Lab members are currently supporting the early stages of Prof. Settle’s multi-year project on the effects of democratic erosion in the United States on how the public thinks and talks about politics. A separate research group, the Democratic Erosion Project, is responsible for collecting data about the extent of democratic backsliding in the US states. SNaPP Lab members are focused on thinking about the political communication and psychology of democratic erosion.

Democrats and Republicans agree that democracy is threatened: 64% of Americans believe that democracy in the United States is “in crisis and at risk of failing” (Rose and Baker 2022) and 84% of Americans think that American democracy is under attack or being tested (CNN 2025). But partisans disagree about the nature and severity of the threat. The explanation for the public consensus that American democracy is in trouble, but the partisan divergence and misperceptions about the details—the nature of the problem, where democracy is most threatened, and the perception-reality gap about the public’s anti-democratic attitudes—reflects the consequences of a media ecosystem undergoing profound change. Scholars note that high levels of affective polarization in the American context produce conditions ripe for partisan divergence about the quality of democracy, threats to democracy, and the development of antidemocratic attitudes (McCoy and Somer 2024). But empirical assessment of these relationships has produced mixed results (Broockman, Kalla, and Westwood 2022; Voelkel et al. 2023; Voelkel et al. 2024; Mernyk et al. 2022; Braley et al. 2022; Landry et al. 2023).

As the United States experiences democratic backsliding, the information environment has moved away from the classic two-step flow of information (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944; Katz 1957; Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955) to a more complex and distorted pathway linking elite action to public opinion. These changes render the public less equipped to hold antidemocratic actors accountable for their actions. First, the production of local news has collapsed and consolidated (Darr, Hitt, and Dunaway 2018), reducing local media’s ability to fulfill its “watchdog role” (though see Archer and Darr (2022) and Lyons, Jaeger, and Wolak (2012) for applicable findings about why the public may pay more attention to state politics when democracy is threatened.) The collapse of local news is one component of the nationalization of politics (Hopkins 2018), whereby the public becomes considerably more aware of what happens on the national political stage at the expense of what happens closer to home. Third, the media likely faces a structural bias to cover highly visible and emotionally arousing forms of democratic erosion, at the expense of equally-important but less visually impactful events. And finally, a more partisan media environment affects both agenda setting and framing: national-level partisan media are likely talking about the problem of democratic erosion in completely different ways.

These structural, partisan, and psychological biases misalign public attention and facilitate misattribution of responsibility, resulting in profound implications for democratic accountability. Democratic erosion is a dynamic process; democratic resilience necessitates awareness and action on the part of the public. It is therefore important to understand how variation in the extent and type of democratic erosion occurring in the United States is related to media coverage of the problem of democratic erosion, and how both objective reality and media coverage of democratic erosion are related to variation in the public’s attention, concern, and antidemocratic attitudes.