Recommendations for Future Work

While comparative research is vital to establishing counterfactuals, the U.S. is often difficult to compare to other nations. Even among countries with similarly extreme majoritarian systems, few have as strict a two-party system. A change from one electoral system to another in this context is unpredictable and would likely need ample time to fully establish its effects.

Especially of interest would be the effects—if any—of a change in the voting system at a smaller scale. While first-past-the-post elections are still overwhelmingly the norm, certain local jurisdictions or states have begun to experiment with alternative methods, most commonly ranked-choice voting. As these cases become more common or further reaching in their reforms, future research should focus on whether more parties gain representation, how candidates’ rhetoric changes, whether misinformation is less prevalent, and how the average partisan in these areas feels about their opponents. Particularly important will be whether voters perceive these new systems as fairer or their opponents as threats. Given the nationalization of local politics in the U.S., even large changes at the local level may have little effect due to the overwhelming influence of our background national political culture, but even if this is the case, establishing this result firmly would be beneficial to the larger conversation.

Future work should also seek to establish a new baseline for comparison. While it is obvious concerns about electoral fraud and security are widespread, it is not yet clear how durable these perceptions are. Additionally, it is not yet clear to what extent the average American has an opinion on the procedural fairness of the election system beyond the performance of their preferred candidates. Future work should seek not just to investigate the recent misinformation surrounding this issue but establish how important perceptions in this area are generally to Americans.

Currently, a great deal of the research on this topic relies on wide-ranging but unspecific data such as the CSES or the ANES. Such data is useful up to a point and has wide coverage but can be vague for establishing more specific conclusions about feelings towards the government. The questions asked by these surveys often make it difficult to differentiate what respondents are giving their opinion about. For instance, Linde and Ekman found that a question which, on its face, measures support for democratic principles, actually corresponds more to the performance of a specific government.¹

This lack of specificity is particularly an issue in measures of affective polarization. The most used measurement, the difference in in-versus-out-party affection, inherently represents a great deal of information. As such it is hard to differentiate the effects of differing numbers of parties on affective polarization, as this measure will represent something far different in a two-party system as opposed to a multiparty environment where one's feelings towards other parties might vary wildly. Additionally, research should answer what causes these differences. In a multiparty system out-party hostility may be lower on average because many of the opposition parties might be ideologically like one's own. However, it may also be due to a partisan feeling less threatened by other parties even if they dislike them because the chance of any one of them winning sole power is very low. Disentangling these effects is key to understanding the real effects of reform.

This report does not focus on the actual sources of misinformation, however there is a great deal of work to be done on this subject, especially around manufactured misinformation. Research should aim to answer whether manufactured disinformation is targeted more towards majoritarian systems over consensus-based ones. Due to the importance of who wins in a first-past-the-post system, compared to the high likelihood of coalition and harder to game system of a country that uses a proportional system, it seems likely misinformation campaigns would be less useful in a consensus-based democracy. Research should seek to establish whether these assumptions are sustained under investigation as well as whether there is a significant difference in the amount of targeted misinformation pumped into countries with differing election methods.