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This American MomentFaculty and alumni scholars offer perspectives on the state of American democracy, its challenges, and its possibilities.Interviews by Sandra Knispel and Karen McCally ’02 (PhD) | Illustrations by John Tomac

illustration of American flag fraying into motes

(Source: John Tomac for the University of Rochester)

Cracks in the Foundation

Democracy is under strain, but the infrastructure remains largely intact.

Gretchen Helmke

Professor of political science at Rochester; cofounder of Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan research project that monitors democratic practices in the United States

Specialist on democratic political institutions with a focus on Latin America; author most recently of Institutions on the Edge: The Origins and Consequences of Institutional Instability in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Courses include Dictatorship and Democracy, Democratic Erosion, and Latin American Politics.

The way I tend to think about democracy is that people have to trust that the rules are basically fair and that if their party or their team loses, the stakes of that loss are tolerable; that in the future they’ll be able to contest an election again; and that they’ll have a chance of winning. That trust keeps everyone committed to democracy and committed to playing by the rules.

But once you break that faith—that elections actually determine the winner—people’s allegiance to democracy may eventually falter. Although more than three quarters of the public surveyed, in both parties, still say that a democratic system is still the best form of government, the public is polarized over whether there was fraud in the last election, which is really problematic for future democratic stability. To me that polarization ranks among the most concerning factors in American politics during these last few months and, as we are seeing, is providing the basis for ongoing attempts to make voting harder and less accessible for Americans.

For most of my career I have studied democratic crises in Latin America, where I see some parallels in the sense that you had a president elected who was an incredibly polarizing figure and who basically tried to undermine the integrity of elections. We had a leader who basically didn’t want to leave power—no elected official ever wants to lose in an election—but the hallmark of a democracy is that they’re willing to leave when they’re beaten at the polls. What we’ve seen in some Latin American cases, and what we saw in this case, is that the president was basically going to use every possible means to try to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the US election to stay in power. That sort of thing has also happened throughout Latin American history.

Yet, the biggest difference is that in most Latin American countries that have experienced those problems you don’t have the same federalist setup that we have in the United States and you don’t have people in place who are willing to go against someone’s bid to stay in power illegally. In the US, particularly at the local level, a lot of officials—lower-level bureaucrats, election officials, and judges—basically all stood up for the rule of law. Those weren’t partisan decisions; they were just doing their jobs, such as administering elections or making court decisions in a neutral, professional way.

What happens to that democratic infrastructure—whether it is maintained or strengthened, or whether it crumbles—will be critical for the fate of US democracy over the next several years.