Affective polarization and willingness to accept democratic transgressions

According to a recent study, most Americans “are partisans first and democrats only second” (Graham & Svolik, 2020, p. 392). This raises two questions. First, is this a uniquely American phenomenon and, second, why are partisans apparently willing to overlook or even condone undemocratic behavior? Finding answers to these questions is critically important, given the concerns that are being voiced about the death of democracy by degree, even in long-established democracies (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). In sum, we must understand how citizens are likely to react to the erosion of democratic norms and how their partisanship shapes their reactions. In this paper we consider how affective polarization shapes the acceptance of democratic transgressions. Affective polarization happens when partisans of opposing political parties “increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents” (Iyengar et al., 2012, p. 405). The phenomenon has been amply documented in the United States (Iyengar and Westwood 2015; Iyengar et al., 2019; McCoy & Somer, 2019). However, affective polarization is not confined to the United States (Reiljan, 2020, p. 387; Gidron et al., 2019). What is missing in this literature is a systematic study of the consequences of affective polarization. In particular, there is no comparative work on the relationship between affective polarization and acceptance of democratic backsliding. Our paper asks: Does affective polarization shape the acceptance of democratic transgressions? When partisans experience such feelings of antipathy toward an opposing party, they may come to see democratic institutions as vehicles for advancing partisan interests and may be willing to see the rules stretched to advantage their party. If a desire for partisan advantage motivates support for democratic backsliding, we would expect followers of the party that controls the executive to be readiest to support the enhancement of executive powers at the expense of checks and balances in order to consolidate their party’s hold on power. This tendency should be especially evident for strong partisans of the incumbent party. Moreover, we would expect those who score highest on affective polarization to be the most accepting of democratic backsliding. Finally, at the aggregate level, we expect to find the least resistance to democratic erosion when overall affective polarization is high in a given political system. In this paper, we utilize a new measure of affective polarization developed for a multi-party context to understand how it affects partisans’ readiness to sacrifice democratic principles. Furthermore, building on our earlier work on the relationship between affective polarization and support for democratic backsliding in the USA and Canada (Gidengil, Stolle & Bergeron-Boutin 2022), we develop a battery of questions that are appropriate to a comparative context to understand how polarization and acceptance of democratic transgressions are related in 15 Western and Eastern European countries as well as the USA and Canada. Beyond the 17-country observational study, we also integrate a new experimental design (in one of our cases) that manipulates affective polarization to understand the effect on willingness to accept democratic backsliding.