Democracy & Distrust: The Election Integrity Movement, 2020–2023

I aim in this thesis to explain why Republican politicians have pursued restrictive election laws, while Democrats have promoted permissive ones, after the 2020 election. During the 2020–2023 period, following Donald Trump's disinformation campaign alleging that the 2020 presidential results were illegitimate, American politics increasingly polarized around election integrity concerns. Republicans fearful of widespread fraud wanted to enhance security measures while Democrats generally sought to expand ballot access. Previous research focused on the differentiation of conservative and liberal media spheres, the asymmetrical radicalization of those in the conservative network, and different conceptions of democracy. The scholarship also addresses how rising polarization has reduced politics to a zero-sum game, and how American federalism has led policymaking processes in Republican and Democratic-controlled states to diverge. My argument synthesizes these strands and contributes by identifying the mechanism that produced these diverging approaches to election administration. I then present and test a series of hypotheses designed to evaluate the theory I elaborate and its implications by using survey data, self-made datasets, and several regression models.