What Researchers Must Do Differently After January 6th, 2021.
This is the write-up of my thoughts for the The Capitol Coup One Year Later: How Research Can Assess and Counter Threats to Democracy.
The field has too long relied on a set of conceptual and methodological approaches that have all too easily led themselves to a value-neutralness that fundamentally elides the nature of threats to democracy in the US and abroad.
What should we do differently going forward? Let me lay out a few big arguments.
First, we need to move from talking about polarization to talking about status threats.
There are many varieties of polarization — enough to be the subject of their own talk — but in general the term refers to the distance between people on any number of measures: ideology, affect (or feelings toward one another), sociality, morality, etc. Polarization is often held up as a cause of democratic backsliding or democratic decay — but this is not quite right. Polarization is often a symptom of underlying democratic or political inequalities, not the cause. Polarization is just often more visible, easier to study, and politically neutral to talk about than political inequalities, so it is more ready-to-hand for scholars. But in relying on narratives of polarization, scholars embrace a value-neutralness that elides the real underlying democratic issues.
We can see this clearly in how the right has embraced the language of being anti-polarization in its attacks on things such as Critical Race Theory and the 1619 project. Indeed, the texts of these bills across the country often sound like polarization scholarship in decrying the “divisiveness” that supposedly stems from the teaching of America’s racial history. And, we already see efforts to address the reality of 1/6/21 being condemned as ‘divisive’ and ‘partisan.’ From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter, the movement for LGBTQIA equality to efforts to achieve economic justice — activists that have threatened existing, and unequal, racial and social orders in their efforts to achieve fully multi-racial and multi-ethnic democracies have been attacked for undermining social solidarity.
A better conceptual approach for researchers, and one that is more theoretically and empirically backed by the research literature in my opinion, would be to study status threats. The analysis of status threats better places the events of January 6th in the context of a Republican president, his party, and their primary coalition of whites attempting to subvert the legitimate and peaceful transfer of power. Status threat also helps us place January 6th in historical context — it was not polarization that caused the Civil War; polarization was the result of efforts by slaves and Black and white abolitionists to end slavery. Movements that challenge the dominant social and political status of groups always cause polarization — dominant interests in societies seek to protect their dominance.
Second, center power and interest in studies of disinformation and propaganda.
We have made a lot of strides as a field in understanding the nature, spread, and effects of disinformation and propaganda. What we have not made equal progress on, however, is our analyses of how disinformation and propaganda are often tools in the service of power. Too often we rely on frameworks that privilege individual psychology (such as making assumptions that people are victims of mis- and disinformation), or frameworks that focus on the distribution of disinformation and propaganda as if it simply all around us, or analyze individual pieces of content and messages.
If we were to center questions of power and interest we would see that disinformation is often a tool (and an elite one at that) for gaining and securing power, including over people’s minds. We would see that disinformation and propaganda are often part of concerted campaigns, and unfold over long time horizons. And, we would see that disinformation and propaganda accord with larger symbolic, social, and cultural frameworks, such as conveying threats to status, provoking racial and ethnic hatreds, and exploiting fear.
January 6th looks different in the light of power and interest. We see election disinformation as first and foremost an elite-driven phenomenon designed to undermine accountability at the ballot box both by creating and reinforcing perceptions of an illegitimate election (over many, many months if not years), and provide political actors ready-to-hand narratives to help them pursue and secure power (quite visible in post-election, GOP-led efforts to restrict voting rights in municipalities across the country). Too much research has centered on Facebook, not elites and institutions such as the Republican Party. Even more, too many scholars have characterized those who participated in January 6th as the dupes of disinformation. This might be true, of course, but it is first and foremost an empirical question. And, I believe that a more compelling hypothesis, derived from extensive reporting by outlets such as the New York Times, would be that while some people certainly fit this description, many, many others were there for political reasons, such as to secure power and defend their social and political positions — to defend white status at the top of the racial hierarchy. Narratives of election fraud might have provided a proximate reason for some, or a legitimating excuse for others, but a far deeper cause of 1/6 is that white social power is under very real threat. Taking people’s potential motivations and interests seriously, rather than ignoring or dismissing them, should be at the forefront of any post-January 6th research agenda.
Third, what we do well as a field is media, but we should have more explicit efforts to incorporate what comparativists and institutionalists tell us about democratic decay and backsliding, and give back to their literature in turn.
This is important, because the body of work on things such as democratic decay or backsliding often only deals with media in a cursory fashion, and often not at all with platforms and social media. Work that centers political institutions in questions of democracy, and even many studies of phenomena such as polarization and political identity in the literature within political science and sociology, often fail to systematically analyze communication and media. Scholars identify things such as polarization and status threats, but without an understanding of information and communication there is no clear mechanism for how people come to perceive themselves as members of social groups, different from other groups, or perceive that their place in society is under threat. At the same time, this literature often has very thin understandings of the complexity of contemporary hybrid media systems, reducing their studies of democracy into media categories of ‘free’ or ‘independent’ versus ‘not free.’ This says little about all the ways that contemporary media may serve ruling or oppositional parties — while still being independent — such as Fox News, and even less about how independent, commercial platforms may give rise to global conspiracy movements aligned with political interests.
At the same time, as detailed above, as a field we would benefit greatly from the uptake of institutional accounts of democratic backsliding, and analysis of the potential role of media in them — including declines in tolerance, views of the opposition as illegitimate, erosion of public faith in democracies, loss of gatekeeping in party nominations, and decreased accountability of political elites. We also should not be limited by what is most visible or accessible to us, including through platform data, at the expense of the data — from deep reporting and congressional inquiries — that reveals all the behind the scenes coordination that made this an attempted coup.
Finally, I think there is already an emerging view that wants to put an ‘individualizing’ frame on January 6th instead of a political one. Individualizing and criminalizing January 6th, by hunting down the perpetrators of violence for instance or focusing on Trump, or focusing on the individuals involved and their motivations, takes us away from understanding January 6th as fundamentally, irrevocably political. As Mahmood Mamdani has argued, “violence” is “an act of constructing the political community….Violence is a means of defining who is a member and who is not — where the boundaries of the community lie. As such, political violence tells us that something is amiss in the political community: someone who wants membership is being denied; someone who is a member wants to expel others.”
If we take Mamdani’s point, we cannot see January 6th as an aberration, but as part of an ongoing project to construct and protect the status of a particular kind of political community — a white dominant United States. Only by acknowledging that January 6th was political violence, with political objectives, can we start to address the underlying tensions in our political community. There is a compelling need to create inclusive, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic democracy and solidarity — where difference is articulated in terms of adversaries, not enemies. And, Mamdani argues that dominant groups need to be seen as much in terms of being survivors of the political systems that created them as non-dominant groups, but with collective responsibility to imagine inclusive citizenship, secure and protect access to politics, and compel the state to redress those historical legacies of inequality to secure full democratic participation.
