ABSTRACT

In recent years, the debate about the state of democracy in the United States has split political scientists into two camps: those who believed that American democracy was stable, and those who feared that former President Donald J. Trump might engage in significant violations of executive authority, such as using a declaration of national emergency to postpone elections. In this article, we argue that this debate rests on an overly simple juxtaposition between democracy and authoritarianism, and has misidentified the true danger faced by American institutions. The United States is in the process of becoming a less functional democracy in which both major parties retain a feasible prospect of winning elections but the nature of their competition is transformed in a manner that undermines the informal norms of healthy democratic life. This entails a shift from “clean” forms of competition which largely take the rules of the democratic game for granted towards what we term “dirty” democracy, in which competition consists, to a significant extent, of attempts to change the rules of the democratic game.

摘要

近年来，关于美国民主状况的辩论将政治学家分成了两个阵营：那些认为美国民主是稳定的，以及那些担心前总统唐纳德·J·特朗普可能会严重侵犯行政权的人。权力，例如使用宣布国家紧急状态来推迟选举。在本文中，我们认为这场辩论建立在民主与威权主义之间过于简单的并列之上，并且错误地识别了美国机构面临的真正危险。美国正在成为一个不太稳定的民主的过程，其中两大党都保留了胜利选举的可行前景，但他们的竞争性的性质是以破坏健康民主生活的非正式规范的方式改变。