Divided by Party: The Role of Partisan Identity on Democratic Values

• In Event: Is Party Identification the Only Thing that Matters? Yes and No.

Abstract

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 led to a resurgence in academic attention to democratic support in the United States. This study expands upon the scholarship in two important ways. First, we examine support for democracy by partisanship. Using data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and an original, nationally representative, sample of 1,000 respondents obtained using Lucid Fulcrum Spectrum, we measure cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions of democratic citizenship. We find substantial differences by partisanship across all three dimensions of democratic citizenship. Second, we analyze support for authoritarian characteristics among real and fictional political candidates. Using data from an embedded survey experiment in the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and multiple survey experiments conducted through Lucid, our results indicate that strong leaders who censor the media or contest election results even without evidence may be attractive to Republican voters. Meanwhile, Democratic voters are much more likely to support candidates who refuse to censor the media and are willing to accept election results regardless of outcome. A priming experiment further shows that support for leaders with authoritarian tendencies functions through party identification. The study results are troubling, particularly given the increasing strength of partisan identity among the American electorate. The trends in this study show that a large portion of the American populace, and in particular Republicans, may not fully embrace democratic values and instead may support candidates with certain authoritarian attributes.

Authors

• Hannah June Kim, University of Nebraska, Omaha

• Maneesh Arora, Wellesley College