Voter turnout could hit a 50-year record for the 2018 midterm elections.

Yet, even if 50 to 60 percent of eligible voters show up at the polls this year, that number will still be very low in comparison to most other developed countries’ turnout statistics. In the 2016 general election, turnout was 55.7 percent, which placed the U.S. 26th out of 32 highly developed democratic countries.

One solution gets a lot of attention right after every election cycle as a response to the abysmally low turnout numbers: make voting mandatory. Barack Obama once said compulsory voting could be “transformative” and could counteract the role of money in politics “more than anything.”

Compulsory voting is often pitched as the silver bullet to the many ills of American democracy, with the assumption that high turnout is always good. But an overview of the literature on compulsory voting and some case examples show that even worse than low turnout might be alienated voters.

The history of compulsory voting

Compulsory voting isn’t a new concept. It’s been in place in Belgium since 1893, Australia since 1925, Brazil since 1934, and Turkey since 1986. It’s been adopted for reasons such as colonial heritage and as a method for curbing the purchase of votes. In total, 27 countries in the world mandate that their citizens vote, and the degree to which compulsion is enforced varies.

In Belgium, compulsory voting was introduced alongside universal suffrage as a way to avoid vote-buying. Today, every citizen above the age of 18 must vote. Although citizens who fail to turn out on Election Day can be fined and precluded from voting for 10 years or from applying for appointments or promotions in the civil service, legal constraints are rarely applied.

“In other words, compulsory voting in Belgium is more a moral than a legal obligation. Yet, the vast majority of voters do turn out on Election Day,” writes researcher Jean-Benoit Pilet. In 2014, 89.4 percent of registered voters in Belgium voted in the parliamentary elections for the federal Chamber of Representatives.

Australia made voting compulsory after a decline in turnout from more than 71 percent at the 1919 election to less than 60 percent at the 1922 election. Today, enrollment and voting are compulsory for Aussies aged 18 or older, and those who fail to “show up” and are unable to provide sufficient reason are required to pay a $15 fine. As of September 30, 2018, 16,176,487 Australians were enrolled to vote. In 2016, the most recent election, 86.5 percent of voters cast a ballot.

Brazil is the largest democracy in the world with compulsory voting. It dates back to 1932, with the enactment of that year’s Electoral Code. There, voters also have to pay a fine if they fail to show up at the polling station without providing reasonable justification. That fine varies from $0.96 to $9.53.

Other penalties for not voting include being denied a Brazilian passport or ID, a federal loan, or access to public universities. Brazilians are also summoned to work at polling stations, and those who forsake that obligation must pay a fine.

In the most recent elections, where Brazilians voted for executive and legislative offices, turnout was 104.8 million people, out of 147.3 million eligible voters.

Why people are attracted to compulsory voting  

Today in the U.S., 38 states offer online voter registration; 16 allow voters to register on Election Day; and 37 have some form of early voting. And yet, large swaths of Americans don’t vote. But not all nonvoters are the same: Nonwhite and Hispanic Americans were more likely to stay home than white voters. Age and income are also determinants of who stays home.

This turnout gap often manifests itself into voting inequalities. The thinking goes: Politicians and elected officials are always trying to appeal to their base. That is, the voters they know they can count on, or the small numbers of voters who will definitely vote but aren’t the base — the swing voters. So proposals and policies are likely to reflect the preferences of those people.

Essentially, that turnout gap means that white, wealthy, and college-educated Americans get to speak louder than their fellow compatriots when it comes to whose priorities and preferences are considered in the policy process.

In turning voting not only into a civic right, but also into a civic requirement, proponents of mandatory voting see it as the most straightforward solution to increasing turnout numbers and making elections and, consequently, policies, more equal and inclusive.

Not only that, some argue compulsory voting has spillover effects such as better-informed voters, a more even distribution of political knowledge throughout the electorate, and cheaper campaigns (since turnout is guaranteed). Others also argue that it encourages politicians to engage with larger swaths of the electorate and thus be more moderate.

The hidden costs of compulsory voting

Compulsory voting accomplishes the basic task it sets out to do: to get the highest percentage possible of eligible voters to leave their homes on Election Day. And yet compulsory voting isn’t the solution to low voter turnout.

The simplest case against compulsory voting is that it negates the premise that while citizens ought to have the right to vote, they should also be free to choose not to vote.

Voters, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, assess the perceived costs to voting vis-à-vis its perceived gains when deciding whether or not to cast a ballot. Those costs can include, but are not limited to, issue salience, the ease with which voters are able to register to vote and to cast a ballot, a country’s electoral system, the frequency of elections, and when in the week elections are held.

Other reasons why forcing individuals to cast a ballot isn’t the solution to better democracy include the fact that people make bad choices sometimes, not because they’re evil or stupid, but because they have preferences and biases and will use shortcuts instead of deeply pondering the benefits and trade-offs of any given policy proposal.

Compulsory voting may also lead to democratic inequalities, where the burden for not voting is highest on those who can bear it least. In Brazil, for example, those tend to be voters for whom interaction with the state is unavoidable. Anyone who’s likely to rely on transactions with the government in the form of benefits, pensions, severance pay, etc., ends up paying a higher penalty for not voting.

But most importantly, voter turnout shouldn’t be the sole measure of a successful democracy. A healthy democracy depends on the quality of the governance and the candidates, too. Higher turnout doesn’t guarantee higher quality candidates or more responsiveness. More isn’t necessarily better.

University of Sydney professor Simon Jackman has argued that compulsory voting “creates a steady guaranteed supply of disgruntled voters that cannot exit the system. … Those voters are typically alienated, distracted and feel as though the major parties are not speaking to them.” Alienated and distracted voters can be, in turn, more susceptible to demagoguery and protest platforms.

That Brazil and Turkey, the two largest countries in the world with compulsory voting, are not shining stories of liberal democracy at the moment is worth noting. For a recent example of what alienated voters look like, look no further than Brazil’s presidential election results, where 9.5 percent of the electorate cast blank or spoiled ballots largely as a way to protest a system and a race they wanted no part in.

Turkey’s voting system has been deemed the most unfair in the world because if parties don’t win at least 10 percent of the seats, they must forfeit all of their seats, which are then reallocated to the larger parties. So people are required to vote, but their votes may effectively not count.

In an extensive overview of the consequences of compulsory voting, researcher Gabriela Sainati Rangel writes that “Individuals living under compulsory voting rules are also more likely to report higher rates of party attachment” which, in the American two-party system, could lead to even more polarization and winning governments with weaker governing mandates.

Rangel also finds that while compulsory voting may lead parties to move away from mobilization, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it results in outreach that’s more inclusive. In fact, with compulsory voting, “parties are likely to shift their outreach strategy from mobilization to persuasion, by reaching out to voters that are less partisan and thus can be more easily persuaded.”

Finally, Rangel writes that “Taken together, the voter turnout question seems to be the only dimension of the effects of compulsory voting that has found clear answers through empirical research.”

Still, for those who see compulsory voting as the best way to fix turnout, low levels of enforcement seem to work just as well as high levels of enforcement, without the undesired effect of harming certain segments of the voting population.

But if not compulsory voting, what then?

There are better ways to get people to vote than fining them for not voting

The solution to low turnout is to create advantages to voting that surpass any disadvantages of doing so, without punishing voters. Reforms such as Election Day registration and automatic voter registration are proven to have a positive effect on turnout and could be a start.  

Other proposals, like proportional representation and ranked choice voting, can elevate voters’ perception of political efficacy. As my colleague Lee Drutman has pointed out, “because more parties are competing for voters; because voters are more likely to feel like their voters matter; and because voters are more likely to have the chance to vote for a candidate they are excited about, proportional representation systems tend to have higher voter turnout — without the force of a compulsory voting system.”

Rob Richie of FairVote writes that ranked-choice-voting in U.S. localities has already led to higher turnout, since it allows voters to choose their number one candidate, while also allowing them not to “waste their vote” by choosing a secondary preference for someone from among the more viable candidates.

Compulsory voting isn’t the surefire way of fixing the problem of turnout in the U.S. that many deem it to be. Its proponents should take into account the indirect effects that this reform would have on electoral politics, individuals’ sense of liberty, and their overall sense that government works for them and not the other way around.

There are other reforms that could also lead to more demographically and ideologically diverse pools of candidates, and a representative and inclusive government that doesn’t involve forcing people to cast a ballot.

Lee Drutman (senior fellow), Hollie Russon Gilman (Political Reform and Open Tech Institute fellow), Christian Hosam (millennial public policy fellow), Heather Hurlburt (New Models of Policy Change director), Chayenne Polimedio (deputy director), Mark Schmitt (director), and Elena Souris (research and program assistant) of New America’s Political Reform program sat down to discuss whether there is a case for political optimism in the current moment. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Starting off with a temperature check: how optimistic are you on a scale of 1 to 10, if 1 is midnight on the Titanic and 10 is Pollyanna?

Heather: 4, so either you can see the iceberg or you’ve just hit the iceberg.

Lee: Then I’ll be at 3, but we’ll see why I’m wrong.

Hollie: I’ll be a 6 or a 7.

Chayenne: I’m probably with Heather at a 4.

Christian: I’ll be 5.5.

Elena: I’m a 5.

Mark: I’ll be a 6, so I’ll just nudge the average up a bit.

Chayenne: Wait, so it’s the world against Holly here.

Biggest concerns

Lee: I’m worried about a legitimacy crisis in our national political institutions.

Heather: I’m worried about the continued weakening of our institutions and norms.

Chayenne: I’m worried about the global pattern what both Lee and Heather are talking about — seeing that not just in the US but across the world.

Christian: I’m worried about what Jeff Sessions is doing right now with immigration courts, kind of clearing the dockets and putting together some draconian measures, like employment reviews of immigration judges, because they actually fall under the executive branch versus the traditional branch.

Mark: I think I’m worried about something similar — a hundred different things like that that aren’t quite making the headlines, and particularly at a point when whatever the ordinary constraints were on Donald Trump are just gone. I think it’s a worry about things that will happen in the short term that will take a very long time to undo.

Hollie: I’d say I’m worried about all those things and I’m worried that citizens in turn will become so disaffected that they stay home and they don’t engage in their civic lives. I’m worried that when you combine that with rising inequality and the self-sorting that you’re seeing, it’s creating very dangerous bubbles of people. Then I’m worried that those bubbles are magnified online with filter bubbles and with the impact of technology on our attention spans, our empathy, and our humanity.

Most promising developments

Hollie: I think we do have a crisis of legitimacy in our institutions, but I think sometimes we take the agency away from individual people, and American ingenuity and the ability of people every day in communities to figure out how to solve their problems and to come together with limited resources. I feel optimistic when I think about how you tap into that energy and create better institutional structures, though it’s very challenging.

Chayenne: Being from Brazil, I’m used to the idea of American exceptionalism. I think the surprise of the 2016 election has forced Americans to look more deeply and to really think about how Trump’s election was a result of some of the structural issues of American democracy and its institutions.

Mark: Well, you played a useful role right after the election and for months after, basically telling us, “Get over your American exceptionalism.”

Chayenne: This is just a Wednesday in Brazil.

Mark: One thing that struck me is that sometimes the people who are the most naturally optimistic about American democracy — which is often a lot of political scientists and journalists who feel like it’s a self-regulating structure — have been the most thrown for a loop.

Lee: The case for optimism is that American democracy has always been in crisis, and somehow we’ve muddled through despite that. What’s uniquely different about this moment? One, American politics has never been quite so nationalized as it is now. Really, until recently, our political parties were basically confederation to local and state parties and the stakes of national politics never felt quite as high.

We’ve also never really had a true two-party system with two very distinct parties representing two very distinct, non-overlapping coalitions. Our political institutions were not set up to have two non-overlapping parties. They were set up first, fundamentally, to frustrate party majorities from happening and then to require a considerable amount of compromise. The problem is we have two-party majoritarian politics without institutions to handle that, and that’s, to me, the frightening thing about institutions in this particular moment. That’s why I’m pessimistic. 

Roles and expectations of government

Christian: There are ways in which African Americans particularly think of the government not necessarily in a positive way, but are always appealing to it as a guarantor in the rights that are supposed to be assured. There’s always, in many ways, a democratic crisis in terms of if the government is living up to some standards that it says it will.

Chayenne: To that point, we wouldn’t want people to only look up to the government in moments of crisis. You don’t want people to only appreciate the role of government when things aren’t working as they should be. It’s easy to appreciate your parents once you move out. So how do you build a sustainable, ongoing level of trust not only from people who are always being screwed over but from the people who actually have power to change the status quo?

Lee: Well, there is an argument that something that’s happening particularly among the younger generation is a lot of things that we took for granted about our democratic process, to say, “Oh, these are not things that we should take for granted. These are values that we actually hold dear, and we’re going to work toward that.” In essence, the Trump election is a tremendous wake-up call.

Diversity as a factor in optimism

Heather: One of the sources for both my optimism and my pessimism is that the adjustment that has to happen to our polity this time is so great. We don’t have really a theory of democracy that includes quite as diverse a set of actors with diverse interests as exists right now — many more than, say, Samuel Huntington conceptualized. And some actors don’t perceive it being possible for everybody’s interests to be satisfied.

Lee: That’s Huntington’s last book, Who Are We? in which he says, “Oh, now that we’ve become a more diverse nation and we no longer have a shared creed, things are going to fall apart and it’s going to be ugly.”

Hollie: You’re looking at this period in history where civic engagement and democracy were supposedly at their height in America. But the reality is immigration was restricted, and we had a society segregated by race and gender.

Lee: It’s basically the argument that you could only build those supported social structures with exclusion. And we basically had an agreement that this is who we are and these people are not who we are.

Mark: At a certain point, and I’m not somebody who talks about, “Oh, once we become a majority-minority country, everything changes.” I think that’s very oversimplified, particularly because it treats Latino political development as sort of identical to African-American development, which it almost certainly isn’t. At a certain point, as you see in a younger generation in a place like California, you have to figure out how to build a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious democracy. It’s not like the period of the ’70s, ’80s where you have poor white America and then you have these other claimants.

Hollie: I agree with Mark. There are people in a lot of these conversations who like to be polemical and say, “The U.S. is only a democracy for 20, 30 years.” While its a fun thing people to like to say; I don’t want to get into that particular debate but I think one of the challenges is that when you talk about the hay-day of voluntary membership associations, they were segregated by race and gender, not by class. That’s one of these pivotal dimensions.

Long-term forecast for engagement post-Trump

Lee: Well, the question is are we going to have these continual cycles of excitement and disappointment. You have all this energy that will go into getting Democrats elected to Congress in 2018 and then 2020, and then perhaps Democrats will have a narrow majority in 2021. Now there’s all this energy built up around single-payer health care and some other overwhelming promises and then no delivery and backlash.

The problem is American political institutions are not set up for narrow majorities. They only work when you have bipartisan compromise and supermajorities. When you have narrow majorities, you don’t have bipartisan compromise, and we’re nowhere near getting supermajorities. We’re just going to have this continual cycle of engagement in response to losses and then disappointment within power.

Chayenne: To a certain extent, that’s okay. I think that realistically, it would be impossible for people to be fired up 24/7. I’m already tired from being fired up for a year and a half. It’s okay that people go away once things fall back to the sort of normal pattern — where things are still not working the way you want them to work, but the world is not on fire. Then again, once you have a crisis, people get fired up again. I think it’s unrealistic to think: “How do we keep this going forever?” There’s a reason we have elected representatives.

Mark: Well, the normal pattern would have to mean getting back to having a Republican Party that’s willing to just engage in ordinary governance. It’s weird, it’s unsustainable for a party to not do that, but if they can lock in their gains and if their attitude is, “Well, these other people are not going to vote for me anyway,” that’s not going to matter. If the alternative is you actually just need a plain old progressive power, my new mantra is that you have to think about a kind of politics that is majoritarian and mobilizing and sustainable. Those are three things that are really hard to put together at the same time. Obama was majoritarian and it certainly mobilized people, but then the mobilization fell away very quickly.

Heather: I want us not to fall into the trap of thinking that the mobilization that we’re seeing now begins with the Women’s March. There are several movements that say how they think about organizing in a digital era is absolutely drawn from failures and successes back as far as Occupy. Again, just as Trump doesn’t sort of emerge from Zeus’s brain.

Chayenne: Recently, I’ve been looking at faith-based organizing, particularly in DC, and that’s the narrative. Someone who organizes for affordable housing in DC told me, “People were homeless before Trump. People are still homeless, and they’re going to continue to be homeless after Trump.” So, sure, advocates should be taking advantage of this moment in terms of recruiting people and hopefully keeping them for the long haul. But at the grassroots level, people have been doing the hard work for a very long time, and they’re not going away.

Lee: In some ways, the danger of getting people more engaged is that we’re at this moment in which everybody is so fired up and divided that just by … the way that people get engaged is because they’re fired up and they’re angry, and that anger leads to a lot of motivated reasoning, which leads to partisanship, which fuels anger, and you get into this cycle.

In some ways, the cynic in me says, “Actually, we want people less engaged.” Because the problem is that too many people are engaged in politics and they have these extreme views. If people care less about politics, you just have normal interest group bargaining.

Keeping perspective

Lee: It seems like there is the old Marxist idea about things have to get worse before they get better.

Heather: I was actually going to say a variance on the same thing. Many societies go through extreme polarization and division and come out better, but what they have to go through to get there is —

Chayenne: Ugly.

Heather: Yeah. I’m not good at balancing. That’s not one of my skill sets, but to the extent I think about it, it’s like, what are we building now that is going to sustain and/or survive pressures if things do get worse before they get better?

Lee: One thing is we have a pretty good economy now. It’s unequal, but it’s growing. We’ve had nine years of steady economic growth and that’s a long time. What happens when we have another recession or —

Christian: Or a terrorist attack.

Mark: Lots of bad things have not happened. We have not had the level of international intervention that we had in the George W. Bush era. The tax cuts are bad, but the tax cuts can be reversed, and we may have crossed a line where all those bad things are going to happen. Some of them, there’s like … It’s kind of fascinating to see … Yes, of course [Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott] Pruitt wants to get rid of all the auto emission standards, but then the auto dealers are dealing with global standards, so they don’t actually want that. A lot of these things are locked in in a way that they are not going to be reversed quite so quickly.

Hollie: It’s very complex because we don’t really want corporations in charge of governance, and yet you’re seeing what is the day when progressives are applauding corporations for taking a values stand. That’s a complicated day, but that’s a day that’s happening.

For the future

Lee: I think that in terms of looking ahead and knowledge on site, I think preparing for the next Trump would be the best thing. …

Elena: Maybe he was allowed to take advantage of a situation here, but he’s not the only person who can see that. Someone else will too.

Lee: No, absolutely not. I think the mistake will be in thinking once Trump leaves —

Heather: Right, like, “That was the one time.”

Lee: Which was the same mistake that we made with Obama: “Oh, we got it. We’re fine. Everything is cool.”

The word federalism used to make liberals raise their eyebrows in suspicion and skepticism. States’ poorly funded welfare programs, paralyzing debt, and resistance to guidance from the federal government were enough reasons to make federalism, as principle of government, something from which progressives would keep their distance.

But after the 2016 election, that changed. After eight years of expectation that the White House would set strong national policy, followed by an epic setback, liberals rushed to quote Justice Louis D. Brandeis pointing out that states are “laboratories” of democracy, where a “single courageous state” can “try novel social and economic experiments.” Federalism has quickly become a tool to challenge and resist White House executive orders and the latest congressional bills.

Indeed, federalism has no ideological alliance. Heather Gerken, dean and professor at Yale Law School and one of the country’s leading experts on constitutional law and election law, told us that “federalism has long been the darling of conservatives. But that’s a mistake because federalism is for everybody.” But while the idea of federalism seems promising, the practice of it is a lot more complicated.

Over the past year, we’ve gathered data for the Laboratories of Democracy Database, a platform for tracking how states are testing new ideas for financing campaigns, structuring voting systems, setting district boundaries, and expanding participation. From this research, states like Washington and Arizona offer an especially optimistic and promising picture of what the future of progressive federalism could look like. Via strong campaign finance laws, robust public financing for campaigns, and independent redistricting commissions, these states are experimenting with new ideas, and the appetite for expanding those ideas has ballooned to a national scale.

But the enormous size and complexity of the United States means that when it comes to reform at the state and local levels, there’s little standardization and no systematic analysis of the effects of reform. On top of that, the drama of politics means that states are always under threat of losing federal funding, are stuck having to navigate partisanship and state/city conflicts, and don’t necessarily have the resources to create easily accessible repositories of information.

There is no standardization

One of the biggest challenges we faced while gathering data from all 50 states was figuring out how to depict that information in an accessible and clear way. With 50 states come just as many different ways to regulate the financing of elections. Even the vocabulary state legislatures and election boards use fluctuates. Election cycle, election period, election segment — they all mean different things. Imagine being a first-time candidate, without a lot of support, trying to abide by the rules. Or imagine being a voter trying to figure out how and when she can contribute to a campaign.

There’s no systematic analysis of the effects of reform

While there are exciting and promising innovations at the state and local levels — like Seattle’s voucher program, through which eligible Seattle residents receive $100 in democracy vouchers to support candidates in the city’s elections — states often implement reforms and then forget about them. Take Hawaii and Massachusetts’s partial public funding programs for candidates, which, according to Demos, is only used by one in 10 candidates running for office. Implementing reform is one thing. Getting it to stick is another.

Impact is another question. As in science, experiments don’t always go well, and not all federalist reforms will translate into positive findings. New policies have transition periods that can add to voter confusion as they try to register to vote, participate in elections, or follow the news. Other policies can impede the democratic process, like voter ID and early voting laws that discourage voters and shorten participation windows.

Some research has shown that public funding makes it harder, not easier, to elect moderate candidates. And even when it does work, the process is complicated. New York City has only been able to apply new campaign finance reforms because it’s required to publish an analysis and hold hearings after every election to continue making improvements. But that’s not the case across the board.

There aren’t easily accessible or transparent repositories of information

State websites were unclear and often contradictory, but finding answers in legislation or guides was just as hard. Some files were hundreds of pages long; others were scanned and unsearchable. In rare cases, the full legislative text isn’t easily available.

A career technologist who spoke with us off the record said that states should provide data in a format that’s easy for people and advocates to understand. That means data that’s online and machine-readable, relevant, and user-centered. To do this on a national scale, though, requires cooperation between the federal government and states to create accessible files and resources. The Governance Lab, an organization that works to promote the importance of open data as a way to improve governance, outlines six principles that aim to make data more open and easier to use, with the goal of promoting transparency:

• Open by default
• Timely and comprehensive
• Accessible and usable
• Comparable and interoperable
• For improved governance and citizen engagement
• For inclusive development and innovation

Throughout our research and data gathering for voting and elections systems, as well as for campaign finance regulation, most states failed to pass the criteria above. Ultimately, this expert told us that a main reason for the slow progress is the lack of stakeholdership: It’s a good idea, but it’s not anyone’s top priority.

The threat of losing federal funding can make states reform-shy

Despite the autonomy states enjoy due to decentralized government, they’re not always immune to retaliation if they choose to go against the federal government. States’ refusal to comply with and direct challenges at federal law can have serious and lasting consequences for states. Sanctuary cities, for example, have been threatened with losing crucial federal funding if they don’t comply with immigration guidelines.

Another unique aspect of American federalism is the difference between state and federal budgeting and funding. While the federal government can operate in a deficit, 49 state governments can’t (Vermont is the only clear exception). Additionally, unfunded mandates from the national level put financial pressure on states, and new tax reforms could have major consequences for high-tax states like California, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York.

Already, as Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect explains, states are the “primary funders of education, transportation, local infrastructure, and public safety.” As a result, states quickly feel economic strain, meaning that any tough decisions could target new reforms like public financing first.

Conflicts between levels of government can increase gridlock

The 2016 election showcased an interesting juxtaposition: a Republican majority at the federal and state level, accompanied by an increase in support for local, progressive ballot measures like increased gun regulations, legalized marijuana, and higher minimum wages.

However, in the past, as Boston University professors Katherine Levine Einstein and David M. Glick have pointed out, this contrast has translated into political battles between governments. In Texas, for example, local city ordinances in 2015 banning fracking and plastic bags were overturned by the Republican state government concerned about a “patchwork of local regulations” governing oil and gas production, an interesting switch in the usual big government argument. North Carolina and Tucson saw similar conflicts over LGBT protections and gun regulations.

While this back-and-forth is important for the checks-and-balances aspect of federalism, it can also increase polarization and gridlock, as states find themselves engaging in never-ending fights both inside their state and against the federal government.

Is federalism the future?

Federalism is not all bad, of course. In fact, it may help decrease partisan warfare. For Gerken, “federalism is a way to soften the problem of polarization by creating incentives for compromise between a federal government controlled by one party and states controlled by another,” something that’s particularly important today, when compromise at the national level seems increasingly unlikely.

When states are given room to implement their own ideas and policies, it also makes national politics less high stakes and works against the winner-takes-all model that so often polarizes our current environment. To Gerken, it’s good for democratic compromise to have “powerful states” because “in a one-sided Washington, a state can do something by themselves.” President Trump may not need a Democratic vote to get through legislation, but he’ll eventually need to be able to work with California, Massachusetts, or New York.

That kind of state leverage allows for what Gerken and a colleague called uncooperative federalism, where “states use [their] regulatory power … to resist federal policy.” It’s an especially effective strategy in areas where the federal government lacks the ability to carry out policies itself, Gerken explained. With Obamacare, the federal government didn’t have the apparatus to run a fully federally funded system and needed the states to step in; not all cooperated. The Trump administration hasn’t always been able to enforce its immigration policy for the same reason: not enough actors to carry out the policy, and thus vulnerable to states that don’t cooperate.

For liberals, progressive federalism, as an idea, is a promising alternative to legislative setbacks at the national level. In the words of Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, cities can act as “urban labs” where programs that are “suffocated” in Congress “can be sent to grow.” While the Progressive Era of the early 20th century used the power of the federal government to enact social and economic reforms to lessen the negative effects of industrialization, today, progressive federalism takes advantage of decentralization and aims to use the power of state and local governments as tools against the Trump administration.

But using federalism as a model for legislative reform will require a much more serious, in-depth, and systematic endeavor to understand how differently states operate. Implementing real standardization would be impossible, but for scale and transferability purposes, states would need to present information in organized, uniform ways, so that those who aren’t as familiar with the governing and legislative process have a real shot at pushing for progressive reforms.

And even with the right infrastructure in place, pushing for more federalism can easily backfire. Federalism is an attractive idea when your party isn’t in power and you’re scrambling to figure out how not to see roll backs of legislation. As Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect pointed out, “the love of federalism is a sometime thing; its critics and champions switch places depending on who is in power at which level of government.”

But federalism itself is a long-term, nonpartisan endeavor. By pushing for more 10th Amendment rights in court, Gerken argues that opportunistic federalists looking for temporary political advantage may find they set a dangerous precedent that limits federal power in the long run.

For years, Brazil’s judiciary massive multi-year probe to root out corruption from the political class has made headlines. Many politicians, from the lowly elected official to a succession of presidents, are being implicated, arrested, and tried. The system might be working to root out corruption, but a nasty side effect is that it is also eroding Brazilians’ faith in democracy. The more politicians are exposed, the more Brazilians pine for authoritarianism.

Brazil’s battle against corruption shows that a system of checks and balances is no guarantee of support for democracy. It shows that when people are unhappy with their governments, they’re not necessarily more appreciative of democracy and the fact that they can just vote politicians out of office. In fact, much like in the US and in democracies across Western Europe — as Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa’s work on democratic deconsolidation shows — a decline in trust in political institutions is making people more open to authoritarian alternatives such as military rule.

In 2016, Brazilians’ support for democracy fell by 22 percent. Not only has support gone down to 32 percent (from 54 percent in 2015), but 55 percent of Brazilians say they wouldn’t mind a nondemocratic government as long as it “solved problems.”

Brazil’s military regime, in place from 1964 to 1985, was the result of a coup that brought down the then-democratically elected President João Goulart. The country went through two decades marked by violence, torture, exile, censorship, and, of course, corruption. Brazilians still search for loved ones who went missing after they criticized the military government, never to be seen again.

But memories of oppression are beginning to fade: A new nostalgia for military dictatorship is everywhere, propelled by a chaotic economy, high levels of inequality and crime, and a corrupt political system.

It’s easy to meet Brazilians — old and young — who believe no politician is free from corruption, and that the only way to “fix the system” is by starting anew with a complete military overhaul of the government. Here’s why, and why that’s worrisome:

The economy is really, really bad

Ten years ago, Brazil began to enjoy a growth boom under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s two-term presidency. Thirty million Brazilians were lifted out of poverty, and 21 million of them made it to the middle class. Low rates of unemployment meant that for the first time, millions of people could buy refrigerators, go on vacation, and attend college. Brazil’s economy was among the 10 largest in the world, and the “Third World country” label no longer applied to the Latin American giant. Lula was one of the most popular politicians in the world, and Brazil was finally gaining respect from the international community.

Fast-forward a decade and a half, and some 13.5 million Brazilians have lost their jobs, the country’s reputation is in shambles, and the economy can’t seem to get over its worst recession in the past 30 years. Between 2012 and 2016, while the world’s economy grew by 3.4 percent on average, Brazil’s economy shrank by 0.4 percent every year.

Brazilians feel powerless and hopeless, because they can’t see an end to their misery. According to a study based on census data, between 2014 and 2015, 4.1 million Brazilians were in poverty, of which 1.4 million were considered to be in “extreme” poverty, with a monthly per capita income of $22. Despite an increase in consumer spending and industrial productivity, and falling inflation and unemployment rates, Brazilians still don’t feel or see any improvement.

That’s seen, for example, in the 82 percent rise in the number of Brazilians who have left the country to live abroad between 2014 and 2016. For those who can’t afford to leave the country, informal gigs — like selling food on the streets — have become not just a way to supplement incomes but, for some people, their only source of income. Brazilians have no money, and neither does the government: The country is facing a budget deficit of $50 billion.

In an attempt to increase revenue, Michel Temer — the current president of Brazil, who replaced former President Dilma Rousseff (after she was convicted of manipulating the budget) — has put in place austerity measures, which have not been well received by the majority of Brazilians. 

In Brazil, social security expenditures account for 11.3 percent of GDP — one of the highest in the world, which costs a lot for the federal government. So one of Temer’s policy ideas has been to raise the retirement age, something that has infuriated Brazilians who saw their much-awaited retirement be pushed further away from them. Protests have ensued, but it’s still unclear whether he’s going to succeed. Temer also put in place a cap on federal expenditure for the next 20 years. That could mean even worse hospitals, schools, and transportation.

Brazilians are having a hard time understanding why they are the ones who have to pay for the mistakes of the political elites.

Ed Luce, an English journalist and the Financial Times’s chief US commentator and columnist, points out that “we are taught to think our democracies are held together by values” — that we all believe in the same principles of civil liberties, that we’re all equal, and that if we work hard, we’ll be okay. But what really keeps liberal democracies together is economic growth. When growth stagnates, diminishes, or is “monopolized by a fortunate few, things turn nasty.” During the 2008-’09 financial crisis, the Brazilian economy experienced growth (moving in the opposite direction of most of the rest of the world’s economies), and support for democracy reached a peak of 61 percent in 2010.

Thus, decline in support also makes sense when the country is still reeling from the worst recession in its history. Low levels of trust, bleak economic perspectives, and citizens’ increasing demands from their governments are a dangerous combo.

Seemingly everyone in the country is corrupt

And that, by itself, is not really a revelation to Brazilians. After all, corruption in Brazil is as mundane as soccer: always there, and part of the country’s identity. But what’s different now is that corruption has come to the forefront of the debate, with a “leave no stones unturned” investigative approach led by the now-famous Judge Sérgio Moro. A slew of corruption scandals have piled up, and the supreme court authorized dozens of investigations that seem to be nowhere near ending.

Rousseff’s impeachment was not the cure-all that those who pushed for her removal had hoped for. Temer, her successor, almost got the boot last month under accusations of taking $150,000 from the meatpacker JBS to facilitate the firm’s businesses in the country. A new corruption probe against him has just been authorized by the supreme court. Lula was sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison for being given an apartment worth 2.2 million reals ($690,000) by a construction firm that had received padded contracts for work on an oil refinery.

More broadly, political parties have been gutted by the investigations and convictions. It’s an entire political class distrusted by Brazilian voters. That’s dangerous because it sets the stage for “outsiders,” who oftentimes have no experience in elected office, or worse, who advocate for radical solutions to democratic problems.

Crime is out of control

Brazilians live in fear. The streets of Brazil haven’t been this unsafe in a long time. Sixty-two percent of people are afraid of walking on the streets at night, while 55 percent are afraid of the police. Children are being shot. 

A study published in late 2016 showed that the number of homicides in Brazil has hit a new record: Nearly 60,000 people were killed — a 21.9 percent increase compared to 2003 numbers. In the northeast region of the country, which also happens to be the poorest one, the numbers are even more striking, with a growth of 100 percent in the number of homicides. Earlier this year, the state of Espírito Santo also made headlines for riots and chaos that ensued after the police force, which hadn’t received a raise for seven years, refused to work.

On TV, the nightly news is usually: a recap of the latest scandal, trial, or arrest, and then coverage of the soldiers fighting with gangs in Rio de Janeiro.

There, the police haven’t been paid in more than a year. So as a last-resort move to create an atmosphere of security and order after armed confrontations between the police and drugs gangs, the Justice Ministry has sent thousands of troops to the state; they’re staying there at least until the end of the year. Criminal homicides have gone up by 10 percent from January to June in comparison with the same period last year. Violent deaths resulting from attempted robbery have risen 21 percent. Children can’t go to school because of the police raids and violent conflicts with the gangs in the favelas, which often prove unsuccessful and do more harm than good. 

The news organization Globo reported that every 54 hours, a police officer is killed in the state of Rio. No wonder residents and visitors feel that the police can no longer protect them. The police can’t even protect themselves. 

Inequality keeps going up, and the rich always win

Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world. And while rapid economic growth has brought gains that benefited the country at a macro level during Lula’s presidency, the country is still deeply divided between those who are extremely rich and those who are extremely poor.

A new study from the World Wealth and Income Database, led by the French economist Thomas Piketty, points to Brazil’s “extreme and persistent inequality.” A comparison between Brazil and other countries like the US, China, and South Africa shows at least an 8 percent difference in share of income in the hands of the 1 percent. In Brazil, their national income share is 28 percent, while in China that number is 14 percent. While the share of those at the bottom 50 percent rose from 11 to 12 percent, the study points out that “inequality among the bottom 90 percent declined at the expense of growing concentration at the top.”

A 10-minute drive in the city of São Paulo can take one from the high-end shopping on Oscar Freire Street, with stores like Chanel and Louis Vuitton, to favelas, where homelessness and crime are ubiquitous. Luxury apartments and favelas are right next to each other, and while some lucky Brazilians are vacationing in Europe, others can barely make ends meet. 

For many Brazilians, it’s clear that they are not all treated and served equally by the government. In fact, only 10 percent of them believe that the government works on behalf of everyone. The rich seem to matter more. And when people feel like the system is no longer working for them, and that everyone is not in it together, they are more likely to look for something different.

The evangelical movement and conservatism are on the rise

The number of Brazilians who identify as evangelical Christians has gone up to 22.2 percent from 6.6 percent. In the National Congress, evangelical Christian lawmakers have seen their numbers soar, thanks to the financial support from churches led by Silas Malafaia (from Assemblies of God Church) and Edir Macedo (from Universal Church). The evangelical bloc has become more powerful, better funded, and increasingly more influential and popular.

The growth in the number of evangelical Christian Brazilians goes in tandem with the growth in number of those who identify as socially conservative. A 2016 poll showed that in the past six years, Brazilians of all ages, all levels of income and education, and both sexes have become more conservative. Fifty-four percent of the respondents have shown a rightward shift on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, the death penalty, lifetime imprisonment, and lowering the legal age at which juveniles can be tried as an adult.

These are people who are deeply dissatisfied with policies that they deem too liberal. Malafaia, for example, has said things like, “No human being has absolute power over her body,” that he loves homosexuals as much as he loves criminals, and that the right to marriage in the US is only another chapter in the moral decadence of the country. His church has more than 100 congregations spread around the country. He says the believers should be politicized, so that they can defend Christian principles.

What’s next, and what we should be worried about

The decline in support for democracy is also regional. Latinobarómetro is a nonprofit that studies public opinion in Latin America and asks people across the region a series of questions to gauge their feelings about democracy and their trust in democratic institutions. Their latest report shows that trust has been on the decline throughout the region since 1995 (when it first started polling). 

When compared with respondents in other Latin American countries, Brazilians were the second least likely to support democracy. Ironically, now that Brazilian democracy is starting to really work, uncovering corruption that has plagued the country for decades, citizens are sick of it.

It’s in this environment that someone like Jair Bolsonaro, a former military officer and candidate to the presidency, thrives. His misogynistic, racist, homophobic, xenophobic remarks have earned him comparisons to Donald Trump. Bolsonaro is an avid advocate to a return of generals to the highest public office. After more than two decades advocating for a return to military rule, his rhetoric is finally catching up to public opinion. The “law and order” rhetoric he uses is appealing to Brazilians who see the ex-military, anti-establishment candidate as the perfect antidote to the current sick system. And while his popularity levels are low and his candidacy uncertain, he has found a segment of the Brazilian population that seems pleased with his approach to “fixing” Brazil.  

Most concerning, however, is not Bolsonaro being elected, but rather the combination of factors that could lead to a return to dictatorship.

A bad economy, a corrupt political class, fear of violence, and rising inequality make the return to dictatorship a real possibility in the minds of many Brazilians. Brazil’s young democracy is less resilient than older, more established democracies like the US or the UK. Brazilian democracy faces one of its most crucial moments. Brazilians’ disenchantment with democracy as a result of its unkept promises of prosperity, safety, and accountability represent a real danger to the future of the country — and the region as a whole.

The election of Donald Trump has reawakened people’s desire to engage in politics.

People are eager to be connected to others who also want to make their voices heard. Activists on both the right and the left are fired up: They want to join civil society organizations, participate in their town hall meetings, protest, and engage with social media whenever an all-too-powerful executive seems to be infringing upon their liberties or attempting to roll back progress. They want to be part of something bigger.

This is definitely a moment to be seized.

But for this new wave of civic engagement to be sustainable, our understanding of what political engagement looks like ought take into account people’s limitations. It also ought to take into account civic tech’s shortcomings in creating opportunities for participation. Models of civic engagement need to be based on the rule of how people think about politics and their willingness and ability to participate, not the exception.

The underlying belief of proponents of civic engagement is that community and group involvement leads to better citizens and that active citizenship is crucial to the survival and maintenance of American democracy. That, in turn, leads them to make the assumption that people will get involved if we lower the costs and barriers of engagement by creating better tools and processes; and that they want to learn more about their communities, if we make it easy for them to do so.

But 60-plus years of political science theory on political behavior combined with what we know about the limitations of civic tech and civic engagement show that there are limits to what we can expect from people. That’s because most people can’t perform the role of the super citizen: Without any knowledge or experience in policymaking and administration, it’s difficult for voters to stay involved in the minutiae of politics.

In 1964, political scientist Philip E. Converse, while studying the nature of belief systems in mass publics, found that “many citizens don’t have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that have formed the basis for intense political controversy among elites for substantial amounts of time.” Most people don’t play close enough attention to politics to care. We think of people as omnicompetent and committed citizens, when in fact they have a hard time with basic things such as trade-offs: They say they want lower taxes and more government spending.

And to the extent to which people care about an issue, that is shaped by their ethnic, racial, occupational, religious, and other types of identity, as well as previous experiences. Availability of information doesn’t guarantee that people will vote differently from the group they belong to just because they have access to a new policy paper or go to a town hall meeting. When making decisions, people will see what their friends think is important and decide that’s important. It’s how we make decisions: by seeing what other people like us think. This is why we so often read stories about candidates with stances on issues that are antagonistic to what is in the best interest of their constituents getting elected again and again.

Ordinary people are also busy with their responsibilities at work and with their private lives. They have diverse interests and time availability, and trust that democracy (in the form of elected representatives) will work for them. If participation can be meaningful only if it takes place in the form of protests or membership in voluntary associations, participatory democracy can end up doing exactly the opposite of what it aims to do. Civic life can be quite elitist and exclusionary when certain processes and tools widen the gap between the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless.

In Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, Theda Skocpol argues: “[A]s strategies for the revitalization of US democracy, recommendations so preoccupied with local and social life — remedies that ignore issues of economic inequality, power disparity, and political demobilization — are simply not plausible. … The people most likely to take local community and social capitalism to heart — to benefit from them and feel well-satisfied — are, I fear, the same folks already flourishing, in increasingly privatized ways, in America’s more lightly governed version of just plain old capitalism.” The last thing we need is another gap between the rich and the poor in the form of how people engage, how accessible tools for engagement are, and the issues that are addressed.

Civic tech can be a tool for positive change and a real asset to civil society organizations and other forms of social entrepreneurship. For those who wish to see voters participate in more meaningful ways, they seem to lower participation costs and provide access information in innovative ways.

Today, more than ever before, tools for organizing, for sharing information, and for keeping elected officials accountable are abundant. But without preexisting ties, effective political action is less likely to flourish.

Social media and other tools that foster participation serve as catalysts for people’s preexisting alliances and sentiments. Surely, the Arab Spring and, to a smaller extent, Bernie Sanders’s revolution, the Women’s March, and Trump’s “Make America Great Again” probably would have progressed at slower paces and potentially in a less well-organized fashion without the help of tools like Facebook and Twitter. But to claim that the existence of organizing tools was the fundamental reason behind the feasibility of these movements is not an accurate assessment of the events that unfolded. We had social movements before social media.

Tools that facilitate participation do a very good job of creating networks of shared interests in very specific ways: They bring together people who already share similar views, and who welcome each other’s ideas, pushing them further into homogenous groups. It is easy to believe policy X is better than policy Y when, coincidentally, all of your friends on Facebook seem to agree with you. The power and the danger of social media is the same: It pushes people further into their filter bubbles. And that can be a dangerous thing. It can make people less tolerant and less willing to engage in compromise.

All of these barriers to participation are real and hard to overcome.

The sustainability of this new wave of civic engagement depends, in part, on our ability to set up realistic expectations of what participatory democracy can accomplish, given our own limitations.

Proponents of participatory democracy ought to adjust their ideas of where most people, real people, fit on the “political engagement spectrum.” If we want to ensure that this rekindled motivation to participate is sustainable, advocates for higher levels of civic engagement need to adjust expectations on how people think about and “do” politics. Tools and processes that foster civic engagement need to be designed for real people.

Institutions that connect people, aggregate their concerns, and create a channel for communication between them and policymakers writing and voting on legislation also play a key role. They serve as catalysts for popular will, and bring to the forefront issues that cannot be effectively addressed via scattered local action.

As Skocpol notes, “Improving local communities and social life will not create sufficient democratic leverage to tackle problems that can only be addressed with concerted national commitment.” For example, think about health care and unemployment, issues that require national policy and legislation. Intermediaries such as political parties and public interest groups have a key role to play in maintaining a balance between popular forces and experienced leadership, while creating pathways for the will of the people to be reflected in policymaking and creating tangible opportunities for engagement. They fill in the leadership gap left by networks for civic engagement.

None of this is to say we shouldn’t aim for more civic participation. When people are part of organizations and face situations where they have to make difficult decisions, or even engage with people with different worldviews, they can become more tolerant and feel higher levels of political efficacy. At the same time, we also know that we’re not going to get thousands of people marching every weekend forever.

Civic engagement is not a panacea for all the ills of American democracy, and it doesn’t need to be. Thus, with those caveats in mind, proponents of civic engagement and civic tech need to ensure that there are accessible and transparent mechanisms for people to participate should they want to do so. They need to create tools that better serve super citizens and civic entrepreneurs, by taking into account the limits, and perhaps distortion, of social media and people’s willingness and ability to participate. Finally, they need to create spaces that help people establish connections and develop trust in a way that outlasts single-issue battles.

Ten years ago, climate activists were sure they had just the strategy to build cross-partisan political will to tackle climate change. They thought they had amassed enough support from evangelicals, who wanted as much as them to protect God’s green earth. That strategy failed. If activists are going to take another run at trans-partisan coalition building on climate, they need to know why.

Today, public opinion on climate science and on the importance of climate action diverges widely along partisan lines, as it did a decade ago when major environmental organizations drew up a legislative strategy that hinged on attracting business and faith leaders to join forces with the environmental movement and build bipartisan support. Environmental funders identified evangelical Christians as a particularly important niche, Lydia Bean and Steve Teles write in a new paper for New America’s New Models of Policy Change.

They built a partnership with the Evangelical Environmental Network, a small group that had already worked for years with a bottom-up, theology-before-politics strategy to raise a generation of grassroots leaders who saw response to climate change as part of an authentic evangelical faith.

But the gap between that top-down, short-term strategy and the EEN’s bottom-up movement building proved fatal, despite climate supporters’ control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives.

Advocates called on their evangelical allies to produce public statements from senior figures, and 86 evangelical leaders signed a statement in 2006, provoking major opposition from their own faith partners and political allies. But that very action ignited a counter-movement that continued for several years, culminating in prominent reversals of conservative figures such as Pat Robertson and Lindsey Graham — and then the failure of a legislative effort to tackle climate. Anti–climate change groups successfully urged evangelicals across America to refrain from taking a public position on climate change. Faith-based counter campaigns like Resisting the Green Dragon shattered any illusion of momentum. Some signers disavowed the letter. Others left environmental activism altogether.

How did the coalition fall apart so fast? Bean and Teles argue that advocates and their environmental funders failed to recognize twin threats the creation care movement posed to the Christian right: a) the perceived economic consequences posed a threat to a central player in the conservative coalition, and b) by empowering younger activists less aligned with the conservative movement, it threatened the old guard as arbiters of evangelicalism’s political engagement.

Asking evangelicals to take a strong stand on an issue that would divide their base and upset their conservative allies was a recipe for a nasty, divisive fight. Given this, the climate care coalition needed grassroots strength. But though it was tremendously successful at convening champions and opening discussion with new generations, its top-down strategy (focusing on elites that were too removed from every day ministry) did not trickle down, and support from local congregations was not there.

As Greg Sargent writes at the New Republic, the terrain of solid conservative opposition to climate science and policy is shifting. Rand Paul and Jeb Bush affirm from the debate stage that climate change is real. Pope Francis reframes global warming as a moral issue. Graham, who in 2010 reversed his support for climate action to say that climate science was “in question” and had been “oversold,” has changed his mind again: “If I went to 10 doctors and nine said, ‘Hey, you’re gonna die,’ and one says ‘You’re fine,’ why would I believe the one guy?”

As advocates look for conservative allies for the next climate coalition, three lessons are key: put time into developing relationships and understanding across alliance partners. Take the time to make outsiders full partners in developing and implementing strategy. Give local outreach efforts the time, space, and scale of resources they need to develop. Can the environmental leadership learn a new gospel? That’s a question that remains unanswered.