At Yale, Political Scientists Envision New Ways to Study American Democracy

For two days at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies last month, leading political scientists stressed common themes about our current moment.

They discussed the erosion of democratic norms, the rise of authoritarianism, and the failure of American institutions to respond with adequate regularity and force. They examined the growing concentration of power in corporations, courts, and technology platforms. They invoked the feedback loop between economic and political inequality, charged in part by racial backlash.

And they united in a belief that traditional political science practices have proven ill-equipped to meet these surging challenges.

“We are living through a moment of extraordinary political change, and the discipline has never had to react to so much with so little time to catch up,” said Jacob Hacker, the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science and director of the American Political Economy eXchange (APEX) at ISPS. “Political science often buys high and sells low. Today, I think we need to think about how to buy low — how to invest in the questions that will matter most in our rapidly evolving polity, even if they’re not yet fashionable.”

APEX is part of the Consortium on American Political Economy (CAPE). Founded in 2023 with the support of the Hewlett Foundation, APEX studies American democratic capitalism — the analysis of the interplay of markets and government in the United States.

Hacker led last month’s conference with his CAPE co-directors, Paul Pierson, the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley; Kathleen Thelen, the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, associate professor of political science at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

“The traditional way political science subfields have been designed no longer makes sense,” Pierson said. “We need to turn away from studying institutions, such as the presidency or Congress, in isolation.”

Studying the American Political Economy (APE) involves looking at political and economic relationships in their totality and in various combinations, offering insights into how political actors regularly cross institutional boundaries to accomplish their goals — perhaps working to pass a law, lobby for executive action, or file a lawsuit. The APE approach requires attention to structures, organizations, and systems of power, particularly how economic elites, media conglomerates, and tech platforms shape political outcomes in ways that are often hidden from view.

Pierson said that focusing on voter behavior or emphasizing institutions as separate entities may have, for example, led political scientists to miss how the U.S. Constitution’s system of separation of powers opened a path for concentrating political authority and degrading the rule of law.

“I think we know now that in a context of competitive authoritarianism, we cannot rely on ambition to counter ambition,” he said. “It is not as reliable as a system where multiparty coalitions serve as a check on concentrated authority.”

Thelen talked about how corporations and politicians have increasingly used courts to obtain their objectives — often in ways that skirt wide attention.

“Adversarial legalism in the U.S. is extremely distinctive,” Thelen said. “Other countries simply do not do their regulation in this way. And this system has created enormous opportunities for powerful actors to get out in front of government regulators and basically run out the clock while they create changes on the ground that cannot be unchanged.”

In addition, Thelen discussed the political implications of how the largest technology companies — Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — have shifted from asset-light to extremely capital-intensive business models in a race to monetize artificial intelligence. They now pour billions of dollars into data centers that require customized computer chips and enormous amounts of energy and water.

“From a regulatory and political perspective, these heavy investments in physical infrastructure make these companies much more vulnerable to government oversight,” she said. “These new business plans are harder to exit or shift. And so, companies are much more eager to curry favor with the administration.”

Hertel-Fernandez focused on the study of labor markets, emphasizing the fragmentation of workers across public and private sectors. He discussed the challenges faced by private sector workers in organizing and the centrality of courts in setting labor policy. And he discussed the need for more research on the political economy of childcare and elder care.

“If you’re trying to raise wages for some of the lowest paying care workers in the economy, that’s going to raise costs for families unless the government steps in to subsidize it,” he said.

Brian Libgober, assistant professor of political science and law at Northwestern University, focused on the shift in policymaking from Congress to the executive branch and the implications for special interests that often operate without transparency, noting how interactions between lobbyists and government have been hard for political scientists to observe.

“Organizations don’t necessarily want you to understand why they are deciding what they are deciding,” he said.