Democracy in America - Partisanship, Polarization Pt 1

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. “It is the function of public opinion to check the use of force in a crisis, so that men, driven to make terms, may live and let live.” Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (1925, 64) “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Donald Trump at a presidential campaign rally in Iowa (January 23, 2016) 1 Introduction “It is nearly impossible to find an American who says that he is opposed to democracy or favors some alternative. . . On the contrary, nearly everyone professes to believe that democracy is the best form of government.” This is how Robert A. Dahl, writing in 1966, summarized contemporary evidence for the support for democracy in the United States (Dahl, 1966, 40). It remains conventional wisdom to this day. Research that traces its intellectual origins to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America finds that the United States consistently exhibits some of the highest levels of support for democracy in the world (Almond and Verba, 1963; Inglehart and Welzel, 2010; Norris, 2011). In this paper, we show that this conventional wisdom rests on fragile foundations. We adopt an approach that, instead of asking about support for democracy directly, infers respondents’ commitment to democratic principles from their choices of candidates in hypothetical election scenarios. Each candidate is experimentally assigned attributes and platforms that approximate real-world elections and, crucially, may include positions that violate core democratic principles, including free and fair elections, civil liberties, and checks and balances. In this framework, voters are said to “support democracy” when their choices reveal a preference for democratic principles over other valid but potentially conflicting considerations such as political ideology, partisan loyalty, or favorite policies. This research design builds on the observation that elections represent a fundamental instrument of democratic self-defense: Especially in advanced democracies, voters have the opportunity to stop politicians whose positions violate democratic principles by defeating them at the polls. We argue that a key obstacle to the viability of such a democratic check is partisan, ideological, and policy-based polarization. Electoral competition often confronts voters with a choice between two valid but potentially conflicting considerations: partisan interests and democratic principles. Polarization raises the stakes of elections and in turn the price of prioritizing democratic principles over partisan interests. When faced with the choice between a co-partisan candidate whose positions violate democratic principles and one who complies with democratic principles but is unappealing, a significant fraction of voters may be willing to sacrifice democratic principles in favor of electing candidate who champions their party or interests. In a sharply polarized electorate, even pro-democratically minded voters may act as partisans first and democrats only second. In section 2, we formalize these intuitions and develop a model of the public as a democratic check. We extend the classic, spatial framework for electoral competition to account for candidates who may hold positions that undermine democratic principles. The latter are conceptualized as negative valence attributes: while voters may differ over policy, ideology, or partisanship, they agree that electoral competition should be democratic and prefer candidates who comply with key democratic principles. This framework yields a number of predictions about the consequences of polarization for an electorate’s resilience to undemocratic candidates: i) voters who hold extreme or intense policy preferences will be willing to sacrifice democratic principles at higher rates than centrist and moderate voters, ii) electorates that are polarized or lack cross-cutting cleavages will be less punishing of candidates that undermine democratic principles, and iii) candidate platform polarization will be detrimental to democracy independent of voter polarization. Our model thus provides microfoundations for classic arguments about the importance of political moderation and cross-cutting cleavages for democratic stability (Dahl, 1956; Lipset, 1960). We employ this framework to guide the design and analysis of our candidate-choice experiment as well as a natural experiment that occurred during Montana’s 2017 special election for the U.S. House. In the candidate-choice experiment, respondents were asked to choose between a series of candidates for a state legislature. Candidates were described by attributes typically seen in real-world elections, including their social and economic policy platforms, partisan affiliation, and – crucially – a “democracy” position. The latter endorsed an action that violates a key democratic principle and approximates real-world practices used by politicians in the United States to subvert the democratic process. Because all candidate attributes were experimentally manipulated, we can interpret the decline in undemocratic candidates’ vote share as a revealed-preference measure of the U.S. electorate’s ability to serve as a democratic check. The following is a summary of our experimental findings, which we present in section 3: 1. Americans value democracy, but not much: A candidate who considers adopting an undemocratic position can expect to be punished by losing only about 11.7% of his overall vote share. When we restrict attention to candidate choice scenarios with combinations of partisanship and policies that we typically see in real-world elections, this punishment drops to 3.5%. 2. Support for democracy is highly elastic: When the price of voting for a more democratic candidate is that candidate’s greater distance from the voter in terms of her preferred policies, even the most centrist voters are willing to tolerate at most a 10-15% increase in such a distance. 3. Centrists are a pro-democratic force: “Centrist” voters who see small policy differences between candidates punish undemocratic behavior at four times the rate of “extremist” voters who give a decisive advantage to one candidate or the other. 4. Most voters are partisans first and democrats only second: Less than 10% of our respondents are willing to punish a co-partisan for violating democratic principles when the price of that punishment is voting against their own party. Only independents and partisan “leaners” support the more democratic candidate enough to defeat the undemocratic candidate regardless of his partisan affiliation. 5. Voters employ a partisan “double standard:” Respondents who identify as Republican are more willing to punish undemocratic behavior by Democratic Party than Republican Party candidates and vice-versa. These effects are about equal among both Democrat and Republican respondents. 6. Platform polarization is bad for democracy: The larger the difference between the candidates’ policy platforms, the weaker the punishment for undemocratic behavior. 7. Sensitivity to the menu of manipulation varies: Voters are most sensitive to undemocratic positions that undermine the free press, checks and balances, and those that aim to disenfranchise opposition supporters. Nonetheless, when we benchmark these against extramarital affairs and underpaying of taxes – two negative valence attributes unrelated to democracy – we find that voters punish the latter more severely than they punish violations of democratic principles. We take advantage of the close connection between the design of our candidate choice experiment and our theoretical framework in section 4, where we shift from the primarily non-parametric analysis employed up to then to a structural approach that identifies the model’s key primitives. The latter approach allows us to explicitly estimate the weight that voters place on democracy relative to party and policy. We estimate this weight at 18% and find that candidates’ democracy positions, economic and social policy platforms, and partisan affiliation jointly account for almost 80% of the systematic variation in voters’ candidate choices. This approach also allows us to put a “price” on voters’ value for democracy in the terms of desirable candidate characteristics they are willing to forgo to punish candidates who violate democratic principles. We find that in order to punish violations of undemocratic behavior, our respondents are willing to tolerate about half the difference between their favorite and least favorite policy positions. We also revisit our experimental findings about a partisan double standard in the punishment of candidates who violate democratic principles and extend our theoretical model to account for this phenomenon. We estimate a 49.6% co-partisan bias, implying that Americans are neither fully principled nor purely partisan in their punishment of candidates who violate democratic principles support for democracy. We move from analyzing hypothetical election scenarios to a real-world election in section 5, where we examine a natural experiment that occurred during the 2017 special election for Montana’s only seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. On the eve of the election, one of the two major candidates assaulted a journalist, which we interpret as a negative public signal about his respect for a free press, or at a minimum, an undesirable valence attribute. Crucially, only in-person voters saw this signal before they could cast a ballot; absentee voters, who in Montana make up a majority of registered voters, had already cast their ballots. This allows us to adopt a difference-in-differences empirical strategy that compares precinct-level vote shifts between absentee and election day voters to infer their willingness to punish the attack on the journalist. Our findings are consistent with both our theoretical expectations and experimental results. We find that Montanans value a free press but only moderate partisans are willing to punish the assault on the journalist by voting across party lines. For strong partisans, partisan loyalty trumps valence considerations. Our findings about the robustness of support for democracy in the United States contribute to a number of debates in comparative and American politics. Most immediately, our paper joins a growing number of papers that have, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, begun to reassess our knowledge about democratic stability in the United States1 and other advanced democracies.2 Theoretically, our arguments parallel Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018), who also highlight the dangers that polarization represents for democratic stability. While their analysis focuses primarily on how polarization weakens the often informal norms that regulate interactions among political elites, our emphasis is on how polarization undermines the public’s willingness to punish politicians for subverting democratic competition in their favor. Our empirical methodology and substantive focus are closest to Carey, Clayton, Helmke, Nyhan, Sanders and Stokes (2018), who also employ a candidate-choice experiment to study the commitment to democratic principles among the American public. Just like we do, they report that while voters do punish candidates whose positions violate democratic principles, the magnitude of that punishment may be overshadowed by other political considerations – most notably partisanship (c.f. Barber and Pope, Forthcoming).3 Taken together, this evidence suggests that our existing knowledge about the support for democracy in the United States and other advanced democracies is of limited utility when 1 See especially Carey, Helmke, Nyhan and Stokes (2018), Huq and Ginsburg (2017), Kaufman and Haggard (Forthcoming), Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018), Lieberman et al. (Forthcoming), Miller et al. (2017), and Przeworski (2017). 2 See, for instance, the exchange between Alexander and Welzel (2017), Foa and Mounk (2017), Norris (2017), and Voeten (2017). 3 While Carey, Clayton, Helmke, Nyhan, Sanders and Stokes (2018) examine a related set of democratic principles, their implementation is different from ours. Their democratic treatments probe voters’ attitudes toward voter ID requirements, partisan influence in law enforcement investigations, elected officials’ deference to court rulings, and willingness to compromise across party lines. it comes to answering a key question: When can we realistically expect the public to serve as a check on the authoritarian temptations of elected politicians? Our theoretical framework helps us address this question by proposing a new perspective on democratic stability: democracy is “self-enforcing” when politicians anticipate that, were they to behave undemocratically, their own supporters would punish them by voting for a competitor in large enough numbers to ensure their defeat. We explain why this check may fail in polarized societies and even among voters who value democracy for its own sake: in sharply divided societies, voters put partisan ends above democratic principles.4 The microfoundations that we develop in section 2 thus combine insights from two lines of classic democratization research. The first views intense political cleavages as a threat to democratic stability (Dahl, 1956; Lipset, 1960); the second asks that explanations of democratic stability be explicit about the incentives of key actors to comply with the rules of democratic politics (Przeworski, 1991; Weingast, 1997). More broadly, we contribute to comparative politics research on democratic backsliding (Gandhi and Ong, 2018; Haggard and Kaufman, 2016; Luo and Przeworski, 2018; Nalepa et al., 2018; Waldner and Lust, 2018). This theoretical perspective also guides our empirical research design. The challenge in assessing the public’s resilience to undemocratic candidates in advanced democracies is that we rarely observe outright violations of democratic principles in this class of regimes. To put it in the jargon of formal theory, undemocratic behavior by political elites is “off the equilibrium path” and so is the public’s reaction to it. Yet if the elite’s beliefs about the public’s off-equilibrium reactions are what keeps them in check in the first place, then we 4 The trade-off between partisan interests and democratic principles can be seen as a special case of a more general trade-off between partisan and valence considerations (Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita, 2009). Such an interpretation of our findings echoes Eggers (2014) who finds that voters punished politicians implicated in the 2009 UK expenses scandal less severely when the electoral stakes in their district were higher. lack an empirical basis for assessing the robustness of the public’s support for democracy. Our candidate-choice experiment overcomes this difficulty: It allows us to investigate “out-ofequilibrium” responses by confronting voters with candidates who may adopt undemocratic positions that are plausible yet rarely encountered in advanced democracies. Jointly, our theoretical framework and empirical findings suggest an explanation for the puzzling persistence in the United States of a number of deficiencies in the democratic process, especially at the state and local level. These include gerrymandering (Chen and Rodden, 2013; Cho and Liu, 2016), misinformation (Albertson and Guiler, 2018), voter suppression (Hajnal et al., 2017; Grimmer et al., 2018), and voter fraud (Ansolabehere and Persily, 2008; Ahlquist et al., 2014).5 Our model implies that elected officials’ incentives to comply with key democratic principles critically depend on the public’s willingness to sanction those who violate them or neglect their enforcement.6 Yet our empirical analysis reveals that this check is at best limited in magnitude and subject to a partisan “double standard.” In turn, public officials may be effectively insulated from electoral sanction in states and districts where one party enjoys a significant electoral advantage. Analytically as well as empirically, we examine the effects of a number of distinct conceptions of polarization. At the level of individual voters, polarization may characterize voters who hold either extreme or intense preferences. At the level of the electorate, polarization may correspond to either a U-shaped distribution of voter preferences or one with a high correlation of preferences across issues or between issue areas and partisan affiliation. At the level of the candidates, polarization can be conceived of as corresponding to a large distance between candidate platforms. These distinct conceptions of polarization are rarely examined within a single theoretical framework. Our analysis demonstrates that 5 See Norris et al. (2018) for a recent assessment of electoral integrity in the United States. For a historical perspective on democratic development in the United States, see Mickey (2015). 6 Clark (2009) sees a similar role for public opinion in his analysis of court curbing. each kind of polarization independently undermines an electorate’s resilience to undemocratic candidates. This broad look at the relationship between polarization and democratic stability contributes to a large research agenda that studies elite and mass polarization in the United States. Whereas most research on mass polarization focuses on characterizing its nature and origins (Abramowitz and Saunders, 2008; Fiorina et al., 2008; McCarty et al., 2008; Iyengar et al., 2018), our focus is on a political consequence that this literature has yet to examine.7 To our knowledge, our study is the first to examine what is possibly the most concerning consequence of increasing polarization in the United States: its potential to undermine the public’s ability to check the undemocratic temptations of elected politicians. 2 A Model of the Public as a Democratic Check Consider a model according to which voters’ preferences over two kinds of candidate attributes determine their electoral choices: i) positional issues, which may include candidates’ policy positions, ideology, and partisan affiliation, and ii) candidates’ compliance with key democratic principles. We conceive of the latter as a valence issue: while voters may differ over policy, ideology, or partisanship, they all agree that electoral competition should be democratic and prefer candidates whose positions comply with key tenets of democratic electoral competition. Formally, voter i’s payoff from candidate j is ui (Xj , Mj ) = − X αk (xik − xjk )2 − δMj , (1) K 7 Because our primary focus is on mass polarization, we intentionally omit discussion of work on the polarization in Congress. For a review of this literature, see Barber and McCarty (2015). where xik is voter i’s favorite position on issue k, xjk is candidate j’s platform on issue k, and αk is the weight that i attaches to that issue. Meanwhile, Mj is candidate j’s democracy position where M is increasing in how undemocratic j’s platform is (i.e. M stands for “manipulation.”)8 The term δ is the weight that voters attach to fair democratic competition – in effect, the intensity of their support for democracy. This simple model yields several predictions that we evaluate throughout the paper. First, voters who hold intense or extreme policy preferences are willing to tolerate undemocratic behavior by their favored candidate. To see the intuition behind these predictions, assume only a single policy issue. Then i votes for candidate 1 as long as xik ≥ x1k + x2k δ(M1 − M2 ) + 2 2αk (x1k − x2k ) for x1k > x2k , (2) where we are assuming that candidate 1’s policy platform is to the right of candidate 2’s platform. Call the voter whose ideal policy xik barely satisfies the inequality in (2) the swing voter xjs. Note that the first term on the right-hand side of this inequality is the midpoint between the two candidates’ policy platforms – it separates the electorate into those who are policywise closer to candidate 1 and those who are closer to candidate 2. The swing voter xjs is in turn located either to the right or the left of this midpoint, depending on whether it is candidate 1 or candidate 2 who adopts an undemocratic platform, x1s , x2s = x1k + x2k δ ± . 2 2αk (x1k − x2k ) (3) When candidate 1 adopts an undemocratic platform (M1 = 1, M2 = 0), the swing voter 8 In turn, M is equivalent to negative valence in models of electoral competition with valence; see e.g. Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita (2009). x1s is located to the right of the midpoint x1k +x2k . Voters to the right of the midpoint 2 between the two candidate’s platforms but to the left of x1s favor candidate 1 based on their policy preferences, yet are sufficiently put off by his undemocratic position to vote for candidate 2 instead. By contrast, voters whose policy preferences are extreme (large xik ) or intense (a large αk ) enough to be to the right of xs1 are willing to tolerate candidate 1’s undemocratic position as their concern for democracy is outweighed by their proximity to his policies. The converse holds when candidate 2 adopts an undemocratic platform. The segment between the two swing voters is related to another set of empirical predictions. It delineates the set of voters who vote for the more democratic of the two candidates regardless their policy proximity. We may therefore refer to this portion of the electorate as “democracy first” voters, as opposed to “policy first” voters. How large that portion is depends on both the length of this segment and the fraction of voters located on it. Its length δ is increasing in the support for democracy δ; it is decreasing in the αk (x1k −x2k ) policy weight αk and the distance between the candidates’ platforms (x1k − x2k ). Meanwhile, the fraction of voters located within this segment is determined by the distribution of voters’ ideal policies: the more polarized (U-shaped) the distribution is, the smaller the fraction of democracy first voters. The consequences of voter polarization are amplified when voters’ preferences over the K policy issues are correlated: when a voter’s extreme position on one issue correlates with her extreme position on another, her preference for the more proximate candidate will be compounding across the two issues rather than cancelling out. The primary purpose of this framework is to guide the design of our candidate-choice experiment and the analysis of our data. This has shaped our theoretical analysis in two ways. First, we have intentionally treated the candidates’ policy platforms and democracy positions as exogenous – these will be randomly assigned in the candidate-choice 1.0 0.5 Fraction defecting from D− candidate Fraction voting for candidate 1 0.4 0.5 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0 −1 x2S x2 x1 + x2 x1 1 x1S 2 0.0 1 x2S x2 x1 + x2 Δmaxx1 x1S 1 2 Voter ideal policies xi Difference in policy proximity ratings (in favor of candidate 1) Figure 1: The fraction voting for candidate 1 (left) and the decline in the less democratic candidate’s vote share (right) experiment that we present and analyze in sections 3-4. Second, in order to explicitly characterize the model’s implications for our analysis of the candidate-choice experiment, we introduce a stochastic structure into the deterministic formulation of the voters’ payoff in (1) and briefly discuss its consequences. We follow the classic random utility models of discrete choice and add to voter i’s payoff from candidate j an error term ij , ui (Xj , Mj ) = − X αk (xik − xjk )2 − δMj + ij . (4) K While only one of several plausible stochastic structures, assuming that the error terms ij are (independently) drawn from the standard Gumbel distribution implies that the effect of candidate positions on voter i’s probability of voting for a candidate can be estimated using the logistic regression.9 We take advantage of this correspondence between our theoretical framework and the random utility model of discrete choice in section 4, where we estimate the model’s key parameters, including civic virtue δ and policy weights αk . 9 See Cameron and Trivedi (2005, 476-478, 486-487). The standard Gumbel distribution is also known as the generalized extreme value type-1 distribution. Here we highlight the aggregate empirical patterns implied by this stochastic formulation. First, in contrast to the deterministic case, the two swing voters no longer sharply separate “democracy first” from “policy first” voters. Rather, the segment between the two swing voters now delineates voters who, regardless of their policy proximity to the candidates, vote for the more democratic candidate with a probability greater than one-half. The left panel in Figure 1 illustrates this by plotting a voter’s probability of voting for candidate 1 as a function of voter ideal policies xik over a single issue k. An alternative interpretation of the vertical axis that we employ throughout is that it corresponds to the fraction of voters in subgroups along the horizontal axis that support candidate 1. The black solid line plots the case when both candidates adopt a democratic position; the red dashed line plots the case when candidate 1 adopts an undemocratic position. The plot is based on parameter values αk = 8, δ = 2, x1k = 1/5, x2k = −1/5 and implies x1s = −x2s = 5/16. When analyzing the candidate-choice experiment in sections 3-4, it will often be more practical to use as the horizontal axis the difference in voters’ policy proximity to the two candidates. In that case, the intersection of the red dashed curve with the .5 horizontal line will, instead of the swing voter x1s , mark the quantity δ , αk which we interpret in section 4 as voters’ value for democracy in terms of issue k. The right panel in Figure 1 plots the decline in candidate 1’s vote share when he adopts an undemocratic position. It shows that while voters with centrist policy preferences will in general defect from undemocratic candidates at higher rates than extremists, the maximum defection rate (marked by ∆max ) will be located to the right of the midpoint x1k +x2k 2 but to the left of the swing voter x1s .10 Intuitively, it is voters who would otherwise narrowly break δ 2k + 4αk (x1k Given our stochastic structure, ∆max has a closed form solution ∆max = x1k +x 2 −x2k ) . This δ corresponds to the value 2α when the horizontal axis refers to the difference in voters’ policy proximity to the two candidates. 10 in favor of candidate 1 that abandon him at the highest rates once he adopts an undemocratic position. A key quantity that we estimate throughout the paper is the overall fraction of voters who defect from a candidate that adopts an undemocratic position, which we denote by ∆. ∆ is a combination of two factors: the defection rates portrayed in the right panel in Figure 1 and the empirical distribution of voters.11 For instance, a simulation that uses the symmetrical Beta(γ, γ) density to vary the distribution of voters’ ideal policies from one with a mass of centrists (γ = 5) to a U-shaped one (γ = 15 ) yields a decline in ∆ from .28 to .06. In effect, ∆ measures the public’s resilience to undemocratic candidates. To recapitulate, this theoretical framework yields five predictions about the relationship between a number of distinct conceptions of polarization and a decline (denoted by ∆ ↓ below) in the electorate’s resilience to undemocratic candidates: 1. Centrists are a pro-democratic force: ∆ ↓ for voters who hold more extreme policy preferences (large |xik |); 2. Moderation is good for democracy: ∆ ↓ for voters who hold more intense policy preferences (a large αk ); 3. Voter polarization is bad for democracy: ∆ ↓ as the distribution of voters’ ideal policies becomes more U-shaped (polarized) as opposed to inverse-U shaped (centrist); 4. Candidate polarization is bad for democracy: ∆ ↓ as the distance between candidate platforms increases (large |x1k − x2k |); 5. Cross-cutting cleavages are good for democracy: ∆ ↓ when voter preference over distinct issue areas correlate.  R∞  1 That is, ∆ = −∞ 1+e1−D − 1+e−D−δM dF (xi ), where F (xi ) is the empirical distribution of voters and 1 P P 2 2 D = K αk (xik − x2k ) − K αk (xik − x1k ) . 11