On the limits of political science: a conversation with Frank Baumgartner

The introduction to this conversation is available in Portuguese here.

Beatriz: How would you characterize the current state of American democracy?

Frank: Right now, it's in crisis and probably already past the point of no return with threats to the constitutional structure. And there'll be many people who, when we look back, we will be able to identify as enablers of breaking the structure and who may have serious regrets about that. But I was talking with a colleague, a political scientist. I mentioned how frustrating it is to see that the Constitution, with its guarantees of separation of power and so many checks and balances, would be so easily broken by somebody using these techniques of a Mafia organized crime boss, threatening people with repercussions and intimidating people so successfully that he could break the system. And my friend, a prominent political scientist, said, well, that's no surprise, no constitutional structure can withstand a threat from enough people in positions of power who reject the constitutional structure. The words on the page, by themselves, no matter what they are, can't guarantee success if there are actors in the system who are driven to break the system. And now we’re seeing that breakdown, especially among members of Congress who no longer protect the institutional framework of the legislature, because they prioritize party loyalty above all else. Or rather, it’s not just the party — it’s loyalty to the Trump administration. That administration is willing to disregard the constitutional compact, particularly its relationship with the judiciary. The judicial branch has no means of enforcing its rulings; it relies on the executive to uphold them. When the executive openly defies those rulings, it forces a constitutional showdown. But the judiciary is often reluctant to escalate that confrontation, knowing it may ultimately lack the power to prevail. It’s deeply disheartening to witness this erosion of the constitutional order. And it's also puzzling to me because I didn't know that many thinkers really want to turn the presidency into an all-powerful executive agency. We've never had that in our country. And I didn't think there were that many Americans who wanted it. But there are, and not just Trump, but also some people who are on the intellectual side, who reject all of the fundamental norms of American democracy. That's surprising and upsetting. But that's where we are.

Beatriz: I'm thinking about the literature on the imperial presidency. Don’t you think, in a way, it is not surprising that people want that, given the increase in the scope of the presidency?

Frank: It’s unsurprising that the President would want more power. Once you're in office, it’s natural to resent any checks or balances that limit your authority. I can easily imagine that the current occupant of the White House would always seek more power rather than less. But that’s how the system works: the Speaker of the House wants more power, the Senate Majority Leader wants more power — everyone does. That’s the idea of ambition checking ambition. So I’m comfortable with that part because the system is designed in such a way that, even though everyone wants more power, they can’t necessarily get it. I also understand the appeal of a strong executive — someone who can act decisively and unilaterally, without navigating the complexities of our fragmented governmental structure.

But when it comes to how we teach political science, I think we’ve all, collectively, taught this idea that our system of checks and balances was a kind of stroke of genius, the product of brilliant minds who designed a structure to prevent domination. In retrospect, we must admit this may have been entirely wrong. And what’s more surprising is that the consensus among political scientists and others isn’t as strong as I thought. Plenty of people are now willing to make the case — to provide arguments and intellectual justification — for turning the presidency into something it has never been in American history. So yes, it’s shocking. Really shocking.

Beatriz: To what extent is the current democratic crisis in the United States rooted in structural features, such as long-standing institutions that struggle to adapt to societal change, and to what extent does partisan or ideological polarization drive it?

Frank: One of the problems is the rise of Christian nationalism. Something is bringing together certain groups and allowing Trump and his more strategic allies to unify them around the idea of returning to the past and focusing on the strength of basic ideas rooted in Christian nationalism. That includes rejecting the separation of church and state, as well as rejecting religious tolerance and pluralism.

If we look back at our country's history, we see religious tolerance, but only because the Christians who came to the United States belonged to many different denominations. Their idea of tolerance was that Puritans shouldn't dominate Quakers, Quakers shouldn't dominate Methodists, Methodists should leave Evangelical Christians alone, and so on. These different sects of Christianity were to be treated equally, without government interference in their disputes or autonomy. That’s quite different from respecting faiths outside of Christianity.

I think the language of tolerance and the separation of church and state has always been questionable. For example, our coins say "In God We Trust" — never "In Allah We Trust." The references have always been Christian, though not explicitly tied to Catholicism, Protestantism, or any particular denomination. There’s a chaplain who says a prayer in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and we pledge allegiance to the flag in school as children. So there have always been references to Christianity, and now that’s becoming a bigger problem. I think people who have long wanted more Christian involvement in government are now pushing very hard to make that happen.

Beatriz: How have shifts in issue framing and agenda-setting (by political elites, media, or interest groups) contributed to the erosion of democratic norms in the United States? Are we seeing certain narratives crowd out more democratic or deliberative policy discussions?

Frank: It’s framing, but I think it goes far beyond that. I believe our government is under the control of someone who behaves like an organized crime boss. The threats, the intense intimidation, the use of money, and the demand for absolute loyalty are new elements. Other politicians have certainly demanded loyalty before, but not at the level we’re seeing now. They haven’t gone so far as to withdraw security protections from former secretaries of state and former presidents. The vindictiveness — that’s new. There’s also a complete failure on the opposition side to articulate a cohesive set of frames and arguments about what they stand for. On the administration side, it’s not a single frame, but rather a constant drumbeat of cultural references that evoke masculinity, whiteness, Christianity, power, strength, and hatred of outsiders. These are potent emotions — all of them negative. And it’s mainly the fear and loathing of outsiders that are most effective. Dehumanizing marginalized groups is a proven technique of framing, and it’s being used very aggressively. Meanwhile, the other side has been unable to reframe or counter these arguments with more humanizing narratives. For example, by emphasizing the need to protect children. So that’s where we are.

Beatriz: Yeah. I remember reading a lot of political psychology and psychology literature for your class, which says bad draws people's attention.

Frank: Yeah. Bad is stronger than good. Negative emotions evoke a much stronger emotional response. Fear, as a negative stimulus, is more powerful than hope. That means you have to offer five doses of hope to counter every one dose of fear. The Trump camp is very skilled at stoking fear.

There’s also this strange adaptation of patriotism that I think we’re starting to see a reaction against. Many anti-Trump individuals are now reclaiming the flag and patriotic symbols, trying to take them back from those they see as engaging in sedition or anti-democratic, anti-American behavior. But those same people are draped in the flag while doing it, and in the most bizarre ways. I know the flag holds more symbolic importance in the U.S. than in most countries, but you’re not supposed to make clothing out of it. You’re not supposed to turn it into a string bikini, pair of pants, underwear, or a handkerchief. You’re supposed to treat it respectfully —not make it into a cowboy hat. But now, that’s what’s happening. And, strangely, the flag has been adopted in these disrespectful forms by people who claim to be demonstrating patriotism, when in reality they’re disrespecting both the flag and the Constitution.

Beatriz: Have you read or seen Ezra Klein's and Derek Thompson's book, “Abundance”?

Frank: No.

Beatriz: Their argument is very similar to something a politician in Portugal has been saying: that to counter the fear and resentment promoted by the far-right, we need to create “objects of political desire,” to make the future feel desirable again. Do you think that’s a powerful enough strategy to reshape the political conversation?

Frank: It’s a good idea to have a positive statement of what we are for rather than just what we are against. It could be something about investing in families and investing in the future, investing in the earth, investing in the environment. We have to be for something,

Beatriz: In the US, Klein and Thompson argue that the opposition is not doing that.

Frank: I agree. They're saying, “We’re going to return to normal. We're for normal. We’re following the rules”, but that's not very inspiring. We have to be for something bigger than that.

Beatriz: Given the current trends, do you think reversing course is still possible? If so, what would that require?

Frank: No, I don't think we'll ever go back. The genie is out of the bottle, and we can no longer expect future presidents to behave as their predecessors did with respect for the constitutional limits on their power. There's no going back, and I'm not sure exactly where we’re headed. It’s highly unpredictable. We’re in a volatile period, and we can’t simply settle down and resume as before. There will have to be significant changes and new guarantees of constitutional order, because the old safeguards were clearly insufficient.

Beatriz: That is scary.

Frank: We’re in a scary time. I don't know if the constitutional structure will survive. I’m not sure it will change for the worse. Although, in many ways, it already has. But to restore a robust and functional democratic system, we can’t just return to the old one. We’ll have to create a new version. And that’s frightening, because you certainly don’t want to convene a Constitutional Convention and rewrite the Constitution — that would be far too risky. We have no idea what might come out of it.

We need a new group of people with a positive vision, something compelling they can present to the American public. It would need to be broadly popular and involve some fundamental changes to the rules.

I hope that will include a broad replacement of many of our elected officials — not just those who conspired with Trump and might lose if there’s a backlash, but also a new generation of politicians who were never aligned with Trump and who can offer a better vision of the future than those who came before them.

Beatriz: In our email exchange, you mentioned that political science as a discipline has done a poor job of understanding, let alone predicting, this outcome. I’ve also spoken to two comparativists who argue that the field does have the tools to make sense of it. Do you think this reflects a specific blind spot in the study of American politics?

Frank: I come from a background in American and comparative politics, and I think the blame is shared. Comparativists didn’t predict the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were too busy analyzing who was standing where in official Kremlin photographs on state holidays, and how close they were to the premier or the first secretary. They completely missed the bigger picture. They failed miserably. We failed as a profession. So this isn’t a problem that is limited to one subfield.

We’re seeing the same failure repeat itself now. The discipline has focused on easy, tidy analyses, emphasizing incrementalism and stability instead of seriously considering the forces that can occasionally produce fundamental instability. Those disruptive forces usually don’t succeed, but occasionally, they do—and that’s when it really matters.

I don’t want to take credit for being able to predict such events. The theory of punctuated equilibrium, which I helped develop, does point to these sudden shifts. But it doesn’t help us anticipate when they’ll occur. So I have to admit: I didn’t see this coming. I didn’t foresee the fall of the Soviet Union — though it wasn’t my area of study — and I didn’t see this crisis coming. I was confident Hillary Clinton would win, and that things would return to normal. Even when Trump was elected, I assumed he wouldn’t last a year in office, because I thought he wasn’t interested in governing, just in proving that he could win.

I’ve been wrong before. I remember predicting in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the nomination over George H. W. Bush, that the Republicans would never win because Reagan was too conservative. After that, I stopped trying to predict election outcomes. So I’m not saying I’ve done better than others. I am saying that, as a profession, we’ve failed many times.

One of the interesting challenges in social science is deciding how we relate to our object of study. I think many of us identify with our subjects. We grow to respect them and prefer to study political actors we agree with. There was a time when the environmental movement was on the rise, especially in Europe, and everyone wanted to write dissertations on the Green Party. It was all very positive. Meanwhile, traditional Christian Democrats and Republicans were ignored mainly because many political scientists didn’t personally relate to them.

That changed somewhat with the rise of the extreme right. Scholars began to study these movements as threats. So the tendency isn’t universal, but it’s there: we gravitate toward studying what we like. And we also tend to avoid taking risks.

I remember conversing with a well-respected colleague about punctuated equilibrium versus the analysis of stable institutional structures. He specialized in the latter and told me he was fine being wrong 5% of the time, as long as he was right 95% of the time. His theory was more parsimonious, so he focused on analyzing the stable parts of the system, leaving the punctuations for others to study.

And he had a point. His approach made sense in terms of scientific modeling. He could make reliable predictions. But the blind spot in that approach is that it avoids the only moments that matter: the major ruptures. And I think that’s where we’ve fallen short. It’s much easier to study well-behaved equilibrium systems than to engage with the complexity of feedback loops and disruptive change, but it’s precisely those moments that demand our attention.

Beatriz: So I have a question. Do you think political science should aim to predict, or simply to understand? Is understanding enough?

Frank: Some things aren't predictable, but we still have to understand them. More importantly, we need to understand the dynamics of the systems we’re analyzing. We shouldn’t oversimplify those systems by assuming they always operate in equilibrium. If they did, then yes, we could predict outcomes. But if they don’t, we can’t pretend otherwise. In those cases, predictability just isn’t possible.

I often use an analogy with climate science. We understand how the atmosphere works, but we can’t predict the weather six months from now. It doesn’t even make sense to ask what the weather will be a year and a half from today. What we can do is understand how weather systems interact to produce outcomes, and that allows us to make short-term predictions, like one or two days ahead. Our forecasts get pretty weak beyond four, five, or six days.

And keep in mind: we’ve invested hundreds of billions of dollars into weather prediction — satellites, sensors, real-time atmospheric monitoring. Political science could only dream of that level of instrumentation and observation. That’s part of why we created the Policy Agendas Project: to start at least developing a basic instrumentation level for understanding political systems. But even that isn’t granular enough to tell us, for example, what politicians are saying behind closed doors at any given moment.

That kind of data would likely never be available anyway, because a lot of what matters happens privately. It’s obscured by confidentiality and inaccessibility. So yes, we often lack critical data. But that doesn’t mean we don’t understand how the broader process works. It just means we’re working under opacity conditions and must be honest about that.

Beatriz: That’s an interesting way to look at it. Do you think political science needs to revise some of its core assumptions in light of what’s happening in the U.S.? I’ve heard people say this is a rare or exceptional event, but did we get something fundamentally wrong?

Frank: We need to change a lot in political science. One of the most significant issues is that the profession in the United States draws too heavily from a narrow social group, mostly upper-middle-class families. We need much greater diversity regarding social background, ethnicity, race, religion, and more richness in our perspectives.

Because when we talk about what governments do, a lot of it is shaped by identity and by how marginalized groups are treated. But very few political scientists truly understand what it’s like to be on the receiving end of government programs — to have relied on food stamps, to have been a single mother, or to have sent a child to an underperforming public school because that was the only option in the neighborhood. Or what it’s like to be targeted by aggressive policing.

Most of us didn’t grow up with those experiences. And that affects the kinds of questions we ask — or don’t ask. There are political scientists who do bring that diversity to the field, and when they do, they ask different questions and see things differently. Their work reveals just how limited the dominant perspective has been.

So I think we’ve failed not only because of a kind of methodological conservatism — and I mean conservatism with a small “c,” as in a focus on incremental change, on stability, on preserving the status quo or exploring marginal variation — but also because we’ve had a blind spot when it comes to social privilege. Our discipline has been shaped by the socially advantaged, and that’s limited our ability to fully understand the dynamics that can lead to dramatic change, like what we’re seeing now at the constitutional level.

Beatriz: Right. One thing I remember from your website, when I was applying to UNC, is a section where you offer advice to young scholars. If you were to give guidance today on what people should be studying, beyond what you’ve already mentioned, what would you tell a young political scientist?

Frank: I would say: study something that truly motivates you. Something that matters substantively to the world, not just something you already have the methodology to analyze. If you choose a topic because it’s essential, you'll develop the necessary tools even if you don’t yet know how to study it.

But if you approach it the other way around — starting with a toolkit, especially a cutting-edge methodology designed to get you published in top journals, and then look for a question that fits that method — chances are, the work will be dull. You might succeed professionally, but it will likely be unsatisfying.

It’s much more rewarding to pursue a complex question that challenges you, where the path isn’t clear, because you might create something original in doing so. It might take longer, but the potential for meaningful impact is much greater when you’re forced to build your own tools to answer a question that really matters.

Beatriz: Thank you. Is there anything I didn’t ask that you’d like to highlight, either about what’s happening in the United States or about political science as a discipline?

Frank: Well, I don’t have the answers. I wish I could tell you something I know for certain, but the only thing I know for sure is that we’re in serious trouble, especially when it comes to our constitutional structure.

As citizens and as scholars, we need to reflect on why we so often miss the big picture. Major world events happen, and we find ourselves catching up, instead of being able to say, “I told you so.”