Our Democratic Dilemma: How Partisanship Shapes Americans’ View of Democracy

Depending on who you ask, the January 6th events at the U.S. Capitol were either a dangerous insurrection that threatened to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power or a patriotic protest trying to save democracy. Ask Democrats, and about 85 percent of them describe what happened that day as an insurrection. Ask Republicans, and only 23 percent agree with that sentiment. Almost half of Republicans also describe the January 6th events as an act of patriotism, but only one in 10 Democrats share that view.

Americans are similarly divided in how they view other major political events. The trial of Donald Trump is seen either as a grave miscarriage of justice, or the rule of law in action. Impeaching a cabinet member is seen as a breach of constitutional norms, or an exercise in accountability. These days, it seems like it’s impossible to find any agreement on what’s democratic and what is not. In the biggest election year in history, that poses a big danger for democracy and a huge challenge for how to defend it.

Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, survey after survey has raised the alarm about an increased prevalence of authoritarian views among the American public. But the problem is not so much that Americans are becoming authoritarian, but rather that our shared understanding of democracy has shifted in partisan ways, making Americans—including our politicians—increasingly more comfortable in expressing and justifying non-democratic views.

Democracy is held together by a collective agreement that democratic institutions are the only game in town and assumes everyone is adhering to that agreement. Yet more and more it feels like we are playing different games, games in which the only acceptable outcome is for our team to win. In the United States, affective polarization—the intense dislike of members of the other party—and the radicalization of the Republican party have pushed partisans into different game boards altogether. The result is a lot of democratic hypocrisy. This is bad news for those who were hoping public opinion would be a bulwark against rising authoritarianism. As long as our party is winning, we are willing to disregard democratic norms—and the more these norms are undermined, the more authoritarian views that were once restrained by social pressures are freer to emerge.

In a recent report, Lee Drutman, Joe Goldman, and I document various cases of democratic hypocrisy and found that support for democratic norms softens when it conflicts with partisanship. A majority of Biden and Trump supporters who claim to reject the idea of a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress and elections” believe their preferred U.S. president would be justified to take unilateral action without constitutional authority in certain scenarios. The inconsistency is alarming, especially among Republicans: While 92 percent of Republicans supported congressional oversight during the Biden administration in 2022, for example, only 65 percent supported that same oversight during the Trump administration in 2019. Similarly, prior to the 2020 election, 91 percent of Republicans thought it was important for the loser to publicly acknowledge the winner as the legitimate president, a core electoral norm. But once the election was called for Biden, only 31 percent of the same Republican respondents shared that sentiment.

“Democracy is held together by a collective agreement that democratic institutions are the only game in town… yet more and more it feels like we are playing different games.”

Democratic hypocrisy makes it less likely that the public will punish politicians who engage in anti-democratic behavior, especially if they belong to the same party. In a series of experiments, political scientists Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik found that only about 13 percent of participants were willing to punish their preferred party’s candidate for engaging in anti-democratic behavior if it meant voting for the other party. Their research leads them to the depressing conclusion that “we should not be surprised by the public’s failure to stop aspiring autocrats in new democracies.”

The democratic consensus has been shattered. What is democratic for some is authoritarian for others, which in turn further justifies non-democratic behavior. To be sure, the shattering of the democratic consensus is mostly attributable to the Republican Party’s radicalization under Trump, so any fix to this problem has to get Republicans back into the democratic fold while simultaneously reinforcing democratic norms among everyone else.

In the short term, strengthening democratic norms may require more public sanctioning of anti-democratic behavior to sideline authoritarian views and make them unappealing. Holding such views must not be the source of any social status. Social protests in favor of democracy and against authoritarian views or politicians can achieve this. Large, peaceful protests send a signal about what people value and what society considers acceptable. This can restore the compelling power of democratic norms and help curb the spread of anti-democratic views. We can look across the pond for lessons and inspiration: In Italy and France, mass protests against far-right candidates led to a drop in votes for the far-right.

Looking ahead, we need proportional representation for the electoral system to make losing elections less painful for candidates and their parties—with electoral results that better reflect the diverse perspectives and values of the electorate. If democracy is a system where parties are willing to lose elections because they know they have a chance of winning in the next election, then a proportional system in which coming in second place does not shut a party out of power may be better suited at keeping everyone playing the democratic game. Proportional representation would also help neutralize the authoritarian threat that haunts the country by exposing the limited popularity of authoritarianism in the U.S. The authoritarian faction looms large because its vote shares and influence are exaggerated by the winner-take-all system and other political institutions, like the electoral college and the malapportioned senate. A proportional system would turn the authoritarian faction into a fringe party that has to negotiate with all the other parties, instead of allowing it to hijack the Republican Party as the current system does.

Reforming the American electoral system is an ambitious undertaking, but having partisanship filter how we understand democracy is not sustainable. We must find ways to bring everyone back into one common democratic consensus.

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