Larry Bartels
May Werthan Shayne Professor and University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Law | Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN, UNITED STATES
Expert in public opinion, electoral politics, public policy, and political representation.
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Biography
Larry Bartels’ scholarship and teaching focus on public opinion, electoral politics, public policy, and political representation. His books include Democracy Erodes from the Top: Leaders, Citizens, and the Challenge of Populism in Europe, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (with Christopher Achen), and Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2nd edition). He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles, and of commentaries in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other prominent outlets. Bartels has received the Warren E. Miller Prize for contributions to the study of elections, public opinion, and voting behavior, the Career Achievement Award from the Society for Political Methodology, and Vanderbilt’s Earl Sutherland Prize for Career Achievement in Research. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Campaigns and Elections
Public Policy
Public Opinion
Electoral Politics
Political Representation
Accomplishments (3)
The Best Books of 2023 (professional)
2023-12-17
The very best of the hundreds of books on international politics, economics, and history that were featured in the magazine this year, selected by Foreign Affairs’ editors and book reviewers.
Society for Political Methodology Career Achievement Award (professional)
2021-01-01
The career achievement is the highest honor bestowed by the Society and recognizes the foundational, distinguished and sustained contributions to the field and the Society made by the recipients over their careers.
Member of American Philosophical Society (professional)
2019-01-01
The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and community outreach. It was founded by the polymath Benjamin Franklin and is considered the first learned society founded in what became the United States.
Education (3)
University of California, Berkeley: Ph.D., Political Science
Yale University: M.A., Political Science
Yale College: B.A., Political Science
Links (2)
Selected Media Appearances (10)
The Populist Phantom
Foreign Affairs online
2024-11-01
Many countries have been roiled in recent years by what is often called a “populist wave.” In the Anglophone world, this new era began in 2016 with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Media and political elites shocked by these events tied themselves in knots trying to figure out what had happened and why. According to the most popular strand of this thinking, the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory were the reverberations of a profound economic and social transformation. Globalization and technological change had shattered the livelihoods .
What I’m Reading: Why Democracy Erodes From the Top
The New York Times online
2024-08-16
First up is an interesting academic work on democratic backsliding — that is, the process of countries turning less democratic over time, eventually becoming semi-autocratic “hybrid” regimes, or even outright autocracies. In “Democracy Erodes From the Top: Leaders, Citizens and the Challenges of Populism in Europe,” published last year, Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, uses public opinion data to challenge the popular understanding of the links between right-wing populism and democratic backsliding in Europe.
Biden’s chances of re-election are better than they appear
The Economist online
2024-02-01
The third lesson, however, is a lot better for Mr Biden: voters have short memories. “The clear consensus in the literature is that recent economic performance is much more relevant at election time than earlier performance,” write Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, two political scientists, in their book “Democracy for Realists”. Americans, they argue, “vote on the basis of how they feel at the moment” and “forget or ignore how they have felt over the course of the incumbent’s term in office”. The authors show that increases in real disposable income per person in only the two quarters before a vote can, with an adjustment for tenure in the White House, predict the vote share of parties that are governing America to a striking degree of accuracy.
Spain's Vox party stumbles, testing limits of European far-right advance
Vox online
2023-07-24
But across Europe, the average vote share of right-wing populist parties has increased only modestly, from about 12% to 13% at the turn of the century to about 15% now, said Larry Bartels, professor at Vanderbilt University.
A 2023 Recession Wouldn’t Be So Bad for Biden. A Downturn in 2024 Would
Bloomberg online
2023-06-18
“The historical record suggests that a recession in the second half of 2023 would probably be less damaging to the president’s reelection prospects than a recession in the first half of 2024,” said Larry Bartels, who studies the intersection of politics and economics at Vanderbilt University. But he also said there’s not much that Biden can do at this point to change the direction of the economy in the short term.
Three Ways The New Primary Calendar Could Change The Nominating Process
HuffPost online
2022-12-02
“Iowa is indeed Republican-trending,” Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels told HuffPost, “but its Democratic Party activists have been pretty liberal.”
GOP, long the law and order party, slams FBI, Justice Department over search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago
USA Today online
2022-08-10
That polarization has led to a redefining of law and order, according to Larry Bartels, political science professor at Vanderbilt University. The issue of law and order has had a long, successful run in American politics, in part because it is conveniently flexible in its application, he said. It started with former President Richard Nixon, who famously remarked that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” he said. With polarized politics, “people firmly committed to one side increasingly convince themselves that any opposition must be illegitimate, even if it comes from individuals or institutions previously viewed as legitimate,” Bartels said.
With ‘Stealth Politics,’ Billionaires Make Sure Their Money Talks
The New York Times Magazine online
2022-04-06
Teaming up with a colleague at Vanderbilt University, Larry Bartels, Page and Seawright started by surveying wealthy people in the Chicago area — interviewing a random sample of 83 individuals from households with a median worth of $7.5 million. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they found that these multimillionaires skewed very conservative on economic issues, expressing a preference for marketplaces and philanthropy, rather than governments, to solve public problems; some also supported reductions to Social Security and Medicare. (At the same time, earlier research showed, affluent Americans tended to take socially liberal stances, supporting abortion and gay rights.) The resulting study, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” felt small to Page, its data insufficient and limited by geography. But he thought he could use it as proof of concept to generate interest for a first-of-its-kind national data set.
The Memo: The pre-Trump ‘normal’ is gone for good
The Hill online
2021-06-02
“I think of Donald Trump primarily as a symptom rather than a cause of democratic dysfunction,” said Professor Larry Bartels, co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University. “The fact that so many ordinary people have been willing to follow him so far is a telling indication of how politically polarized our society has become. The fact that so many political elites have been willing to follow him so far is even more telling, and even more unhealthy,” Bartels added.
The Republican revolt against democracy, explained in 13 charts
Vox online
2021-03-01
This chart, from a September 2020 paper by Vanderbilt professor Larry Bartels, shows a statistical analysis of a survey of Republican voters, analyzing the link between respondents’ score on a measure of “ethnic antagonism” and their support for four anti-democratic statements (e.g., “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it”). The graphic shows a clear finding: The higher a voter scores on the ethnic antagonism scale, the more likely they are to support anti-democratic ideas. This held true even when Bartels used regression analyses to compare racial attitudes to other predictors, like support for Trump. “The strongest predictor by far of these antidemocratic attitudes is ethnic antagonism,” he writes.
Selected Articles (3)
House Republicans were rewarded for supporting Donald Trump’s ‘stop the steal’ efforts
Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesLarry M. Bartels, Nicholas Carnes
2023-08-14
In early 2021, members of Congress cast a series of high-profile roll call votes forcing them to choose between condoning or opposing Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Substantial majorities of House Republicans supported Trump, first by opposing the certification of electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania on January 6th, then by opposing the president’s impeachment for inciting the attack on the US Capitol, and then by opposing a bill that would have created a national commission to investigate the events of January 6th. We examine whether the House Republicans who voted to support Trump in 2021 were rewarded or punished in the 2022 congressional midterm elections. We find no evidence that members who supported Trump did better or worse in contested general election races. However, Trump supporters were less likely to lose primary elections, more likely to run unopposed in the general election, more likely to run for higher office, and less likely to retire from politics. Overall, there seem to have been no significant political costs and some significant rewards in 2022 for House Republicans who supported Trump’s undemocratic behavior.
Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy
Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesLarry M. Bartels
2020-08-31
Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40% agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” (In both cases, most of the rest said they were unsure; only one in four or five disagreed.) I use 127 survey items to measure six potential bases of these and other antidemocratic sentiments: partisan affect, enthusiasm for President Trump, political cynicism, economic conservatism, cultural conservatism, and ethnic antagonism. The strongest predictor by far, for the Republican rank-and-file as a whole and for a variety of subgroups defined by education, locale, sex, and political attitudes, is ethnic antagonism—especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The corrosive impact of ethnic antagonism on Republicans’ commitment to democracy underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics.
Partisanship in the Trump Era
Journal of PoliticsLarry M. Bartels
2018-10-18
This article provides a snapshot of the contemporary American party system focusing on similarities and differences in the attitudes of rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats. In contrast to much journalistic speculation, I find that Republicans are not particularly divided by Donald Trump’s “hard-edge nationalism” and “gut-level cultural appeals.” Indeed, they seem to be united and energized by cultural conservatism (as measured by survey items tapping support for building a wall on the Mexican border, respect for the American flag, concerns about discrimination against whites, and negative feelings toward Muslims, gays and lesbians, atheists, and immigrants, among others). Democrats, by comparison, are relatively divided on cultural questions but united and animated by support for an activist government. This significant difference in the correlates of partisan affect, especially between the most committed partisans, puts a new twist on conventional understandings of current partisan polarization.
