Replication Data for: Assessing the risk of democratic reversal in the United States: A reply to Kurt Weyland

By replying to Weyland’s comparative study of populism—published in the 18(2) edition of Perspectives on Politics—we revisit optimist perspectives on the health of American democracy in light of existing evidence. Relying on a set-theoretical approach, Weyland concludes that populists only succeed in subverting democracy when institutional weakness and conjunctural misfortune are jointly observed in a polity, thus conferring on the United States immunity to democratic reversal. We challenge this conclusion on two grounds. First, we argue that the focus on institutional dynamics neglects the impact of the structural conditions in which institutions are embedded, such as inequality, racial cleavages, and changing political attitudes among the public. Second, we claim that endogeneity, coding errors, and the (mis)use of Boolean algebra raise questions about the accuracy of the analysis and its conclusions. While we are skeptical of QCA as an adequate modeling choice, we replicate the original analysis and find that paths towards democratic backsliding and continuity are both potentially compatible with the United States.