Democratic Erosion and Ungrading at the 2025 Northeastern Political Science Association Meeting

Hey all --

I want to document what we as scholars and students accomplish by meeting each other and talking about our work. Words like "research" can obscure the combination of curiosity, effort, and expertise which constitute the building of knowledge. "Networking" doesn't seem to mean anything when we have pressing needs. Last year when I attended the conference I argued that "political science really does allow for a full, thoughtful consideration of the human experience." That is what's happening at the conference again, and I know we should be wary of anyone who asserts that isn't valuable.

Two presentations in particular are on my mind:

The first day of the conference Sarah Stokes, President of APSA, presented on democratic erosion. I live-skeeted her remarks on Bluesky, as everyone could benefit from her abundance of research and clarity of thinking. She told us the threat of military coups were once the primary means of democratic erosion, but now elected demagogues are most potent. Left populists (Hugo Chavez) and right-wing ethnonationalists (Orban) are prominent examples of this. They attack the institutions which make democracy possible: the press, the courts, the legislature, the bureaucracy, other parties, and so many more. Income inequality makes them effective. Stokes had a chart with a steep curve where increases in income inequality consistently accompany decreases in democracy. What we see in the U.S. is happening the world over; the U.S. is not exceptional in this sense.

I was grateful for the emphasis on inequality. I know some who believe that the right attitude or habit mean you can do more with less. They mean well but have not considered how terrible it is to be poor. How nothing is reliable, how you're continually paying more for the basics, how you're being bullied by one thing or another. In truth, inequality is radicalizing.

Stokes offered practical solutions. Polarization does help demagogues, as it opens the door for unnecessary skepticism. We can fight for better institutions, resist specific calls from politicians to attack them, and build empathy. This is a useful, empirically grounded framework to begin with. In my opinion, we can quickly move from this to holding actors accountable for vicious, anti-democratic abuses of power. I always find myself wondering whether I should even consider defending SCOTUS, since occasionally it delivers a decision that is halfway decent. And the answer is that if a bunch of justices take a bunch of bribes all the time then we need to change things drastically. We need to recognize when some, operating on behalf of the demagogue, are destroying critical pillars of democracy.

The other presentation I want to bring to your attention is Jonathan Parent's on ungrading. Dr. Parent is preparing a paper for publication, so I do not want to give any details which would compromise his unique contribution to the discourse. What I can say is that his overview of grading hits like a truck. The research, according to Parent, consistently shows that grading and learning do not go together at all. Students get anxious about grades, often dedicating themselves to an approach more like playing a game as opposed to an exploration of the material. Parent's use of ungrading unleashes student creativity in ways which would make any serious teacher jealous. A lot of the stories he shared about his experience mirror what we strive to do in student programming. Students take the material, effectively communicating their interpretation and its value through visual art, video, and podcasts. In doing this, they judge themselves. They understand what they're doing as good; they know the efforts they made which were less than optimal. They commit to building a framework by which they better know their own actions. I can't imagine an educational experience doing much more than this.

So yeah. I'm thinking more about how to build the practices of ungrading into my classes. I don't just want to give an A. I want to know people are taking what is taught, thinking about it, and then doing something with it. If you're going to class in order to hide from engagement with the world, how is that useful to anyone? Education is a responsibility to your community. Those doing the research and the teaching are acknowledging that responsibility. It is critical to make this clear at a time when a man is trying to pay himself 1 trillion dollars while the government is cutting programs for everyone else left and right.