SPOILER ALERT - One of the limitations of this work that may get in the way of understanding what's going on is that it treats the loss of trust in democracy as symmetric across the political spectrum. And, in some cases, like the willingness to employ gerrymandering, that's accurate. But in others, like support for baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud and willingness to limit voting rights, there's a definite asymmetry. Ignoring this distinction may cause us to miss some effects that are small only because they're concentrated in a subset of the participants.
Interventions that reduce partisan vitriol don’t help democracy
Thinking better of your partisan opponents doesn't mean you want them voting.
It's no secret that the US is suffering from a reduced commitment to one of its foundational principles: democratic representation. Gerrymandering, political violence, and unfounded accusations of election fraud are in the news regularly, and the widespread support for them raises questions about why so much of the population has suddenly turned against democratic ideas.
One of the simplest potential explanations is that it's a product of partisanship grown ugly. Rather than thinking of political opponents as simply wrong, a growing fraction of the US public views their political opposites as a threat that needs to be neutralized. If your opponents represent a danger to society, how could you possibly accept them winning elections?
If that's a major driver, then lowering the partisan temperature should help. And, conveniently, social scientists have developed interventions that do exactly that. But now, a team of researchers has tested that and found that it doesn't work. You can make people more comfortable with their partisan opposites, and they'll still want to suppress their vote—possibly with violence.
Missed connections
The team behind the new work, from a collection of US universities, recognized that there's a bit of a disconnect in a lot of the current literature on partisan polarization. The dominant idea has been that thinking less of your opponents—viewing them as a threat or morally or ethically challenged—is a pre-condition for doing anything to keep them from power. And, for many, that "anything" includes violating democratic ideals by suppressing votes or resorting to violence.
Under this view, getting people to view their opponents in a better light should restore a willingness to allow those opponents full participation in the political process. And we already have techniques that several studies have indicated help tone down the sort of partisan distaste.
While these techniques restore a better view of political opponents, nobody's tested whether they improve people's view of democracy. So they set out to do that.
To determine partisan animosity, they relied on two simple tests. One is the dictator game, where participants chose how much money to share with a fellow player. The other was a "joy of destruction" game, where participants could pay to reduce the holdings of someone else. Committed partisans would be expected to be more likely to reduce the holdings of any players that supported their political opposition. Participants were also simply asked how they felt about political opponents.
Support for democratic principles was measured through several questions. Examples included support for closing polling stations in areas where political opponents lived, support for gerrymandering in cases where it was technically illegal, and finding justification for the use of violence to advance political goals.
As for interventions to change these dynamics, the researchers tested a number. One focused on reminding people of friendships that cross partisan boundaries. Another corrected some of the exaggerated stereotypes about members of the opposite party. And yet another described friendships between major figures in the two parties, like Joe Biden and John McCain.
Nothing happening
As you'd expect from past work, this sort of partisan polarization correlated with things like support for political violence and promotion of anti-democratic efforts. And there was a small but consistent correlation between cold feelings toward partisan opponents and a willingness to punish them in the financial games.
As expected from prior research, the interventions reduced the negative feelings toward political opponents, which had behavioral consequences. In both games, the interventions reduced the tendency of people to punish their partisan opponents by leaving them with less money. So, by all measures tried here, the interventions reduced some of the negative aspects of partisanship.
But not anti-democratic tendencies. All of the measures described above—a willingness to suppress the vote of their opponents, a support for violence—were unchanged, even as feelings toward political opponents improved. In fact, the only intervention that had a statistically significant effect on an outcome measure made matters worse.
(Reminding people of cross-party friendships among politicians actually increased support for politicians who promote anti-democratic ideas.)
Since the work was done with different participant populations and each took part in different measures of polarization, there's a chance for some positive results to occur at random. So the researchers also did a meta-analysis of their own work, combining the data from multiple individual experiments. This turned up absolutely nothing. There is simply no indication in this work that cutting down on bad feelings toward political opponents changes the desire to suppress those opponents, even if it means sacrificing democratic principles.
Well, that's awkward
This raises a couple of awkward questions. One is about the assumed causation of the US's experience with a decline in support for democracy. Many people have traced that decline to some of the arguments circulating within the far right around the time of the 2016 election, which raised apocalyptic ideas about the loss of the US should the Democrats win. But this work suggests lowering the partisan fever doesn't reverse this, raising questions about whether apocalyptic fears were at fault in the first place.
The other big question is that if this doesn't work, what can reverse the US's reduced trust in democracy? The results suggest that it's possible to feel more positively toward political opponents, but still think various undemocratic means, including violence, may be needed to keep them from exercising political power.
One of the limitations of this work that may get in the way of understanding what's going on is that it treats the loss of trust in democracy as symmetric across the political spectrum. And, in some cases, like the willingness to employ gerrymandering, that's accurate. But in others, like support for baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud and willingness to limit voting rights, there's a definite asymmetry. Ignoring this distinction may cause us to miss some effects that are small only because they're concentrated in a subset of the participants.
Nature Human Behavior, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01466-9 (About DOIs).
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