Democratic Situations

Democratic Situations places the making and doing of democratic politics at the centre of relational research. The book turns the well-known sites of contemporary Euro-American democracy – elections, bureaucracies, public debates and citizen participation – into fluctuating democratic situations where supposedly untouchable democratic ideals are contested and warped in practice. The empirical cases demonstrate that democracy cannot be reduced to theoretical schemes of conflict, institutions or deliberation. Instead, they offer an urgently needed renewal of our understanding of democratic politics at a time when conventional ideas increasingly fail to capture current events such as Brexit, Trump and Covid19.

Ugly Freedoms

In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These “ugly freedoms” legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker’s sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism’s violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination.

Expressive Survey Responding: A Closer Look at the Evidence and Its Implications for American Democracy

Concerns about public opinion-based threats to American democracy are often tied to evidence of partisan bias in factual perceptions. However, influential work on expressive survey responding suggests that many apparent instances of such bias result from respondents insincerely reporting politically congenial views in order to gain expressive psychological benefits. Importantly, these findings have been interpreted as “good news for democracy” because partisans who knowingly report incorrect beliefs in surveys can act on their correct beliefs in the real world. We presently synthesize evidence and commentary on this matter, drawing two conclusions. First, evidence for insincere expressive responding on divisive political matters is limited and ambiguous. Second, when experimental manipulations in surveys reduce reports of politically congenial factual beliefs, this is often because such reported beliefs serve as flexible and interchangeable ways of justifying the largely stable allegiances that guide political behavior. So when circumstances render it costly to endorse a partisan belief, assessments of that belief become less diagnostic of the political predispositions that matter most, not more diagnostic of sincere views that will override partisan commitments. The expressive value of acting on political commitments should be viewed as a central feature of the American political context rather than a methodological artifact of surveys.