The Strongman Gap

Yascha Mounk referenced Lee Drutman's latest Voter Study Group research in a Slate article about Americans' opinions on strongmen leaders.

Written by Lee Drutman, Larry Diamond, and Joe Goldman, it tries to answer a question first raised in work by Roberto Foa and me: Are citizens now so angry at the failings of their political institutions that they are growing increasingly disenchanted with democracy itself? Is this problem especially pronounced among the young? And what implications does that have for the future stability of our political system? (I present a lot of this work in my new book, The People vs. Democracy.)

Building on a new representative survey, the authors find both some moderately good and thoroughly bad news.

The good news is that Donald Trump seems to be healing some Americans of their long-standing desire for a strongman. As we showed in our original article, the share of respondents who wish for a “strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections” has been rising for the better parts of two decades. And while this increase was marked among all age groups, it was especially prevalent among the young. That trend has now broken. Perhaps in response to the authoritarian leanings of the president, the number of Americans who wish for a strongman leader has now receded back to the levels recorded in 1995. And this fall was especially marked among younger voters, who are also likely to hold the most negative views of Donald Trump.

Unfortunately, there are also two important pieces of bad news.

The first of these is that Americans’ attitudes about democracy are rapidly polarizing along partisan lines. Whereas liberals and conservatives held anti-democratic views at roughly equal levels in previous surveys, self-described conservatives are now much more likely to favor a strongman leader than their more liberal peers.

The report by Diamond, Drutman, and Goldman also suggests that the rise of Donald Trump is one of the big reasons for that. Thirty-two percent of Americans who supported Trump in the primaries favor a strongman leader, for example; among those who voted for Hilary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz, less than 20 percent did.
Interestingly, the preference for a strong leader was especially pronounced among voters who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 but switched their allegiance to Donald Trump in 2016. Clearly, the appeal for a strongman was a significant part of the reason why Trump was able to clinch the presidency.

The second piece of bad news is that young people are continuing to grow frustrated with the current system at alarming rates. Indeed, though they are less tempted by a strongman leader than their elders, they are also far more likely to say that democracy may not be preferable to other political systems. While only 15 percent of Americans over the age of 65 held this view, for example, about twice as many people below the age of 30 were open to non-democratic alternatives. (One caveat: Because of survey methodology, data for people below the age of 23 was not available.)