Emilee Booth Chapman’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

Most democratic theories recognize that democracy requires widespread adherence to both formal and informal norms that constrain the use of power and structure relationships among citizens. Most also recognize that a healthy democracy requires some forms of activism or resistance that transgress those norms to disrupt hierarchies, challenge injustices, and drive discursive innovation. Recent systemic theories of democracy show that democratic theory can incorporate these two realities without contradiction, but it is not clear whether an ethic of citizenship can do the same. This article reviews recent literature on the purposes and ethics of transgressive politics while also drawing attention to neglected questions about the functions of democratic norms and how they are maintained amid transgressions. These are questions that must be addressed by an ethic of citizenship that can navigate the tension between the authority of democratic norms and the constructive potential of transgressive politics. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 27 is June 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Voting is only one of the many ways that citizens can participate in public decision making, so why does it occupy such a central place in the democratic imagination? This book provides an original answer to that question, showing precisely what is so special about how we vote in today's democracies. By presenting a holistic account of popular voting practices and where they fit into complex democratic systems, the book defends popular attitudes toward voting against radical critics and offers much-needed guidance for voting reform. Elections embody a distinctive constellation of democratic values and perform essential functions in democratic communities. Election day dramatizes the nature of democracy as a collective and individual undertaking, makes equal citizenship and individual dignity concrete and transparent, and socializes citizens into their roles as equal political agents. The book shows that fully realizing these ends depends not only on the widespread opportunity to vote but also on consistently high levels of actual turnout, and that citizens' experiences of voting matters as much as the formal properties of a voting system. And these insights are also essential for crafting and evaluating electoral reform proposals. By rethinking what citizens experience when they go to the polls, the book recovers the full value of democratic voting today.

Realism can mean many things in political theory. This article focuses on “common-sense realism,” an approach to decision making under uncertainty characterized by its posture toward risk. Common-sense realist arguments have become popular in recent democratic theory. One prominent example is found in debates over the responsible party institutional model (RPIM). RPIM’s main features are two-party competition for full control of government and party organizations that empower officeholders, not activists. Proponents of RPIM defend it in realist terms. They claim that efforts to pursue more ambitious democratic ideals jeopardize goods that RPIM can readily secure. In this article I articulate a realist approach to institutional evaluation that assesses proposals on three dimensions: robustness, feasibility, and stability. Using this approach, I demonstrate that the realist argument for RPIM is weaker than it initially appears. The debate over RPIM is not a debate between realism and idealism but between competing democratic ideals.

This paper advances normative theorizing about political parties by highlighting concerns arising from recent empirical scholarship on marginal partisanship, affective polarization, and identity convergence. These phenomena challenge the ideal of healthy partisanship as characterized in recent democratic theory, and point toward a new theoretical agenda. I argue that democratic theorists’ current focus on the virtues of mature partisanship has obscured essential questions about the scope of partisanship as an ideal and about processes of partisan socialization and mobilization.

In this article, I defend compulsory voting on the grounds that it reinforces the distinctive and valuable role that elections play in contemporary democracy. Some scholars have suggested that mandatory voting laws can improve government responsiveness to members of poor and marginalized groups who are less likely to vote. Critics of compulsory voting object that citizens can participate in a wide variety of ways; voting is not important enough to justify forcing people to do it. These critics neglect the importance of voting's particular role in contemporary democratic practice, though. The case for compulsory voting rests on an implicit, but widely shared, understanding of elections as special moments of mass participation that manifest the equal political authority of all citizens. The most prominent objections to mandatory voting fail to appreciate this distinctive role for voting and the way it is embedded within a broader democratic framework.