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The Majoritarian Threat to Liberal Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2021

Guy Grossman Open the ORCID record for Guy Grossman [Opens in a new window] ,
Dorothy Kronick ,
Matthew Levendusky  and
Marc Meredith
Guy Grossman*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Twitters: @guygrossman; @dkronick; @m_levendusky; @mieuque
Dorothy Kronick
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Twitters: @guygrossman; @dkronick; @m_levendusky; @mieuque
Matthew Levendusky
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Twitters: @guygrossman; @dkronick; @m_levendusky; @mieuque
Marc Meredith
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Twitters: @guygrossman; @dkronick; @m_levendusky; @mieuque
*
*Corresponding author. Email: ggros@upenn.edu
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Abstract

Incumbents often seek to wield power in ways that are formally legal but informally proscribed. Why do voters endorse these power grabs? Prior literature focuses on polarization. We propose instead that many voters are majoritarian, in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic – even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. We find support for this claim in two original survey experiments, arguing that majoritarians’ desire to give wide latitude to elected officials is an important but understudied threat to liberal democracy in the United States.

Keywords

Democratic erosionpopulismpolarizationdemocratic backsliding
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 36 - 45
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

The authors thank the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics for generous financial support of this project, as well as Dan Hopkins, Brendan Nyhan, Emily Thorson, the editors, and the anonymous referees for very helpful comments. The authors declare no conflict of interest related to this project. The University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board approved this research (Protocol #826580). All data and code needed to replicate these analyses are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse in the Harvard Dataverse Network at: doi:10.7910/DVN/X4ECFT.

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