As the 2026 midterm elections approach, the signs of democratic backsliding are everywhere across the U.S. political landscape. Troubling signs include the Trump administration's demand for state voter roll data and interference with mail-in voting, the pressure it applied to Georgia election officials to reverse Joe Biden's victory in that state in the 2020 election and, of course, extreme partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts.
These examples illustrate the dual role federalism plays in American democracy, according to Michael Dichio, an associate professor of political science at the University of Utah whose research examines the role of judicial institutions in U.S. politics.
The principles of federalism that undergird our political system are intended to balance the prerogatives of the states with those of a national government. Dichio and his co-author Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo of Christopher Newport University in Virginia argue in a new paper that federalism can both undermine or protect democracy, depending on the independence of democratic institutions, the strength of national party coalitions and other factors.
Their article appears in the journal Publius under the title "The State of American Federalism 2025-2026: Federalism's Dual Role in Democratic Backsliding."
What follows is a Q&A with Dichio, edited for length and clarity.
Let's talk about the dual relationship between federalism and democracy you describe in the paper.
We argue that the relationship between federalism and democratic backsliding is conditional and bidirectional, and it depends on several different mechanisms. In some ways, federalism really is agnostic about democracy's survival. Federalism is neither inherently democratic nor inherently antidemocratic. The same institutions can protect democracy in one state and erode it in another.
What are the ways federalism protects democracy?
Federalism creates stumbling blocks for would-be autocrats. By devolving power from the federal government to subnational units, it multiples veto points, and those spheres of sovereignty enable pushback. In practice, that means an aggrandizer of power needs to capture more choke points.
When the threat comes from national leaders, federalism protects best when the opposition controls enough states, and those states have genuine sovereign authority over elections, courts, and law enforcement. States resist through litigation by their attorneys general, through officials who refuse to cooperate, and through statewide venues like elected courts and ballot initiatives that can't be gerrymandered.
On the flip side, how does federalism facilitate authoritarianism?
This is where the agnosticism comes into play. The same decentralization that blocks a national autocrat can also shelter subnational autocrats. The quintessential example in American political development, of course, is the Jim Crow South from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. We had authoritarian enclaves perpetrating domestic terrorism against Black people, and were shielded by those same federalism forces.
Today national party coalitions can use the states they have majorities in as 'laboratories of backsliding' through things like voter restrictions. and gerrymandering. This erosion becomes durable when state legislatures capture or restrict the venues that could otherwise reverse such as state courts or ballot initiatives that could check legislators engage in subversion Under unified party control, states can become agents of a national leader rather than checks on those leaders.
How worried are you about the health of U.S. democracy?
I am worried. I don't really have a gradation or scale, but what worries me structurally and constitutionally is that the executive branch keeps growing, and Congress keeps shrinking or shirking its duties. Regardless of your political affiliation, this is worrying. Congress is designed to do something, and in many ways, it's doing less. This has been bipartisan and cumulative for decades. Let's look at examples: emergency powers, governing by executive order, war powers, Congress handing off and delegating its authority while focusing on less important things. And each president inherits the powers and precedents of the last one. It's a sort of ratchet effect.
Two other things worry me. First, parties that are nationalized and strongly hostile to each other. James Madison's system, described in the Federalist Papers, assumed that officeholders would defend their own institution's power against other branches. Once loyalty runs through the party and ideology rather than to Congress or to a state, the checks stop working.
Second, there's a real counter-majoritarian strain. The Senate, the Electoral College, gerrymandering as a practice, the Supreme Court: these are counter-majoritarian institutions which have their place in sustaining liberal democracy. But we're now seeing them allow a party to hold power while losing the popular vote. These gaps between votes and power wear down faith in democracy.
What are the most promising signs that democratic institutions are weathering these challenges?
There are sites of resistances. Courts sometimes cross ideological lines and rule against the party that appointed them as in the Supreme Court's ruling on National Guard deployments. There are also Republicans resisting their own party, for example, by refusing to turn over voter roll data, for example. We've seen that in Utah. Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the state's top election official, shared earlier this summer that she received Department of Justice letters threatening prosecutions, which she tied to that refusal.
There are sites of resistance. What tempers my worry is that American democracy has survived worse. The end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, the long era where large parts of the country were not democratic at all. We have only been a full, inclusive multiracial democracy since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The system has real depth. We still have decentralized administration, independent courts, a large civil society, and officials like the Utah lieutenant governor who resist pressure from their own party. Those are signs that liberal democracy is still alive. Is it thriving? That's a different question.
The article "Federalism's Dual Role in Democratic Backsliding" appeared in the summer 2026 edition of Publius: The Journal of Federalism, the flagship journal of the Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations section of the American Political Science Association. The authors, Dichio and Bromley-Trujillo, are the journal's annual review editors.
Banner image: Stock photo by Chris F, via Pexels.
