Lee Drutman
Senior Fellow, Political Reform Program
This paper was jointly published with the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group.
While support for democracy generally remains strong in the United States, we find that not all of these conditions for democratic stability are met. The results we report here are distinctive in several respects. The VOTER Survey (Views of the Electorate Research Survey) methodology of repeatedly interviewing the same respondents year after year enables us to assess what few other surveys of democratic commitment are able to do: the consistency of people’s support for democracy over time. The findings we report from the last three years should sound alarm bells to at least a modest decibel.
In our panel survey, fewer than 10 percent of Americans consistently express support for authoritarian alternatives to democracy across three surveys (in 2017, 2018, and 2019). However, one-third (33 percent) of Americans have at some point in the last three years said that they think having “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections” would be a good system of government. And about a quarter (24 percent) have said at some point that “army rule” would be a good system. Put another way, while fewer than one in 10 Americans consistently supports an authoritarian option, a third of Americans “dabble” in authoritarianism.
The December 2019 VOTER Survey goes further than we have gone in the past, and deeper than most surveys of American public opinion have ever gone, to probe the circumstances in which Americans might support an authoritarian leader’s rejection of checks on their authority. None of the scenarios we present for the president acting unilaterally without constitutional authority elicit opposition from a majority of our sample.
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