António Câmara, "The Long Corrosion of Democratic Constraints in American Politics, 1873–2025"
Democracy substitutes political competition for violence, but only if politicians accept institutions and a shared reality as constraints. Attacking institutions and spreading conspiracies may benefit individual politicians by mobilizing supporters and weakening opponents. However, doing so corrodes these democratic constraints and invites the violence that democracy was meant to replace. It also undermines public trust in institutions and distorts the decisions of citizens and politicians. I measure when politicians attack and defend institutions and advance conspiratorial claims, using large language models applied to over 18 million Congressional floor speeches from 1873 to 2025. I show that attacks on institutions and conspiratorial claims rise steadily over the twentieth century and accelerate sharply in the 2020s, reaching all-time highs by 2025. This surge builds on a long-run increase and is not a recent development. These patterns predate and are not explained by the diffusion of major communication technologies. Instead, the long rise and surge are consistent with a spiral model of endogenous escalation in which politicians increasingly attack democratic constraints.
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel room K354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20260331T160000Z DTEND:20260331T180000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR