Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

Who among us are the most willing to jettison democratic elections? Which voters not only detest their political adversaries, but long for their destruction?

These questions are now at the heart of political science.

Five scholars have capitalized on new measurement techniques to identify “partisan sectarian” voters, a category that “does indeed predict anti-democratic tendencies.”

In their recent paper, “Partisan Antipathy and the Erosion of Democratic Norms,” Eli Finkel and Jamie Druckman of Northwestern, Alexander Landry of Stanford, Jay Van Bavel of N.Y.U. and Rick H. Hoyle of Duke make the case that earlier studies of partisan hostility used ratings of the two parties on a scale of 0 (cold) to 100 (very warm), but that that measure failed to show a linkage between such hostility and anti-democratic views.

In fact, the five scholars write, “Partisan antipathy is indeed to blame, but the guilty party is political sectarianism,” not the thermometer rating system:

Insofar as people experience othering, aversion, and moralization toward opposing partisans, they are more likely to support using undemocratic tactics to pass partisan policies: gerrymandering congressional districts, reducing the number of polling stations in locations that support the opposing party, ignoring unfavorable court rulings by opposition-appointed judges, failing to accept the results of elections that one loses, and using violence and intimidation toward opposing partisans.

Who, then, falls into this subset of partisan sectarians?

The authors cite a set of nine polling questions that ask voters to assess their feelings toward members of the opposition on a scale of 1 to 6, with six the most hostile.

The first set of questions measures what the authors call “othering.” The most extreme answers are

“I felt as if they and I are on separate planets”

“I am as different from them as can be” and

“It’s impossible for me to see the world the way they do.”

The second set of questions measures “aversion”:

“My feelings toward them are overwhelmingly negative”

“I have a fierce hatred for them” and

“They have every negative trait in the book.”

The third set of questions measures “moralization”:

“They are completely immoral”

“They are completely evil in every way” and

“They lack any shred of integrity.”

How, then, to identify voters high in anti-democratic views? Prototypical questions here are: “Democratic/Republican governors should ignore unfavorable court rulings by Republican/Democratic-appointed judges” and “Democrats/Republicans should not accept election results if they lose.”

The Finkel et al. analysis linking partisan sectarianism to anti-democratic views received strong support, but not a wholesale endorsement, from Nicholas Campos and Christopher Federico, political scientists at the University of Minnesota, who modified the Finkel approach.

“Following Finkel et al.,” Campos and Federico write in their recent paper, “A New Measure of Affective Polarization,” partisan hostility consists of “more than an undifferentiated tendency to feel more negatively about out-partisans than in-partisans, and we believe that the broad concepts of othering, aversion and moralization provide a good starting point for identifying the multiple components.”

In an email elaborating on arguments in their paper, Federico wrote that while he and Campos used the same “othering,” “aversion” and “moralization” model, they changed the focus, most especially in the case of moralization:

Finkel et al. conceptualize moralization as seeing the out-party as evil or morally corrupt. Instead, we focus on the belief that one’s own partisan identity is rooted in fundamental moral values, beliefs about right and wrong, and so on. Research on “moral conviction” in psychology strongly suggests that intolerance and inflexibility toward those who disagree (and a willingness to reject democratic outcomes that differ from one’s own preferences) is rooted in a tendency to moralize one’s preferences.

In his email, Federico argued that the third dimension of partisan animosity, “aversion — a tendency to dislike and want to distance the out-party from the in-party — is the strongest predictor of anti-democratic attitudes and support for violence.”

Do partisan sectarians demonstrate unique demographic........

© The New York Times