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

Graham, Matthew H.; Svolik, Milan W.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3354559

Cited by 153 publications

(270 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…These same questions are being posed by citizens of countries including Poland, Hungary, Turkey, the Philippines, Rather, democracy comes under threat in some areas at the same time that democratic practices persist in others. The fragmentary deterioration of democracy may be the result of strategic choices by would-be autocrats exploiting polarization (Graham and Svolik 2018;Svolik 2018) or voter uncertainty (Nalepa, Vanberg, and Chiopris 2018), trying to cling to power (Helmke 2017;Luo and Przeworski 2018), or avoid accountability (Frum 2018). Either way, if we are to understand threats to democracy and recognize them when they arise, we need disaggregated measures of what we value in democracy.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for Bright Lines in the Trump Presidency

Carey¹,

Helmke²,

Nyhan³

et al. 2019

Perspect. polit.

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Is American democracy under threat? The question is more prominent in political debate now than at any time in recent memory. However, it is also too blunt; there is widespread recognition that democracy is multifaceted and that backsliding, when it occurs, tends to be piecemeal. To address these concerns, we provide original data from surveys of political science experts and the public measuring the perceived importance and performance of U.S. democracy on a number of dimensions during the first year-and-a-half of the Trump presidency. We draw on a theory of how politicians may transgress limits on their authority and the conditions under which constraints are self-enforcing. We connect this theory to our survey data in an effort to identify potential areas of agreement—bright lines—among experts and the public about the most important democratic principles and whether they have been violated. Public and expert perceptions often differ on the importance of specific democratic principles. In addition, though our experts perceive substantial democratic erosion, particularly in areas related to checks and balances, polarization between Trump supporters and opponents undermines any social consensus recognizing these violations.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for Bright Lines in the Trump Presidency

Carey¹,

Helmke²,

Nyhan³

et al. 2019

Perspect. polit.

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show abstract

“…Our choice of dimensions is also based upon the data availability and potential generalizability of the outcomes of the current analysis. While the inherent European ideational (region-dependent) plurality is a promising safety catch to guard us against extreme group polarization (for instance, Graham and Svolik, 2020 show for the US that party ties quite often override the importance of democratic principles providing a blank check for politicians), it makes at the same time the European landscape less amenable to the large-N analysis. Therefore, in this study we will concentrate only on the most important and visible left-right dimension.…”

Section: Theorizing the Link Between Crises Inequality And Polarizamentioning

confidence: 99%

Falling Apart or Flocking Together? Financial Crises, Inequality and Left-Right Polarization in the OECD

Schneider

Шевчук

2020

Preprint

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According to the conventional wisdom, political polarization has been growing in the past few decades, and increasing inequality and financial crises have fuelled this trend. Making use of new measures and differentiating between parliamentary and electoral polarization across the left-right cleavage, this article offers a comparative evaluation of this claim for the OECD countries. The results show that the electorates in the European Union have become more conflictive, while the political parties represented in the national parliaments have moved in opposite direction. The statistical analysis demonstrates in line with the theoretical expectations that currency crises have increased mass polarization. The article also offers some tentative support for the hypothesis that increased levels of income inequality enhance this trend and that growing elite discord increases the left-right confrontation in the electorate.

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“…In these items, people are either supportive of democratic values or opposed to them. When these sorts of principles are used in candidate choice experiments as a principle endorsed or opposed by a candidate (Carey et al 2018;Graham and Svolik 2020), the candidate is intended to be either supportive or opposed to democratic values.…”

Section: Democratic Principles Political Elites and The Mass Publicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most Americans believe that elections are currently free and fair, and place a high importance on free and fair elections (DeSilver 2016; Gibson and Caldeira 2009), though support for democracy has declined somewhat among younger generations (Foa and Mounk 2016) and belief in the integrity of American elections has declined in recent years as conspiracy theories about electoral fraud have taken hold (Norris, Garnett, and Grömping 2020). As long as these beliefs hold, the public has an incentive to impose costs on elites who push elections too far from the norms of free and fair democracy, in the form of electoral punishment (Graham and Svolik 2020) or protest. These costs could deter elites from electoral manipulation that is too blatant or too extreme.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Democratic Principles Constrain the Effectiveness of Elite Cues on Election Rules?

McCarthy

2020

Preprint

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The public's perception of the fairness of an election rule is an important determinant of popular support for that rule. Thus, the public's fairness principles might act as a constraint on party elite attempts to manipulate election rules for their own electoral benefit. However, if party elites are able to influence what the public considers fair, the effectiveness of this constraint would be limited. This paper posits two possible mechanisms by which this elite influence could function. First, elites could change the public's perception of whether a given fairness principle applies to a given election rule. Second, elites could attempt to directly change which fairness principles people prioritize or endorse. This study tests both mechanisms using survey experiments, finding that elites are able to influence opinion on voting policy issues even when their messages use inapplicable principles. However, elites are unable to directly affect the democratic principles that citizens prioritize.

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

Cited by 153 publications

References 33 publications

Searching for Bright Lines in the Trump Presidency

Searching for Bright Lines in the Trump Presidency

Falling Apart or Flocking Together? Financial Crises, Inequality and Left-Right Polarization in the OECD

Do Democratic Principles Constrain the Effectiveness of Elite Cues on Election Rules?

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