to the 2026 US midterm elections at the state and national levels. If you are interested in contributing to the series, contact Peter Finn (P.D.Finn@greenwich.ac.uk).

We are now less than four months from the 2026 midterms, and less than six from the start of the 120th US Congress that voters will collectively craft via these midterm elections. Here are four key steps to look out for that will take us to January 2027.

Remaining primaries

Having begun in March, the 2026 primary season runs through mid-September when Delawareans choose those who will compete in November in the First State. Significant primary contests so far have included Texas (3 March), Pennsylvania (May 19), and California (2 June). Upcoming dates of note include 4 August, which sees primaries in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Virginia, and Washington, and 11 August that sees Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont, and Wisconsin go to the (primary) polls. A final multi-state primary date occurs on 18 August in Alaska, Florida, and Wyoming.

Following Arizona’s contest on 21 July, there are remaining contests in South Dakota (28 July), Tennessee (6 August), Hawaii (8 August), Oklahoma (25 August), Massachusetts (1 September), New Hampshire (8 September), and Rhode Island (9 September). One process point to watch out for is that, following on from California, there is a top two primary (often called a jungle primary) in Washington state. Alaska will hold a top four primary. In such primaries, the top two or four will go through to the ballot in November irrespective of which party they represent.

“early voting center, silver spring civic building” by D. Reed, CC BY-NC 4.0

A “midterm convention” and debates

As a midterm year, 2026 is absent the full-scale razzmatazz and media feasts that come from presidential nominating conventions. That said, the Republican Party will be holding what they have billed as a midterm convention as the primary season begins to wrap up on September 9-10 in Dallas, Texas. Announced in typical Trumpian style, the president trailed the event on a Truth Social post: “BIG NEWS! For the first time ever, the Republican Party will hold a MIDTERM CONVENTION. It will be in Dallas, Texas — One of my favorite places in the World.” Trump signed off by saying “THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN! President DONALD J. TRUMP”.

There will also not be the spectacle of presidential candidates facing off against each other in primetime debates. There have, however, already been inter and intra party debates for the race to be the governor in, for instance, California, Michigan, and Kansas, meanwhile in recent days the candidates for senate in Texas have agreed to hold a debate. In a time when everything can be both local and national content, expect candidates, at least for more high-profile offices, to be speaking to multiple audiences at the same time.

3 November 2026 is Election Day

The culmination of the two years of campaigning and politicking, Election Day 2026 will see tens of millions go to the polls to vote for candidates for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, a third of the Senate’s 100 seats, dozens of state and territory governorships, and thousands of state and territory level offices.

Heading into Election Day, there are 45 Democratic members of the senate to the Republicans’ 53 and two Independents. In the House, 212 members are currently Democrats, 218 are Republicans, one is an Independent, and there are four vacancies. 218 is the magic number for a party to have a majority in the House – given the already close margin, it’s clear that the Democrats do not have to win many seats to take the chamber.

At a federal level, Democrats will be looking to break the unified hold – or trifecta – Republicans currently have on the House of Representatives, Senate, and the White House. At present, the most likely outcome is that Democrats take the house, and Republicans hold the Senate, meaning Trump will be faced with a divided government for the final two years of his presidential term.

Following Election Day, it will be two months before the 120th Congress sits. Known as “lame-duck” sessions, these periods can be interesting in and of themselves. In December 2018, for example, Trump, frustrated that the 115th Congress had not included funding for a border wall in an appropriations bill, said he would not sign the bill. This refusal followed criticism from right wing media that Trump was not living up to his promise to build a border wall. This shutdown lasted for over a month, costing more than $10 billion according to the Congressional Budget Office.

On a different tack, following the 2014 midterms, the Senate Intelligence Committee published an executive summary of a report into the CIA’s post 9/11 rendition system. This executive summary of a still unpublished report, known generally as the torture report due to the abuse and torture it documents, was released in the post-midterms period after the Democratic Party lost the Senate majority, and thus control of the committee.

As such, depending on the results produced by the 2026 midterms, broader events, and the vagaries of presidential behaviour, the period between election day and the sitting of the 120th Congress may well feature such noteworthy events

The 120th Congress begins

The 120th Congress will begin sitting on 3 January 2027. It will be the final Congress of the Trump era and will set the national political picture that will frame what will inevitably be a hugely expensive battle for White House in 2028. As with previous congresses, it will likely be driven partly by state, national, and international events (and how those in office choose to respond to them), evergreen issues such as the economy and national security, that are interpreted by many through binary partisan lenses.

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The post The 2026 midterms: The road to the 120th US Congress first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

In 2026, the Phelan US Centre ran an essay competition for LSE master’s students with the prompt, “What role can democratic citizenry play in shaping America’s role in the world as it enters its 250th year?“

In this episode we spoke to the author of the winning essay, Alexander Minford, and the runners-up, Iman Shaikh and Kristýna Šimonová. We discussed their essays, the competition, what it’s like for students to engage with a wider audience, and the opportunity they had to present their essays in the UK parliament to MPs and the British-American Parliamentary Group.

Read the essays from the winner and runners-up  

• The most important act of American global leadership may be winning a local primary– Alexander Minford – LSE School of Public Policy (winner)
• Finding Tocqueville in Times Square: how lessons from America’s vibrant civic past can reinvigorate its citizenry in the present – Iman Shaikh – LSE Department of Government (runner-up)
• At 250, the world’s oldest democracy is autocratising at a global cost that its citizens have the power to stop – Kristýna Šimonová – LSE Department of International Relations (runner-up)

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We’d love to hear what you think – you can send us a message on Twitter @LSE_US, or email us at uscentre@lse.ac.uk.

This podcast was produced by Chris Gilson and Avan Fata.

• Featured image credit: Robin Boot/LSE
• Note:  This podcast gives the views of the interviewees and host, and is not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, the LSE Phelan US Centre, nor the London School of Economics.

The post Master’s students essay competition 2026 | The Ballpark podcast first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

Trump vs. democracy

Trump’s attack on democracy stretches across every area of American life and has global influence, from free speech to benefit payments, and from Tallahassee to Tehran. The website Trump Action Tracker run by UCL Professor Christine Pagel has tracked all of Trump’s actions during his second term that “echo authoritarian regimes and may pose a threat to American democracy”. It currently lists 3,559 separate anti-democratic actions since 2025. Not a week or day goes by when we don’t see new stories and initiatives designed to dissolve rights or even suspend habeas corpus.

Like classic authoritarian leaders, Trump has long opposed the fundamental features of democracy. The political scientist Adam Przeworski famously argued that a democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections” and the losers leave power (in non democracies they don’t leave, and stay put). Trump is clearly against this fundamental feature of democracies; he tried all he could to not leave office in 2020, and has disputed every election since. He supposedly only ran in 2024 to stay out of jail. His big lie over 2020 is an attack on the very glue holding together American democracy-electoral validity- and is now an excuse for all sorts of undemocratic actions ahead of the mid-terms.

Not only does he oppose democracy, Trump has succeeded in rolling it back and weakening it, perhaps fatally. Trump and his supporters in the Supreme Court have launched an all-out assault on the principle of equality, another bonding material for democratic countries. They have even undone the most important law in the history of American democracy, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ,the legislation that finally made the US an equal democracy under Lyndon Johnson. These graphs which show Black voter registration rates, representation and economic power tell us how important the VRA was. Its conscious destruction in 2026 by the Supreme Court tell us, as one commentator put it, that the problem in Trumps’ America is not one of “polarisation” but “authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, and racism”.

Trump’s detention camps

In a final clear dictatorial sign, Trump is shredding the rule of law. Trump has created a vast set of detention camps (referred to by some as concentration camps) across the United States, to illegally hold those who have been arrested illegally. As of early 2026 February 2026 the “United States is currently holding more than 70,000 immigrants in 224 facilities across the nation, 104 more facilities than it had before Trump took office. Those detainees include children”.

It is important to remember that the camps and prisons are fundamentally different: detention camps, by definition, “are places where individuals are imprisoned not for criminal acts, but because of their status”. The data are stark “For the first time in US history, immigrants with no criminal record now constitute the largest population in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention” and “as February 7, 2026, nearly seventy-five percent of all immigrants detained—approximately 50,000 individuals—have never been convicted of a criminal offense”. A full “225 judges…have ruled that the new policy likely violates both the law and the right to due process”.

This is not simple imprisonment. Inmates, illegally held, are dying. 17 inmates have died so far just in 2026. Mamuka Artmeladze, “a Georgian man with no criminal record and no alleged immigration violation” was illegally held for 119 days before he died. Other inmates are subject to horrific neglect and abuse and deprived of access to the basic things they need-such as double amputee Rodeny Taylor. Children have been left without parents to live alone.

“01a.March.RefuseFascism.17thStreet.WDC.16August2025” by Elvert Barnes, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Is Trump a “caudillo”?

So, if Trump is a dictator, pulling apart American democracy, exactly what type of dictator is he?

One view has Trump as simply transactional. Some have rightly likened Trump to a “caudillo”, the Southern American dictator type which appeared in the 19^th century but resurfaced more recently. Caudillo rule is highly personalist, violent and masculine, often linked with ties of personal loyalty and profit. It is a style of rule associated, perhaps above all else, with pillage and looting. And Trump is certainly looting the US. The Brennan Center has called Trump’s second term “epic corruption in plain sight”. He and his networks have made huge amounts of money across everything from Stock trading to Trump meme coins. The Center for American Progress estimates Trump has made a more than $2 billion (and counting by the minute).

It is true that much of what Trump does is rooted in performance, and some fascinating work has looked at the professional wrestling concept of “kayfabe”, where performances are simultaneously known to be false but also believed.

But this “caudillo” dictatorship pre-supposes Trump does not believe anything at all. Yet he does have a set of core beliefs, which amounts to a blend of racism and white supremacy, a type of fascism grown from America’s violent racial history. His ideology, insofar as he has one, is a belief that American must return back to the 1950s. The journalist and activist, Ta-Nehisi Coates called Trump America’s “First White President”. As Barack Obama wrote in his memoirs, Trump “unleashed the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party – xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folk.”

Trump as Mussolini

If we do use the “F” word, then we need to ask whether Trump looks like the Fascist dictators of the 1930s. While Trump is certainly not Hitler, there are some parallels, including a desperate craving and simultaneous hatred of the elite. Reading the text of Hitler’s speeches in Heiden’s biography reveals some extraordinarily incoherent rambling which echoes Trump. One deep resemblance concerns the way Hitler’s personality, biography and character came to fill and dominate all German politics: politics became utterly personalised and “one person’s ‘personal experience’ became the representation-and total value-of a country”. Trump has become all of American politics, in a way that no presidents before ever has.

But we may be looking in the wrong place. It is the Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, in his relative weakness and cynicism, that Trump resembles most. Mussolini’s regime, especially as it weakened and stagnated from the 1930s onwards, became more and more about appearances and propaganda-and increasingly desperate attempts to make reality fit a fiction. Under Mussolini, Fascist Italy also blundered into a series of bloody and backfiring foreign policy decisions. Politically, Trump has that same parallel appearance, where he is a buffoon and figure of fun who is at the same time deeply dangerous.

All pieces of the picture can be true at the same time. Trump is in most spheres a transactional leader: a caudillo abroad and when at pillage, and a fascist domestically when turning back the clock. And we must remember, with the midterms looming as the most important democratic battle since the 1960s, his motives are those of all dictators through time-to stay in power and out of prison.

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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.

The post Trump’s attacks on democracy reveal his authoritarian ambitions first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

Frustration with America’s two-party system has rarely been higher. Recent polls show that a large majority of Americans wish they had more political parties to choose from. Reform movements have already changed how votes are counted in Alaska, Maine, New York City, and Washington, D.C., with similar efforts underway in other cities and states across the country.

But, when it comes to electoral systems, what kind of change do Americans want? Most existing research focuses on technical details, such as ballot structures and vote transfer mechanisms, that ordinary voters may find confusing or irrelevant. We took a different approach using large survey experiments with more than 6,000 American adults. Rather than asking respondents to weigh in on technicalities, we asked them to evaluate two key consequences a reform to the electoral system would have for the US House of Representatives: how many parties would win seats and how ideologically spread out those parties would be.

We found that Americans react very negatively to reforms that produce pronounced legislative polarization in Congress – meaning there is a significant ideological gap between parties – even when those reforms might be expected to give citizens a stronger voice. Polarization is so unpopular that it tends to dominate how people evaluate reforms across the board.

Two studies to test one set of questions

In our first study, we used an experiment which asked respondents to choose between two hypothetical options. Each option described an electoral reform with several features. Respondents saw three pairs of electoral reforms. We randomly varied the number of parties that would win seats (two, three, or five) and the ideological spread of those parties (clustered in the middle, evenly spread, or split into two extremes), as well as some other features of the reforms unrelated to our primary research goals.

Our second study used five short texts describing different electoral reform outcomes, ranging from a status-quo scenario (the same two parties with their current ideological positions) to a five-party House with new parties at the ideological extremes. We analyzed the responses in two ways. First, we compared people based only on the first text they saw, which was randomly assigned. This approach allowed us to estimate how reactions differed across reform outcomes without relying on comparisons people made after seeing several scenarios. Second, we compared each person’s ratings across all five texts, which were shown in random order. This approach used each respondent as their own point of comparison, giving us more statistical precision.

In both studies, we asked respondents how each reform would affect three things political scientists consider central to democratic representation: voice (whether citizens’ views get aired and debated), governability (whether legislation can actually get passed), and responsiveness (whether laws that pass reflect what citizens want). We also asked respondents which reform they preferred overall.

“vote for me” by Andrea Maria Cannata, CC BY-NC 2.0

Polarization is the deal-breaker

When respondents evaluated a hypothetical House split into two ideologically opposed camps, they reacted negatively. They saw this kind of polarization as harmful to governability and responsiveness, which was unsurprising. What did surprise us was that they also saw it as being harmful to citizens’ voice, even though more ideological diversity should mean that more perspectives are represented. Whatever theoretical benefits polarization could offer for representation seem to be drowned out by the dysfunction Americans associate with a deeply divided political landscape.

When it came to simply adding more parties to the House without necessarily changing the ideological landscape, Americans responded less consistently. In our first study, where the number of parties was just one feature among many, respondents did not show much enthusiasm for moving beyond a two-party system. In our second study, where the focus was exclusively on how the party system would change, respondents tended to favor moderate departures from the two-party status quo, especially when new parties were not positioned at the ideological extremes.

What this means for reformers

These findings have practical implications for advocates of electoral change. Ranked-choice voting of the kind recently adopted in many parts of the country looks well-aligned with what Americans say they want. It can potentially break the two-party duopoly without typically producing the kind of fragmentation and polarization seen in some proportional systems, and it is often credited with encouraging candidates to appeal beyond their core supporters.

Proportional representation with few legislators per district, which can introduce new parties without producing legislative gridlock, may also be more consistent with Americans’ preferences. By contrast, reforms that could produce a House split into ideologically opposed factions are likely to face stiff resistance.

The broader takeaway is that reform advocates may want to focus less on the abstract case for change and more on what change will actually deliver. The challenge is to explain how reform can expand representation without making national politics feel even more polarized and ungovernable. Americans do not appear to want a House with new parties at any cost. They want a House that works and includes a wider range of voices, but, above all, that does not deepen political polarization.

• This article is based on the paper, “Attitudes Toward Electoral System Reform and Party System Change in the U.S.”, in American Political Science Review.
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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.
• The research study discussed in this op-ed was conducted independently of Quinton Mayne’s current institutional affiliation, and the views expressed here are his own.

The post Americans like the idea of more parties in Congress unless it makes polarization worse first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.