Welcome to the latest edition of The Expand Democracy 3, written this week by Eveline and Nivea, with the support of Rob. Every two weeks, we highlight promising pro-democracy ideas and local, national, and global news.
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#1. Deep Dive: Conditional Democrats – The Iran War and the Psychology of Electoral Accountability
By Eveline Dowling
A police officer stands guard beneath a poster of Iran’s former leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran. Source: Time
The United States has been at war with Iran for over a month. The strikes began without a congressional vote, a declaration of war, or the authorization that the Constitution explicitly requires Congress to provide. The Senate rejected a war powers resolution three times, and the House defeated its version mostly along party lines.
Democratic leadership reportedly delayed forcing their own vote, calculating that the war’s unpopularity was more useful as a political tool than as a mandate for constitutional action. When accountability functions primarily as a partisan instrument rather than a constitutional principle, it tends to stop functioning as accountability at all. This raises an empirical question: given that many Americans are against the war, what does the research tell us about how democratic backsliding of this kind affects public support for democracy? And does that backlash translate into meaningful accountability?
The most rigorous empirical work on American public support for democracy does not tell a simple story. In a landmark 2020 study in the American Political Science Review, Graham and Svolik designed a nationally representative experiment in which voters chose between candidates who held either democratic or explicitly antidemocratic positions, things like supporting gerrymandering, restricting polling places, or ignoring court rulings. Their finding was sobering in that only a small fraction of Americans actually prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices when doing so requires voting against their party or preferred policies. Most Americans, the study found, are partisans first and democratic norm-enforcers second.
A more recent study complicates this picture in an important way. In a British Journal of Political Science 2025 paper, Eddy Yeung ran a preregistered experiment with over 4,000 American respondents to track how willingness to punish antidemocratic incumbents changes as violations accumulate over time. Unlike Graham and Svolik’s static snapshot, this dynamic approach found that a majority of Americans are willing to remove incumbents through electoral means as backsliding unfolds, and that accountability increases as violations become more visible and repeated.
Taken together, the two studies suggest that public willingness to defend democracy is real but conditional. It depends on how legibly violations are perceived as violations and on whether the electoral system provides a meaningful channel for acting on that perception without requiring voters to sacrifice other political priorities entirely.
That conditionality has structural implications. Cross-national research across 100 democracies, published in the European Journal of Political Research in 2024, finds that antidemocratic incumbents do the most damage when public support for democracy is weak and that strong public commitment raises the cost of institutional attacks. Citizen engagement, in other words, is structurally consequential. This result aligns with Claassen’s influential 2020 article, “In the Mood for Democracy? Democratic Support as Thermostatic Opinion.” Claassen’s work presents the thermostatic model of democratic mood, which posits that public support for democratic norms tends to rise in response to visible threats against them. The current moment reflects both dynamics simultaneously. Ninety percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict, and Democrats hold a 14-point enthusiasm advantage heading into the midterms, the largest in decades.
Yet awareness without institutional channels for accountability tends to dissipate. The war powers votes failed not because the public supported unchecked executive war-making, but because the electoral system gave most members of Congress little incentive to act on public sentiment rather than party discipline. This is the condition Graham and Svolik pinpointed as suppressive of democratic accountability. When voting one’s constitutional conscience requires crossing party lines, most elected officials (like most voters) do not do it.
This is where electoral structure enters as an institutional design question. Even if forms of proportional representation, ranked choice voting, and nonpartisan primaries do not alter the underlying psychology the research identifies, they alter the environment in which that psychology operates. When political survival is less exclusively dependent on base approval, the democratic impulse Frederiksen identifies has greater institutional space to operate. Frederiksen’s finding that Americans will punish backsliding as violations accumulate suggests the democratic impulse is present. Whether the institutional architecture allows it to function is both a research question and a reform question.
#2. Spotlight: A Cross-Partisan Casualty – Overseas Voting Rights in the Age of Voter Restriction
By Nivea Krishnan
Source: Democracy Docket
In November 2024, I cast my ballot as an Arizona and U.S. citizen from Madrid, Spain thanks to the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA). I was one of the estimated 2.8 million U.S. citizens living abroad who are eligible to vote in U.S. elections. The mission to remove barriers to participation for these voters has been long-running and historically cross-partisan at the state and federal levels. UOCAVA in particular established critical, uniform tools such as the Federal Post Card Application and Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot to address the unique barriers that voters abroad face, whether it be limited access to mailing systems or frequent relocations.
It is extremely clear that the several high-profile voting restrictions being deliberated at the state and federal levels would disproportionately impact broad swaths of the American public, from married women whose maiden names are not on their official documents to the more than 21 million Americans who lack ready access to their passports or birth certificates. We are also seeing legislation and executive actions that put many of the 2.8 million eligible overseas voters at risk.
An NPR report from October 2025 articulates the main argument against overseas voting, focusing on overseas citizens born abroad who have never lived in the United States. In April of last year, rulings in North Carolina state courts led to a major policy change that now prohibits overseas non-resident voters from voting in state and local races. This may seem quite narrow, but advocates in the state warn that proposed legislation to codify these rulings is phrased in a way that would strip those same voters of their right to cast ballots in federal races, as well.
The Republican National Committee, the group behind the lawsuits in North Carolina and Michigan, is applying the strategy to Arizona, challenging the law permitting state and federal voting for overseas non-resident voters as a violation of the Arizona Constitution. In total, there are bills on the table in 23 states that seek to impose voting restrictions in one form or another, each of which would impact overseas non-resident voters by imposing proof of citizenship laws or allowing individuals to challenge another’s ability to vote (South Dakota SB 185). The decentralized nature of the American election system forces reformists to pursue a state-by-state approach to improve implementation odds, but there have been plenty of federal actions taken against voters abroad, as well.
The Association of Americans Resident Overseas (AARO)’s White Paper, published in February of this year, identifies a slew of four federal lawsuits targeting overseas voting rights. Two lawsuits are asking courts to eliminate the grace periods that allow valid ballots to be counted after Election Day, and the other two ask courts to prohibit proof of citizenship requirements in two states, which would require voters to publicly disclose highly sensitive personally identifiable information and expose overseas U.S. citizens to serious and unnecessary physical, cyber, and identity-theft risks.
A key democracy defender on the other side of this fight is the Secure Families Initiative. SFI is a nonpartisan group of military spouses and loved ones that brings firsthand knowledge of the human-level impacts of foreign policy to issue-based advocacy. Their organizing strategy centers on the lived experiences of military-affiliated individuals, training them on how to voice their stories to effect change. Two of their focus areas are expanding the military vote and protecting civil rights for all families, making current attacks on overseas voting a top priority for them. SFI publicly opposes a requirement for documentary proof of citizenship, citing similar claims to other advocacy groups that the requirement seeks to solve a nonexistent problem and “imposes burdensome barriers on military and overseas voters who are just trying to exercise their constitutional right to vote.” SFI is actively involved in legal challenges and legislative advocacy campaigns, being one of the groups to win a legal challenge in October 2025, invalidating parts of the Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections Executive Order and prohibiting the President from unilaterally directing changes to federal election procedure.
Groups like SFI are on the frontlines of the fight to protect and expand democracy. Just two weeks ago, they launched their 2026 SFI Voting Ambassador Program, which invites trusted members of the military community to volunteer to help close the military voting gap ahead of the 2026 midterms through voter registration and education programming.
In the broader fight over overseas voting rights, SFI’s work makes clear that just as voting is a civic duty, so too is the responsibility to protect access to it.
#3. Timely Links and Shorts
Upcoming event! “A Celebration of Modern Suffrage Movements”: Hosted by the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, the event will spotlight research and activism on expanding voting eligibility. RSVP for the April 9th event now.
Recent Verasight March 2026 Survey Insights: Verasight conducted a nationally representative survey of 5,000 adults to address questions suggested by clients for their 2026 Client Omnibus Survey. From AI to elections to social trust, the results reveal the civic pulse of US adults in March 2025.
“Why a last-minute bailout in Missouri won’t lead to ballot shenanigans”: The Downballot writes about a model state practice, “Republican Rep. Sam Graves announced just days before Missouri’s filing deadline that he wouldn’t run for a 14th term, but his late-breaking retirement won’t engender any ballot shenanigans—thanks, ironically, to Graves himself. That’s because the state automatically reopens filing in any races in which a candidate who had filed to run formally withdraws within two business days of the deadline, which is March 31 this year. The new deadline will fall on April 10.”
“Popular vote plan to elect presidents is patriotic”: Ben Jealous for the Chicago Sun Times writes, “What better way to honor America’s 250th birthday than by taking one more step toward becoming the democracy we have always said we are? The people who stood at Lexington did not risk their lives so future generations could accept minority rule. They did not fight so Americans would shrug when the person with the most votes loses. They fought for freedom.”
New Election Trust Research Podcast: A new podcast by UC San Diego Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections brings together election administrators and researchers from across the country working to improve elections and increase public trust. Check out the first 4 episodes out now!
“The Infrastructure of Trust: How Local Civic Hubs Are Rebuilding Democracy Across Rural America”: The Ford Foundation writes, “The organization’s grantmaking model is built around the core belief: that national problems are solved in local communities. Central to that is a structure the Trust calls ‘Civic Hubs’: locally based, locally led organizations that create the culture and conditions for people to discuss the decisions that affect them most and act together toward meaningful change.”
“Children and young people’s assemblies: The next generation of democracy”: DemocracyNext writes, “Claudia Chwalisz, CEO and Founder, DemocracyNext, spoke to Laura Jane Mowlds, 19, from Ireland, who participated in Ireland’s first children and young people’s assembly on biodiversity loss; Ina Vonach, 19, from Austria, who joined a regional citizens’ assembly; and Katie Reid, Child Rights International Network (CRIN), a child rights specialist focused on child and youth participation in (inter)national governance, democracy, planning and environmental/climate justice.”
“What to know about Supreme Court oral arguments in late-arriving mail ballots case”: Votebeat writes about an important case heard this week, “The case before the court arises from state and national Republicans’ challenge of a Mississippi law that allows ballots postmarked by Election Day up to be counted as long as they arrive five business days later. The justices must rule on whether Election Day is the deadline for voters to cast their ballots, or whether federal law instead requires ballots to be received by elections officials by that date.”
Trump’s executive order on vote by mail to face legal challenges: NPR writes, “[Ned] Foley says he expects lawsuits against Trump’s order to make their way through the federal courts quickly in this midterm election year. Before signing the order, Trump defended it as a way to stop illegal voting by noncitizens in federal elections, which is already incredibly rare.”
“The Decision That Would Create a Permanent American Underclass”: Padma Lakshmi writes for the NYT on birthright citizenship, “The law on birthright citizenship is clear, and a majority of Americans support it. But Mr. Trump refuses to accept limits on his ethnic gatekeeping and his attempts to bend the Constitution to his will. And he fails to recognize that birthright citizenship is American culture.”