Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States

Abstract

Is support for democracy in the United States robust enough to deter undemocratic behavior by elected politicians? We develop a model of the public as a democratic check and evaluate it using two empirical strategies: an original, nationally representative candidate-choice experiment in which some politicians take positions that violate key democratic principles, and a natural experiment that occurred during Montana’s 2017 special election for the U.S. House. Our research design allows us to infer Americans’ willingness to trade-off democratic principles for other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, and policy preferences. We find the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing in several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence. Our findings echo classic arguments about the importance of political moderation and cross-cutting cleavages for democratic stability and highlight the dangers that polarization represents for democracy.

Democratic Hypocrisy: Polarized citizens support democracy-eroding behavior when their own party is in power

“…These results have important implications for the study of public opinion towards democratic institutions and advance the experimental research on public attitudes toward democratic erosion in several ways. First, compared to Graham and Svolik (2020) who posit that voters view compliance with democratic norms as a valence issue (preferring democracy-complying candidates to democracy-eroding candidates), we view support for democracy as context-dependent and provide evidence that voters often prefer choices that erode existing democratic norms. Second, we show that toleration of democracy-eroding behavior is stronger among those whose in-party is in power.…”

“…Thus, the debate that this paper seeks to contribute to centers on the question of why citizens supportive of democracy, in general, tolerate or even encourage the erosion of existing democratic norms by their elected leaders, rather than serve as a check on undemocratic political behavior (Graham and Svolik 2020).…”

“…Recent conjoint experimental studies have attempted to tackle these problems by evaluating voter candidate choices based on policies, partisanship and democracy-eroding positions, with mixed results. Carey et al (2018) found little support for dismantling democratic institutions, while in contrast Graham and Svolik (2020) and Stolle et al (2019) found that only a few people are willing to punish actors who endorse rolling back democratic safeguards in polarized contexts.…”

Partisanship in Crisis: Public Response to Covid-19 Pandemic in Indonesia

“…For decades, vast scholarships on partisanship have followed the path of such a pioneering definition (see, for instance, Bartels, 2000;J. Bullock et al, 2013;Goren, 2005;Graham & Svolik, 2020). Drawing on this conceptual understanding and modifying Goren's (2005) conceptual interpretation of the Campbell et al's definition, we put leaderbased partisanship here as an individual's affective orientation or attachment to a political leader, who paved their way to an executive position through electoral competition, based on the individual's feelings of being close to the particular groups associated with the leader.…”

A Partisan Right to Harm Others?

“…Partisanship is also implicated in dating and marriage decisions (Huber andMalhotra 2017, Nicholson et al 2016), and in economic transactions (McConnell et al 2018). Recent studies show that partisans may be open to embracing candidates who subvert democracy (Graham and. More germane to the issue of public health, partisanship influences health attitudes and behaviors in the context of the pandemic, with Democrats being more supportive of social-distancing and other public health measures than are Republicans (Gadarian, Goodman, andPepinsky 2020, Green et al 2020).…”