Assistant Professor of Democracy and Global Affairs
Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame
Concurrent Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Core Affiliated Faculty Fellow, Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Faculty Fellow, Nanovic Institute for European Studies and Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society
I am a comparative political scientist working at the intersection of elite behavior, mass behavior, and democratic institutions. My research spans comparative political behavior (citizen support for democracy, voter accountability, electoral coalitions), elite communication (rhetoric, divisive language, conflict entrepreneurship), and political economy (legislative gridlock and polarization). A thread that runs through much of the work is how elites and citizens together produce the democratic or undemocratic institutional developments we observe in Europe and elsewhere. My research has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Economic Journal, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, and other journals. I am currently writing a book on democratic electoral coalitions.
I joined the University of Notre Dame in 2024. Before Notre Dame I was a postdoctoral scholar in the Polarization Research Lab and a postdoctoral fellow in Stanford's Department of Political Science. I received my Ph.D. from ETH Zurich in 2023.
Democratic Pivots: How Voters Incidentally Save (and Lose) Democracy
Ordinary voters around the world participate in elections with substantive implications not only for policy-making after election day but, more fundamentally, for the trajectory of the political regime. In these regime elections, the electoral menu offers competing visions of the polity itself, with some parties supportive of democratic governance and others leaning authoritarian. Since the rise of the Law and Justice party in Poland, of President Erdoğan in Turkey, and of Donald Trump in the United States, such elections have often been portrayed as referendums on democracy. Some parties and candidates with a record of democratic transgression won those elections, such as Law and Justice in 2019, Trump in 2024, and Erdoğan over multiple election cycles. Still, pro-democratic oppositions prevailed in other contests, for instance, in the United States in 2020 and Poland in 2023. Why do the vote shares for pro-democratic parties in those contested regime elections sometimes grow and at other times shrink?
When ordinary voters tip the scales for democracy in fiercely contested elections, it is natural to read the outcome as a collective choice for democracy over autocracy. This is a reading of those elections that their winners, such as President Biden in his 2021 inauguration speech, themselves employ. Contra these prominent narratives, I argue that the voters who make all the difference in these contests, a segment I call democratic pivots, decide regime elections incidentally by voting for the party that aligns most strongly with their own substantive preferences yet happens to be pro-democratic, as opposed to deliberately voting for a distinct vision of the polity.
Building on a dynamic theory of democratic coalitions and the conditions under which they grow and contract, my book draws on empirical evidence from a set of three cases that vary in how democracy emerged but have all faced regime elections over the last decade: Poland, Turkey, and the United States. Learning from each country’s experience with regime elections and complementary empirical evidence, including fine-grained subnational electoral shifts, panel data tracking pivotal voters and their profiles, and survey experiments in all three, I provide evidence on the origins of democratic coalition volatility. The comparative evidence indicates that the underlying electoral dynamics have been remarkably similar: when elections are fought between pro-democratic and authoritarian-leaning forces, regime preferences run high on both sides and largely offset one another, leaving their outcome to be driven by the ordinary concerns voters bring to any election. Democratic survival or breakdown is thus far more a byproduct of ordinary politics than an intentional choice by those voters who decide it.
At the University of Notre Dame, I teach the following courses. I have previously taught at ETH Zurich, the University of Lucerne, and Leipzig University.
marc.jacob@nd.edu
O236 Hesburgh Center for International Studies
Notre Dame, IN 46556