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Psychological Biases and Democratic Anxiety: A Comment on Little and Meng (2023)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2024

Daniel Treisman Open the ORCID record for Daniel Treisman [Opens in a new window]
Daniel Treisman*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
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Extract

In their timely article, Andrew Little and Anne Meng make an important point. Despite widespread alarm over democratic backsliding, objective evidence suggests that the scale of the phenomenon is much more limited than many seem to think. Recent power holders around the world have not been entrenching themselves more effectively than in the past. Incumbents continue to lose elections about as often as they used to, and those who win have not been doing so by larger margins. Opposition parties are allowed to compete about as frequently today as 10 or 20 years ago. Moreover, there has been no increase in leaders’ ability to evade term limits.

Type
Comment and Controversy
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , April 2024 , pp. 194 - 197
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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