How do voters perceive changes to the rules of the game? Evidence from the 2014 Hungarian elections

Ahlquist, John S.; Ichino, Nahomi; Wittenberg, Jason; Ziblatt, Daniel

doi:10.1016/j.jce.2018.01.001

Cited by 32 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…15 Although foreign military attacks may provide opportunities for narrow domestic groups such as weapons manufacturers, such attacks typically do not benefit large groups of U.S. citizens. 16 Our prediction dovetails with research showing that citizens apply a partisan double standard when thinking about domestic issues, including political corruption (Anduiza, Gallego, and Muñoz 2013), election fraud (Beaulieu 2014), and election rules (Ahlquist et al 2018). interpret data selectively, accepting news that portrays their party in a positive light while dismissing news that portrays their party in a negative light (Bush and Prather 2017).…”

Section: Hypotheses About Tolerance Versus Condemnationsupporting

confidence: 68%

“…Previous studies have found that meddling by domestic actors raises doubts about the integrity of elections, triggering a chain reaction that delegitimizes the political system, depresses voter turnout, and encourages mass protest (Norris 2014;Tucker 2007;Wellman, Hyde, and Hall 2018). Research has documented the prevalence and consequences of domestic threats to electoral integrity, including efforts to block opposition parties, censor the media, launder campaign funds, gerrymander districts, suppress turnout, buy votes, stuff ballots, and manipulate the rules that translate votes into seats (e.g., Ahlquist et al 2018;Birch 2011;Simpser 2013).…”

Section: Hypotheses About Faith In Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Public Opinion and Foreign Electoral Intervention

Tomz

Weeks

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Foreign electoral intervention is an increasingly important tool for influencing politics in other countries, yet we know little about when citizens would tolerate or condemn foreign efforts to sway elections. In this article, we use experiments to study American public reactions to revelations of foreign electoral intervention. We find that even modest forms of intervention polarize the public along partisan lines. Americans are more likely to condemn foreign involvement, lose faith in democracy, and seek retaliation when a foreign power sides with the opposition, than when a foreign power aids their own party. At the same time, Americans reject military responses to electoral attacks on the United States, even when their own political party is targeted. Our findings suggest that electoral interference can divide and weaken an adversary without provoking the level of public demand for retaliation typically triggered by conventional military attacks.

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Section: Hypotheses About Tolerance Versus Condemnationsupporting

confidence: 68%

Section: Hypotheses About Faith In Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Opinion and Foreign Electoral Intervention

Tomz

Weeks

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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show abstract

“…40 On the other hand, because conventional measures of support for democracy around the world suffer from the same flaws that our study highlights, we may have been unduly confident about support for democracy worldwide. Put differently, if only 3.5% of voters realistically punish violations of democratic principles in one of the world’s oldest democracies, we should not be surprised by the public’s failure to stop aspiring autocrats in new democracies (Ahlquist et al 2018; Nalepa, Vanberg, and Chiopris 2018). Our findings suggest a sobering upper bound on what can reasonably be expected from ordinary people in defense of democracy.…”

Section: Conclusion: It Can’t Happen Here?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2020

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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.

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“…Others find evidence of partisan effects on procedural values in other contexts (e.g. Goren 2005, Anduiza et al 2013, Park and Smith 2016, Ahlquist et al 2018). Yet several other studies find no evidence of partisan effects (e.g.…”

Section: Partisan Bias and Procedural Valuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partisan Context and Procedural Values: Attitudes Towards Presidential Secrecy Before and after the 2016 US Election

Berliner

2020

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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What shapes attitudes towards procedural rules that constrain executive power? This letter argues that procedural values are contextual: A function of who is in power. Supporters of those in power prefer fewer procedural constraints, while opposition supporters prefer greater. This study reports the results of a unique test using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey. Respondents were asked, in both pre- and post-election waves, if they thought it should be ‘easier or harder for the president to keep documents secret from the public’. The panel design makes it possible to track individual changes following the shift in political context. The results show evidence of a partisan ‘flip’ in attitudes following the election, with Republicans becoming less likely – and Democrats more likely – to prefer additional constraints on presidential secrecy. However, this partisan ‘flip’ is present only among higher political knowledge respondents.

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How do voters perceive changes to the rules of the game? Evidence from the 2014 Hungarian elections

Cited by 32 publications

References 53 publications

Public Opinion and Foreign Electoral Intervention

Public Opinion and Foreign Electoral Intervention

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

Partisan Context and Procedural Values: Attitudes Towards Presidential Secrecy Before and after the 2016 US Election

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