Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T07:15:10.881Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Majoritarian Threat to Liberal Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2021

Guy Grossman Open the ORCID record for Guy Grossman [Opens in a new window] ,
Dorothy Kronick ,
Matthew Levendusky  and
Marc Meredith
Guy Grossman*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Twitters: @guygrossman; @dkronick; @m_levendusky; @mieuque
Dorothy Kronick
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Twitters: @guygrossman; @dkronick; @m_levendusky; @mieuque
Matthew Levendusky
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Twitters: @guygrossman; @dkronick; @m_levendusky; @mieuque
Marc Meredith
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Twitters: @guygrossman; @dkronick; @m_levendusky; @mieuque
*
*Corresponding author. Email: ggros@upenn.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Incumbents often seek to wield power in ways that are formally legal but informally proscribed. Why do voters endorse these power grabs? Prior literature focuses on polarization. We propose instead that many voters are majoritarian, in that they view popularly elected leaders’ actions as inherently democratic – even when those actions undermine liberal democracy. We find support for this claim in two original survey experiments, arguing that majoritarians’ desire to give wide latitude to elected officials is an important but understudied threat to liberal democracy in the United States.

Keywords

Democratic erosionpopulismpolarizationdemocratic backsliding
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 36 - 45
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The authors thank the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics for generous financial support of this project, as well as Dan Hopkins, Brendan Nyhan, Emily Thorson, the editors, and the anonymous referees for very helpful comments. The authors declare no conflict of interest related to this project. The University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board approved this research (Protocol #826580). All data and code needed to replicate these analyses are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse in the Harvard Dataverse Network at: doi:10.7910/DVN/X4ECFT.

References

Acemoglu, Daron, Robinson, James and Torvik, Ragnar. 2013. Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances? Review of Economic Studies 80(3): 845–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Almond, Gabriel Abraham and Verba, Sidney. 1963. The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Astor, Maggie. 2018. Wisconsin, Limiting Governor, Borrows a Page from North Carolina’s Playbook. New York Times 5 December.Google Scholar
Bentley, Frank R., Daskalova, Nediyana and White, Brooke. 2017. Comparing the Reliability of Amazon Mechanical Turk and Survey Monkey to Traditional Market Research Surveys. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI EA ’17 New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 1092–1099.Google Scholar
Berinsky, Adam, Margolis, Michele and Sances, Michael. 2014. Separating the Shirkers from the Workers? American Journal of Political Science 58(3): 739–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bermeo, Nancy. 2016. On Democratic Backsliding. Journal of Democracy 27(1): 5–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carey, John, Helmke, Gretchen, Nyhan, Brendan, Sanders, Mitchell and Stokes, Susan. 2019. Searching for Bright Lines in the Trump Presidency. Perspectives on Politics 17(3): 699–718.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chafetz, Josh. 2017. Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Chappell, Carmin. 2018. Republicans in Wisconsin, Michigan Move to Limit the Power of Incoming Democrats. CNBC. Retrieved from https://cnb.cx/2yTNptV.Google Scholar
Dahl, Robert. 1961. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Dunning, Thad, Grossman, Guy, Humphreys, Macartan, Hyde, Susan D., McIntosh, Craig and Nellis, Gareth. 2019. Information, Accountability, and Cumulative Learning: Lessons from Metaketa I. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fearon, James D. 2011. Self-Enforcing Democracy. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 126(4): 1661–708.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foa, Roberto Stefan and Mounk, Yascha. 2016. The Democratic Disconnect. Journal of Democracy 27(3): 5–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, James. 2008. Intolerance and Political Repression in the United States: A Half-Century after McCarthyism. American Journal of Political Science 52(1): 96–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, Matthew and Svolik, Milan. 2020. Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization, and the Robustness of Support for Democracy in the United States. American Political Science Review 114(2): 392–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grillo, Edoardo and Carlo, Prato. 2020. Reference Points and Democratic Backsliding. Retrieved from SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3475705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grossman, Guy, Kronick, Dorothy, Levendusky, Matthew and Meredith, Marc. 2020. Replication Data for: The Majoritarian Threat to Liberal Democracy. Harvard Dataverse V4. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/X4ECFT.Google Scholar
Hibbing, John and Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth. 2002. Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs about How Government Should Work. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howell, William and Moe, Terry. 2016. Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government–and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Kaufman, Robert and Haggard, Stephan. 2017. Democratic Decline in the United States: What Can We Learn from Middle-Income Backsliding? Perspectives on Politics 17(2): 417–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levitsky, Steven and Ziblatt, Daniel. 2018. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown.Google Scholar
Levy, Marin K. 2019. Packing and Unpacking State Courts. William & Mary Law Review 61(4): 1121–58.Google Scholar
Luo, Zhaotian and Przeworski, Adam. 2019. Democracy and Its Vulnerabilities: Dynamics of Democratic Backsliding. Working Paper. Retrieved from https://ssrn.com/abstract=3469373.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, George E., Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth, Sullivan, John L. and Wood, Sandra L.. 1995. With Malice toward Some: How People Make Civil Liberties Judgments. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClosky, Herbert. 1964. Consensus and Ideology in American Politics. American Political Science Review 58(2): 361–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCullum, April. 2017. VT Supreme Court Weighs Shumlin’s Authority. Burlington Free Press 3 January. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2IeTLIZ.Google Scholar
Millhiser, Ian. 2020. Georgia Republicans Cancel Election for State Supreme Court, So Governor Can Appoint a Republican. Vox. 19 May.Google Scholar
Mounk, Yascha. 2018. The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is In Danger and How to Save It. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nalepa, Monika, Vanberg, Georg and Chiopris, Caterina. 2018. Authoritarian Backsliding. Working Paper: University of Chicago and Duke University.Google Scholar
Svolik, Milan. 2020. When Polarization Trumps Civic Virtue: Partisan Conflict and the Subversion of Democracy by Incumbents. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 15(1): 3–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tushnet, Mark. 2004. Constitutional Hardball. John Marshall Law Review 37(2): 523–53.Google Scholar
Varol, Ozan O. 2014. Stealth Authoritarianism. Iowa Law Review 100(4): 1673–742.Google Scholar
Weingast, Barry. 1997. The Political Foundations of Democracy and the Rule of Law. American Political Science Review 91(2): 245–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wines, Michael. 2017. Rebuked Twice by Supreme Court, North Carolina Republicans Are Unabashed. New York Times May 27.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Grossman et al. supplementary material

Grossman et al. supplementary material

Download Grossman et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 261.3 KB
Supplementary material: Link

Grossman et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/X4ECFT
Link