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Why Do So Many Voters Want Restrictions on American Democracy?

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There is currently a great deal of concern over threats to American democracy. That discussion is loosely framed as “Dictatorship versus Democracy”. The issues and the threats are real. “Dictatorship versus Democracy” isn’t exactly what is going on. There are claims that elections are being rigged by the manipulation of results from voting machines. There are claims of voter fraud. There are claims of voter suppression, notably of black, Hispanic, young and urban voters. There are concerns about the use of legal procedures to overturn results obtained from vote counts. There is concern over the January 6 assault on the Capitol, and the attempt of Donald Trump to nullify the effects of the 2020 election by preventing an orderly transition of presidential power. There are concerns over the future of civil liberties. There are concerns about both present and future “weaponization” of law enforcement to persecute political enemies of the president. Both liberals and conservatives maintain that democracy is being threatened, although there is little symmetry in the identification of specific threats. Liberals are concerned about voter suppression, legal procedures to overturn known final vote counts and the violent assault on our national Capitol. Conservatives are concerned about the rigging of voting machines and illegal voters casting ballots. Both sides claim law enforcement is or will be used to punish political enemies. 

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The United States is not going to become a dictatorship any time soon.

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1. The American military is entirely uninterested in overthrowing democracy.

 

a. The American military is not suffering from any mistreatment under a civilian government.

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b. The American military does not engage in “khaki capitalism”. High level officers do not have business enterprises that they obtain by virtue of their military position. The Joint Chiefs of Staff would not become personally wealthier if they overthrew a civilian government.

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c. The United States government has not suffered a catastrophic loss of a major war that would make the military eager to get rid of incompetent civilian leadership.

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d. As a result, the American military is highly unlikely to either engage in a coup or cooperate with a President who unilaterally declares military law. Whether the military would cooperate with a President who was systematically purging military leadership to install his own staff of loyalists is an open question. Military officers historically have been hostile to civilian leaders who threaten their jobs, their income or their sense of national security.

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2. The American Government would be difficult to overthrow given the strategic and tactical issues that a revolutionary force would have to face.

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a. The United States is physically extremely large. There are too many large cities, too many economic centers and too many broadly dispersed military assets to allow for a convenient putsch or coup.

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b. Right-wing vigilantes and wannabe paramilitaries would be rapidly overwhelmed in a confrontation with the actual American military. It is no accident that the January 6 rioters attacked the Capitol and not the Pentagon. The Capitol was only defended by lightly armed police officers. The forces protecting the Pentagon would be formidable.

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3. The Supreme Court would be highly unlikely to support any abrogation or cancellation of the American Constitution. That would include an arbitrary presidential declaration of martial law. The current court with its high percentage of conservatives and Trump appointees has been fully willing to decide in favor of right-wing positions on social issues. It has not supported any arguments of unlimited Presidential omnipotence.

    

4. State governments will continue to be highly autonomous. We have long had conservative social policies in Alabama and Louisiana and liberal policies in New York and California, regardless of the composition of the federal government. These state differences are unlikely to change.

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It is one thing to say the United States will not become an absolute dictatorship. It is another to say that America will not suffer a worsening of democratic process. The more realistic danger is that America will see an increase in voter suppression, rigged elections and administrative overrides of known election results.

   

Voter suppression, rigged elections and administrative overrides of known election results are a long-standing American tradition.

    

The Era of the Founding Fathers was not a Golden Age of Civic Textbook Democracy where the will of the people was translated seamlessly into governance by elected officials chosen by a majority of Americans. Exclusion from voting was the rule rather than the exception. Voting rights were limited to those individuals who could be reliably trusted to support the political and economic interests of the elites. Ballot box stuffing was widespread. When governing elites did not like the results of elections, they found procedural mechanisms to ensure that the new office holder would be someone closer to their preferences.

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America’s Long Legacy of Voter Suppression, Ballot Box Stuffing and Overriding Election Results

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Restrictions of Voter Suffrage[1]

     

For most of American history, the majority of adults were not allowed to vote.

    

Women were not allowed to vote until the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920.

    

Native Americans were not allowed to vote until the Snyder Act of 1924.

    

Blacks were not allowed to vote until the passage of the 15th amendment in 1870. Poll taxes and other obstacles often prevented blacks from fully exercising their voting rights until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

    

The exclusion of Indians and African Americans from the franchise was integral to maintaining American economic growth, which was heavily dependent upon ethnic exploitation. America grew on the back of agriculture. We were the seventh richest nation in the world in 1870, and the richest nation in the world in 1940. Manufacturing only came to represent the majority of American exports by 1930. Most of our growth came from exporting Southern cotton in the early nineteenth century, and from exporting Midwestern wheat in the late nineteenth century. All of the land that was used for growing cotton or growing wheat was taken from First Nations peoples. Had Native Americans been able to vote, they never would have tolerated the policies of violent dispossession that characterized life on the Western Frontier.

    

The cotton economy depended on slavery. After emancipation, the cotton economy continued to be viable because blacks continued to work at sub-market wage rates due to policies that restricted their labor mobility. These included overt racial discrimination in employment, systematic exclusion from quality education and vagrancy laws that threatened blacks seeking northern or urban employment with arrest for being “transients”. Had blacks been able to vote, they never would have tolerated slavery, employment discrimination, educational discrimination, or vagrancy arrests.

    

We remember these exclusions because they are germane to contemporary equity discussions. However, one of the most systematic exclusions was one we forget about – the exclusion of working-class voters in nineteenth century America. Voting was strictly a privilege of the wealthy. In this regard, the United States was following the Athenian example. Athenian democracy was open to all “free men” – but the majority of the Athenian population were slaves. The free-status rule confined voting to the upper and upper-middle class. Nathan Keyssar has documented the wide variety of legal devices that were used to keep poor people in the United States away from ballot boxes. There were just a ton of these.

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Ballot Box Stuffing [2]

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There has been concern expressed, mostly by conservatives, about tampering with voting machines. One does not need electronic voting equipment to rig an election. Plain ordinary ballot box stuffing does the job perfectly well using ordinary paper.

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In the 1828 Presidential election, wagonloads of Andrew Jackson supporters crossed from Tennessee into Kentucky and from Kentucky into Ohio so they could vote in both states. This was the first documented case of widespread voting using the names of deceased voters. It was enough to give Jackson a crushing victory.

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In the 1844 Presidential election, New York City had more ballots than it had voters.

    

Fixed elections were an enduring feature of New York City political life under Boss Tweed in Tammany Hall. Boss Tweed used all the standard forms of election rigging; one of his inventions was “cooping”, where workers would be kidnapped and forced to go from polling place to polling place for the purpose of voting repeatedly. Tweed also developed the technology of multiple folded ballots placed inside each other, increasing the yield of each fraudulent visit to the voting booth.

    

The 1920 Chicago election was marked by the actual bombing of multiple political rallies. On election day, an election judge and various campaign workers for one of the candidates were kidnapped. Subsequent elections had less violence but more fake voting – generally in the form of “stingers” (paid repeat voters), “ghost voters” (voters using the names of the dead) and “four- legged voting” where a partisan entered the voting booth and told voters how to vote. The 1926 election had armed gangs going from polling place to polling place, punching out poll workers who were interfering in the planned ballot box stuffing, and kidnapping gang members from the other side who were also going from polling place to polling place carrying out ballot box stuffing.

    

The 1936 Presidential election in Kansas City generated over 200 convictions for election tampering. The 1946 Kansas City election would have generated a comparable number of convictions, except a local gangster broke into the county courthouse, blew open a safe, and stole the evidence related to ballot box stuffing by his associates.

    

The 1960 Chicago presidential elections are well known for the lengthy delays associated with getting the voting returns from the City of Chicago. Only when the votes for the rest of the country were in – and the vote totals for downstate Illinois were in – did Chicago vote totals appear - which oddly enough were just enough to tip Illinois for Kennedy.

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Administrative Overrides of Electoral Results

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Administrative overrides of electoral results can be reactive or proactive. A reactive override is when a state legislature or some other body chooses an election winner that is different from the person who won the majority of votes. Some sort of legal procedure is invoked to cancel out an election result that a powerful faction views as unsavory. A proactive override is the rigging of a structure of an election so insure that the winner will be someone different from the person who would have been elected by a simple majority of voters. The most common proactive override in American politics is gerrymandering.

    

There is no need to linger over the gerrymandering issue. Every reader of this volume knows the details. I personally live in the most liberal district of liberal Austin in otherwise conservative Texas. The Texas State Legislature has done everything possible to neuter Austin’s influence over the Texas Congressional Delegation. At one point, I was in a district that ran from my neighborhood up north to the top of Austin, across a long stretch of rural Texas and ending in the Republican western suburbs of Houston. I was represented by a Republican. Four blocks east of my house was the border of my congressional district. The district on the other side was represented by a liberal Democrat. One block west of my house was another congressional district border. That district ran west of my neighborhood to a more conservative Austin neighborhood, then down through more conservative exurbs and more rural Texas. It ended in the conservative northwest suburbs of San Antonio. That district was also represented by a conservative Republican.

    

For readers seeking more scholarly discussions of gerrymandering, see Keena, Latner, McGann and Smith (2021), Seabrook (2022) and Griffith (1907). The Griffith is particularly germane because he traces the history of gerrymandering in the United States from the colonial era through 1840. He identified no fewer than 50 examples – with most of his examples involving multiple districts. Readers looking for a “Golden Age” of American democracy are not likely to find it in the Era of the Founding Fathers.

  

It is worthy of note that there is further proactive overriding of electoral results though the intentional manipulation of state borders to favor rural areas. Consider that California gets only two senators. North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho – all rural states - get as many senators as California does. The District of Columbia – an urban setting – gets neither a senator nor a congressman. It could not participate in presidential elections until 1961. State borders are discretionary choices rather than objective social facts. There could have been just one state called Dakota. California could have been divided into more than one state. In the early nineteenth century, admission of states to the union was heavily shaped by making sure there would not be a majority of non-slave states. Afterwards, the creation of multiple sparsely populated states in the Great Plains was meant to counter to the rising urban working-class vote on the East Coast.

   

America has also seen proactive administrative overrides in the form of elections that did not even try to take the popular vote into effect. The 1796 election that gave John Adams the Presidency was only partially based on a presidential election. In eight out of sixteen states, representatives to the Electoral College were selected by state legislatures or by political appointees rather than by the voters themselves. In the ninth state, Tennessee, there was a mix of electoral and administrative selection of Electoral College representatives.

    

The election of 1800 that gave Thomas Jefferson the Presidency was even more undemocratic. More states switched from having elections to having state legislatures pick the representatives to the Electoral College. Overall, out of seventeen states, only five actually held a Presidential election. 

     

In 1824, there were still six states whose state legislatures picked their delegation to the Electoral College. That election was determined in the House of Representatives. John Quincy Adams got only ¾ of the vote totals that Andrew Jackson received. The House of Representatives still gave John Quincy Adams the Presidency.

    

The 1876 Tilden Hayes election was a reactive override. Samuel Tilden won the majority of the popular vote. Tilden also won in the Electoral College. The House of Representatives chose to ignore both the popular vote and the Electoral College decision and give the election to Rutherford B. Hayes. The fight over the election was bitter and contentious. The strength of feeling of both sides in this debate did not lead to any commitment to actually respect the will of the voters.

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Why Restrictions on Democracy Are Likely To Get Worse Rather Than Better:

 

Samuel Huntingdon has argued that societies choose to switch from dictatorship to democracy or from democracy to dictatorship if there are intractable problems that the earlier political system can’t deal with. When things aren’t working, a society gives one political party or general a shot, and then another political party or general a shot, and then a third or a fourth or a fifth. If none of the political parties seem to be solving the problem at hand, the nation opts for dictatorship. If none of the generals seem to be solving the problem at hand, the nation opts for democracy. Switching between dictatorship and democracy is a larger grander version of “Throw the Bums Out.”

   

Huntingdon argues that the rise of the dictatorships of the Great Depression and the firing of the commissars and generals that came with the fall of the Berlin Wall or the end of the military dictatorships in Latin America were all responses to long term stagnant economic growth. Governments could not end the Great Depression; the European Communists could not produce economic growth. The Latin American generals could not pull their countries out of the doldrums of the famous “lost decade” of the 1980’s. Although Huntingdon does not make this argument himself, the survival of Communist dictatorship in China and Vietnam can be linked to the robust economic growth of both countries. [3] Frustrations, in this case due to stagnant growth, does not lead to democracy per se or dictatorship per se. It does lead however to citizens wanting to change their form of government.

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What if restrictions on democracy fit the same pattern as transitions to dictatorship? This would suggest that democracy becomes more restricted when there are intractable social problems that highly democratic polities are unable to deal with. GDP per capita is not a promising “intractable economic problem” that can explain increased restrictions on American democratic processes. The American economy has been generally strong since the Clinton Presidency, not counting the relatively short derivatives crisis of the early 2000’s and the recent COVID pandemic.

 

But there are other problems that have been intractable. Note that what the readers of this essay are likely to consider an intractable problem, and what MAGA voters think is an intractable problem, are two different things.

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Migration

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American conservatives are very concerned about migration. They perceive our Southern Border as being an unsolved crisis. Note that most conservatives are not really aware of empirical trends in migration. Most are not looking at in-migration or outmigration rates. Most are not considering nationalities that are not Hispanic. The number of Europeans, Indians and Chinese coming to America is not on the conservative political radar. My personal speculation is that “the border crisis” is a smokescreen label for increasing percentages of Hispanics in the areas where conservatives live. Conservatives want aggressive legal measures taken against Hispanics who “surely are illegal immigrants” and they want them deported or sent to camps as soon as possible. In 2000, 13% of the American population was Hispanic. By 2021, this number had gone up 43% to 19% of the American population. The only states where the Hispanic population did not go up at least by 50% were New York, California, New Mexico and Illinois. All are Democratic strongholds. Every other state saw dramatic increases in Hispanic population. In Conservative Texas, the Hispanic population went up 76%, a number almost double the rate of general population growth. The growth of the Hispanic population in Texas has been relatively mild. Alabama, South Carolina and Kentucky all saw rates of Hispanic population growth in excess of 200%. Michigan, which has developed a highly radicalized nationalist right-wing movement, only saw 60% growth in the Hispanic population. However, overall population only grew 1%. The relative ethnic composition of Michigan has become significantly more Hispanic over time. (UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute 2022)

    

From the point of view of voters who want to maintain Anglo dominance of the American population, nearly every government in the last half century has been a failure. Massey, Durand and Pren (2016) have shown that increasing immigration enforcement has not reduced migration from Mexico to the United States. Migrants find a way to get in. However, increased enforcement makes the crossing into the United States more expensive and more dangerous. Therefore, harsher anti-immigration measures lead to migrants not wanting to return to Mexico. Under looser regimes, migrants would have returned to Mexico as soon as they made a reasonable amount of money, a phenomenon known as circle migration. Every government “toughens” measures on the border; the decrease in circle migration increases the percent Hispanic in the United States by increasing the percentage of Hispanic migrants coming in who stay and don’t leave.

    

Anti-migrant voters have learned that just “voting in a new candidate” is unlikely to produce the demographic changes they want. Since they believe harsh measures are the most effective protection they have, they endorse tough politicians who promise to abrogate civil rights.

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Disrespect for Red State Residents

 

Not all politics is about monetary issues or objective class interest. Identity politics are real. Voters are often cynical about claims that they will be better or worse off if a particular politician wins an election. Often this cynicism is justified. As such, when they vote, they are voting to make themselves feel good as they cast their ballot. Reaffirming their own personal value and making a statement about what is good about “people like them” can be more important than obtaining any particular social policy. Identity voting is all about respect. It is particularly important for voters who feel disrespected.

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Marco Garrido (2019) has argued this point compellingly in his analyses of Philippine politics. Garrido argues that slum dwellers in Manila voted for Joseph Estrada for President not because he was going to improve material conditions for the poor – but because he convincingly demonstrated that he deeply respected slum dwellers. Slum dwellers in most countries in the Global South are treated like maids and criminals. Garrido extensively documented the disrespect that Manila slum dwellers experience – and from his interviews showed how deeply the slum dwellers resented this. Slum residence represented a locational stigma over and above any social class stigma.

    

Most politicians would ignore the slums except at election time. Then they would show up with their jackets off and their shirt sleeves rolled up, promise some sort of public works project and then get into their limousines and disappear. Estrada would come to the slums often, meet with slum dwellers, eat the food the slum dwellers ate and walk the streets the slum dwellers lived on. Locals felt that he genuinely liked and respected them. Estrada was rewarded with massive slum support in the election.

    

Paul Collier (2018) has argued that a respect battle underlies conservative politics in England. England has a red state/blue state divide with London and the Southeast being the “blue state” and the Industrial North being the “red state”. London has a thriving service sector based on world class finance, medical care, higher education and the arts. The Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Northeast have economies based on antiquated metal-bending industries that were already uncompetitive at the global scale by the late nineteenth century. Collier argues that Northerners is frustrated not only by their dismal economic prospects but by the enormous status differential between London and the rest of Britain. Brexit, hostility to the European Union and hostility to immigrants are all strategies for generating respect for native-born Northerners as well as an attempt to regain control over the circumstances of their lives.

    

In the United States, a status differential clearly exists between coastal states, which are known for high tech, high finance, higher education and big government, and the middle of the country – disparagingly referred to as the “flyover states”. Originally, the South was the only relatively low status region. However, deindustrialization and the creation of the Great Lakes Rustbelt has demoted most of the Midwest outside of Chicago and a handful of university towns into disrespected low-tech “washed-up has-beens”. Think about how the public relations campaigns for Detroit revival’s have placed a central emphasis on Intuit, the maker of Quicken. Intuit would be at best a minor player in the Bay Area. Saginaw or Battle Creek don’t even have an Intuit. Economic scarcity exacerbates racial tensions. Status scarcity promotes hostility to both coasts and to university towns and state capitols whose denizens are “chic-er” and more respected. Hostility to big government is in part hostility to high-status office workers with M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s. Hostility to orthodox medicine is in part hostility to rich doctors with cushy incomes and advanced degrees. With QAnon and its successors, “anyone” can be smarter than a government policy analyst if they do their own research on the internet. Likewise “anyone” can be smarter than a doctor if they do their own internet research into alternative medicine. Wealthy coastal urbanites are less likely to go hunting and less likely to own guns. Rural working-class families go hunting and love guns. Guns are treated as a murderous abomination on the coasts – and gun owners are viewed as thugs. Gun owners do not see things that way.

    

Religious conservatives are also fighting for status. Church attendance has been dropping in the last twenty years, a continuation of a longer-term trend. The percentage of adults who identify as Christian has been dropping while the percentage of adults who identify as non-religious has been increasing. (Pew Research Center 2019) Evangelicals have seen significant defeats in the rising acceptance of abortion, gay marriage, and transgender rights. Films, television and popular music all promote worldviews antithetical to Fundamentalist Christianity. Public education argues for the primacy of science over religion, and for the superiority of secular teachers and professors to religious leaders. Public education often pushes a feminist or racially tolerant perspective. Evangelicals perceive themselves as being treated as ignorant, backward and stupid.

    

It is worthy of note that conservative religions have a long history of supporting authoritarian governments. In Spain, in the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church supported Carlist monarchists in three civil wars against more republican forces. (Callahan, 1984) The Church supported Franco in the more famous Spanish Civil War that occurred in the Twentieth Century. (Callahan, 2000). The Catholic Church also supported Salazar’s authoritarian government in Portugal, although it did oppose more explicitly fascist movements such as the Integralists. (Pinto and Rezola, 2008) Catholicism was deeply intertwined with the Fascist movements in both 1930’s Argentina (Finchelstein 2020) and Italy (Kertzer, 2014) . The Catholics were not the only religious group who could be anti-democratic. The Greek Orthodox Church was a fundamental ally of the authoritarian Metaxas regime in the 1930’s. (Kallis, 2008) The Orthodox Church also supported proto-Fascist Nationalist movements in Serbia (Falina, 2008) and Romania (Shapiro, 2007).  

    

In the United States, some forms of evangelical Protestantism have evolved into Christian Nationalism. There are conflicting interpretations of Christian Nationalism, with a lot of research remaining to be done. It is reasonable to think of Christian Nationalism as being a simple aggregate of conservative people with particularly conservative world views. (Gorski and Perry, 2022, Djupe, Lewis and Sokhey 2023) It is possible to think of Christian Nationalism as the attempt of Evangelical or Non-Denominational ministers to set themselves off from more moderate mainstream denominations – much in the same way that MAGA politicians set themselves off from mainstream Republicans who they consider to be RINOs. (Hollinger 2022, Finke and Stark 2005) There are synergies between theological differentiation and political differentiation. It is possible to link the conservative political activities of religious groups to extremely wealthy conservative parishioners who fund such activity both out of their own ideals and out of their own material interests. (Marti, 2020, Gold, 2023) I believe all of these interpretations have elements of truth. Regardless of how Christian organizations generate their political commitments, there have been no democratically national governments that have been able to stem the tide of rising secularism in society. This is likely to increase the interest of Christian activists in non-democratic forms of governance.

   

Supporters of MAGA see two intractable problems that no elected government has been able to correct:

a. Migration

b. Loss of Respect For Red Staters and Religious Conservatives

    

Democrats provide no solutions to these problems. Mainstream Republicans provide no solutions to these problems. Changing the political party that is in power offers no solutions to these problems. In the eyes of conservatives, bringing in a strong man might theoretically solve these problems.

    

Ergo, the enthusiasm for Trump.

    

Ergo, the willingness to tilt elections so Trump is more likely to win.

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[1] The material in this section largely comes from Keyssar 2000.

[2] The material in this section largely comes from Gumbel 2016.

[3] North Korea doesn’t fit that explanation.

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For More Information

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Callahan, W. (1984). Church, Politics, and Society in Spain. 1750-1874. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press.


(2000). Catholic Church in Spain. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. 


Collier, P. (2018). Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties. New York, Harper.


Djupe, P., Lewis, A. and Sokhey, A. (2023). Full Armor of God: Mobilization of Christian Nationalism in American Politics. New York, Cambridge.


Falina, M. (2008). Between ‘Clerical Fascism’ and Political Orthodoxy: Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Interwar Serbia. In M. Feldman and M. Turda with T. Georgescu (Eds.), Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe (pp. 35-46). New York, Routledge.


Finchelstein, F. (2020). Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy 1919-1945. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press.


Finke, R and Stark, R. 2005. Churching of America: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press.


Garrido, M. (2019). Patchwork City: Class, Space and Politics in Metro Manila. Chicago, University of Chicago.


Gold, R. (2023, March 24). Meet the Billionaire Bully Who Wants to Turn Texas Into a Christian Theocracy. Texas Monthly. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/billionaire-tim-dunn-runs-texas/


Gorski, P. and Perry. S. (2022). Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to Democracy. New York, Oxford.


Griffith, E. C. (1907). Rise and Development of the Gerrymander. Chicago, Scott, Foresman & Company. 


Gumbel, A. (2016). Down for the Count: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America. New York, New Press.


Hollinger, P. (2022). Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press.


Huntingdon, S. (1991). Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman, University of Oklahoma.


Kallis, A. (2008). Fascism and Religion: the Metaxas Regime in Greece and the ‘Third Hellenic Civilization’: Some Theoretical Observations on ‘Fascism’, ‘Political Religion’ and ‘Clerical Fascism’. In M. Feldman and M. Turda with T. Georgescu (Eds.), Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe (pp. 17-34). New York, Routledge.
 

Keena, A., Latner, M., McGann, A., and C. A. Smith. 2021. Gerrymandering the States: Partisanship, Race and the Transformation of American Federalism. New York, Cambridge. 
 

Kertzer. D. (2014). Pope and Mussolini: Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe. New York: Random House.


Keyser, A. (2000). Right to Vote: Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York, Basic Books.


Marti, G. (2020). American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion and the Trump Presidency. New York, Rowman and Littlefield.


Massey, D., Durand, J. and Pren, K. (2016) Why Border Enforcement Backfired. American Journal of Sociology 121(5), 1557-1600. doi: 10.1086/684200
 

Pew Research Center. (2019). In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at a Rapid Pace. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/
 

Pinto, A. C. and M. I. Rezola. (2008). Political Catholicism, Crisis of Democracy and Salazar’s New State in Portugal. In M. Feldman and M. Turda with T. Georgescu (Eds.), Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe (pp. 141-156). New York, Routledge.


Seabrook, N. 2022. One Person, One Vote: Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America. New York, Pantheon.
 

Shapiro, P. (2007). Faith, Murder, Resurrection: Iron Guard and the Romanian Orthodox Church. In K. Spicer (ed.), Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence and the Holocaust. (pp 136-170). Bloomington, Indiana University.
 

Stiglitz, J. (2012). Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. New York, Norton. 
 

Tilly, C. (2007). Democracy. New York, Cambridge.
 

UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute. (2002). Mosaic Not a Monolith: Profile of the U.S. Latino Population 2000-2020. Retrieved from https://latino.ucla.edu/research/latino-population-2000-2020/
 

Wejnert, B. (2014). Diffusion of Democracy: Past and Future of Global Democracy. New York, Cambridge.

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