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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2020

MATTHEW H. GRAHAM Open the ORCID record for MATTHEW H. GRAHAM [Opens in a new window]  and
MILAN W. SVOLIK Open the ORCID record for MILAN W. SVOLIK [Opens in a new window]
MATTHEW H. GRAHAM*
Affiliation:
Yale University
MILAN W. SVOLIK*
Affiliation:
Yale University
*
*Matthew H. Graham, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, Yale University, matthew.graham@yale.edu.
†Milan W. Svolik, Professor, Department of Political Science, Yale University, milan.svolik@yale.edu.
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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.

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Type
Research Article
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American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 392 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2020 

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Jacob Hacker, David Hendry, Greg Huber, Steven Levitsky, David Mayhew, Nolan McCarty, Adam Przeworski, Arturas Rozenas, Daniel Treisman, Bonnie Weir, and audiences at APSA, EPSA, Boston University, Caltech, Columbia, Georgetown, Harvard, IAS Toulouse, Peking University, Technical University of Munich, Texas A&M, UC Berkeley, UT Austin, Vanderbilt, and Yale for their helpful comments and conversations and Isaiah Affron and Lily Engbith for research assistance. This project was supported by the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, both at Yale University. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EEARKA.

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