In Citizenship in Hard Times, Sara Wallace Goodman argues that partisan polarization imperils liberal democracy, because it tears asunder mass beliefs about the nature of citizenship. These beliefs—comprising a variety of abstract attitudes about political participation, tolerance of diversity, fealty to the democratic process, and attachment to the polity—matter because they confer legitimacy on political elites and the system in which they operate. But both incumbency and structural features of the system in which politicians operate—namely majoritarianism versus more consensual models of governance—may incentivize politicians to politicize them in response to democratic threat, with dire consequences. If individual-level partisan cleavages over citizenship become too wide as a response, Goodman contends, this then jeopardizes the broad-based consensus that allows institutions to function in the first place.

To make the case, Goodman analyzes a trove of survey data in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany ranging back to 2004. She uses preexisting survey measures tied to citizenship values and develops new measures fielded on an original 2019 cross-national survey. Within the latter, she embeds survey experiments designed to test partisan response to two kinds of democratic threats: polarization and election interference. The core empirical chapters test three main questions: (1) How widely endorsed are the citizenship values she examines? (2) Are they polarized by party identification? and (3) Does party identification condition how citizens respond to nominally nonpartisan democratic threats?

Overall, the book engages in a discussion of the utmost importance to contemporary politics. It is clearly theorized and engagingly written, and both the breadth and depth of the empirical approach are admirable. Its broadened conception of citizenship values is a much-needed addition to the relatively shopworn set of measures that most others have relied on in this domain, and the extensive use of survey experimentation helps address the usual concerns about causal identification that plague ambitious cross-national studies such as these. The results also are interesting. On the one hand, citizens differ meaningfully by party on the values Goodman highlights (chap. 4), a worrisome sign of disunity. On the other hand, evidence that experimentally induced democratic crises prompt further value polarization (chaps. 5 and 6) is less persuasive, in the sense that theorized differential responses by party almost never appear statistically significant when partisan groups are directly compared. Goodman may still be correct about this, and the results are in some cases suggestive if not dispositive, but certainly more research is warranted.

All major statements such as this one prompt the reader to consider fundamental questions, and I raise two here. First, as descriptively interesting as they are, why should we center the causal story on citizens and the citizenship values they profess? In Goodman’s account, these are not just objects to be studied but are also key cogs in the democratic system: citizens confer legitimacy on elites (and therefore the democratic system itself), and values tied to civic culture constrain elite behavior (p. 45). These assumptions are both common in the comparative literature on political culture and reasonable on their face. Yet most recent psychological- and political behavior-derived accounts of attitude formation put less weight on this “bottom-up” dynamic and more on a “top-down” or “follow-the-leader” view that privileges the ability of elites and the media to set the agenda, frame, persuade, and prime. Goodman’s own summary of the sprawling literature on partisanship lands on the notion that it works through mechanisms of “follow the leader, information cueing, [and] community pressure” (p. 49). All her analyses place citizenship values as effect and not cause. Given this, why should we think of citizenship norms as anything other than merely an effect of elite discourse? These theories are not mutually exclusive, but it is a question worth taking seriously, and there is no empirical evidence here one way or the other.

What about the values themselves? Goodman argues that they are the stuff of democratic stability: “these basic liberal commitments allow for the inherent differences of opinions, and other characteristics of a diverse society, to flourish while being bound together in common national purpose, or national unity” (p. 40). This is a common view among liberal nationalists and is plausible at face value. But it is an assumption just the same, and these norms might just as easily reflect an underlying unity/disunity in a society as cause it.

These are thorny issues, and it is difficult to adjudicate “mover” versus “moved” given the evidence at hand. But at a minimum, future researchers should keep in mind that there is a difference between understanding citizens’ attitudes about citizenship in an era of democratic threat and the role of these attitudes in the democratic process writ large. Given that the causal force of norms is central to this story—indeed, this is pitched in the early goings as one of the book’s two major arguments (pp. 14–15)—it seems odd that there is no attempt to adjudicate the issue empirically.

A second question is whether the story better reflects institutional dynamics or ideological ones. Goodman argues that institutional design matters because some systems are zero-sum and others are not (p. 52). One inference is that zero-sum “majoritarian” countries are more susceptible to polarization than non-majoritarian ones. Perhaps, but it seems like this misses what makes the current political landscape feel so utterly toxic. Whatever one makes of Goodman’s treatment of the United States as “a majoritarian system par excellence” (p. 19), its institutional rules—at least those highlighted here—have not fundamentally changed, while partisan polarization has ebbed and flowed over decades and centuries. Our road to the current mire has been both elite led and asymmetric, beginning with partisan elites sorting themselves on an ever-greater swath of issues and culminating in these elites, particularly Republicans, dedicating themselves to an antidemocratic political program. More broadly, in the three countries here and elsewhere, jeremiads about “democratic decline” were rife in the 1970s, more or less absent in the latter part of the twentieth century, and since reemerged in full force. If the institutional arrangements and incentives—at least those Goodman highlights—in these countries have not fundamentally changed over that period, then what has?

At the same time, the threats to democracy that Goodman highlights—polarization (chap. 5) and electoral interference (chap. 6)—are quite purposefully intended to be “apolitical” or at any rate apartisan. That is, they represent threats that are neither construed nor processed as an intrinsic part of the other party’s political program, in the way that, say, Republicans’ campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade or Democrats’ support of sanctuary cities would be. This is for good reason: we want to provide suitable conceptual distance between cause and effect.

Yet the notion that such threats are uniquely “about politics … a threat against regime practices, from the rule of law and norms of tolerance to brick-and-mortar institutions” (p. 43; emphasis in original) is difficult to sustain. “Polarization” as such may be a threat to democracy in the abstract, but it seems as though the far bigger threat to the kinds of liberal democratic values Goodman highlights is tied directly to the ideological program of the political right. Further, in the case of election interference, it seems inescapable that it is the political right that has been the intended beneficiary in most cases. This is not to gainsay the importance of structure and incumbency altogether. But surely they cannot be the whole picture when, at least in the United States “democratic crisis” in the sense defined here is bound up in the political program of one political party much more than the other.

There are (at least) two readings of the broad themes Goodman engages: (1) a structural story centered on institutional design, as filtered through citizens’ partisanship, and (2) an ideological story about how elites, specially those on the right, are uniquely drawn and empowered to dismantling norms and institutions tied to the post–World War II democratic order. The former is at root a story about the effect of being in power, whereas the latter is one about who is in power. Goodman’s research design offers little or no leverage here because in all cases the political right was in power when the key survey was in the field. But, as a thought experiment, can we imagine the January 6 insurrection and all the attendant fallout had Democrats been in power and Hillary Clinton in the White House? Or, if one prefers history to hypotheticals, why did Nixon readily concede a much closer election in 1960, and why was his threshold for resigning office much lower than that of Trump?

In summary, this book is in the rare tradition of work that needs to be read and taken seriously by scholars across discipline and subfield. It has a place in the pantheon of comparative public opinion scholarship that asks big questions and searches widely and deeply for answers. One need not agree with all its assumptions and arguments to understand the importance of its central message: excessive polarization puts governance at risk. Goodman asks us to consider how long a house divided can stand, a question that seems to become more serious with every passing election.