Partisanship and protest legitimacy perceptions

Despite the many studies of the central role of partisanship and polarization in especially US society (Campbell et al. 1960; Greene et al. 2002; Iyengar et al. 2012; Huddy et al. 2015; Iyengar et al. 2019), we still know relatively little about its actual political and especially democratic effects (Iyengar et al. 2019). This is surprising because partisanship and polarization are often held up as one of the biggest threats to liberal democracies in general (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018; McCoy et al. 2018) and US democracy in particular (Abramowitz & McCoy 2019). The fear is ultimately that politics in the context of increasing partisanship and polarization may devolve into a Schmittian struggle between friends and illegitimate enemies that cannot be accepted but must be defeated (McCoy et al. 2018; Schmitt 2005). In this article, we ask how partisanship affects the legitimacy of the key democratic practice of contention, understood roughly as extra-institutional collective political struggle (cf. McAdam et al. 2001). The legitimacy of some forms of contention, such as protest politics, is an ineliminable feature of democratic stability and deepening (Markoff 2019). We provide the first empirical study of how partisanship affects the legitimacy of contention. We do so by leveraging original 4-wave panel data gathered during both the anti-lockdown protests and the Black Lives Matter contention as well as two preregistered survey experiments (one representative of the U.S. population) conducted in the run up to the 2020 Presidential election. Our main hypothesis is that participants evaluate protest tactics as more legitimate when currently carried out by members of the ingroup than when currently carried out by members of the outgroup. Furthermore, we hypothesize that the discrepancy between ingroup and outgroup evaluations of legitimacy is positively correlated with the degree to which an act is interpersonally hostile. We therefore expect larger differences for transgressive and particularly aggressive tactics, such as looting, than for conventional tactics, such as marching in the streets. The paper aims to contribute to the social movement and partisanship literatures in developing and testing a micro-level mechanism that links partisanship to the erosion of democratic norms by infusing political science literature with insights from political sociological studies of the public’s interpretation of contention.