Who Is Antidemocratic?
New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall summarized a slew of recent research on antidemocratic attitudes. Some of what he found may surprise you.
Here are a few bullet points:
People who hate people of the opposite party and believe they are immoral or evil are more likely to abandon democratic norms.
Partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes are unrelated to age, income, education, race, or ethnicity.
One study found that Democrats are slightly more likely than Republicans to hold antidemocratic views. But another study conducted in the weeks leading up to the 2020 elections found more antidemocratic views among Republicans, with cultural conservatism being the driving factor.
In addition to antidemocratic views, people who hate members of the opposite party are less likely to hold leaders of their own party accountable when they break the law or do something unethical. This is especially true for Republicans.
Culturally conservative Democrats and economically liberal Republicans are more antidemocratic.
A combination of high levels of political involvement and low levels of political knowledge were strongly associated with antidemocratic behavior.
Those with high levels of partisan animosity are more likely to hold extreme political views, but only slightly, which means a lot of them have moderate views on policy.
The internet contributes to this problem in many ways that researchers are only beginning to understand.
Social media distorts our views of reality because extreme, more rare, views, get more traffic than moderate, more common, views.
Key quote from psychologist Jay Van Bavel: “Our sense of morality is designed to navigate and regulate social life in small communities, and this simply doesn’t scale very easily to the large, synthetic world of social media.”
Read the whole thing. Here is a gift link.
Our Next Conference!
FOURTH OF JULY SPECIAL: Use code “July4” for half-off!
You can buy tickets now or sign up here to get on your email list for updates.
What Else We’re Reading
RNS: “How Christian nationalism is going under the radar in this election”
Some far-right Christian lawmakers have proposed that nonreligious Americans are not fit to govern because, without Christ, they are “evil.” Is it possible, given their relative lack of concern about such statements, that nonreligious Americans don’t know what Christian nationalism is?
Amanda Ripley: “The Protest Trap: We all need to do something useful with fear, rage and grief. The question is, what? Three lessons from the research.”
Just after 11 o’clock in the morning on Oct. 14, 2022, at the National Gallery in London, two protesters from the climate activist group Just Stop Oil slipped under the velvet ropes protecting Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting and threw two cans of orange Heinz tomato soup on the artwork, which was protected by glass.
It was one of three dozen protests at art museums worldwide that year. The goal was to attract media attention, and it worked, in a way, sparking over a thousand stories all over the globe, from South Africa to China to Australia.
“We are not trying to make friends. We are trying to make change,” a spokesperson told The Guardian afterward. “And unfortunately, this is the way that change happens.”
But wait, is this the way change happens? It’s a logical theory: Drive attention to a serious problem in hopes that it will galvanize public support, which will put pressure on decision makers to make positive change.
But does it work? Or more to the point, when does it work?
Study: “Endorsing both sides, pleasing neither: Ambivalent individuals face unexpected social costs in political conflicts”
Abstract:
Reducing political polarization requires finding common ground among people with diverse opinions. The current research shows that people generally expect that expressing ambivalence about political issues—endorsing some considerations on both sides, for instance—can help them establish positive relations with others holding a wide variety of political views. However, across several policy topics—COVID-19 mask mandates, immigration, and the death penalty—we found that targets expressing a given position with more (vs. less) ambivalence were not liked more, whether perceivers agreed or disagreed with their overall position. In fact, when perceivers agreed with targets' overall positions, they judged those with more (vs. less) ambivalent attitudes as less likeable, warm, and competent. Although views of ambivalent targets varied across perceivers, the negative effect when targets and perceivers shared overall positions was larger and more consistent than any positive effects among opposing perceivers. This exposes a mismatch between expectation and social reality: Whereas expressing ambivalence might make intuitive sense toward bridging political divides, we found it was ironically more likely to reduce liking among allies while maintaining disliking among adversaries. These findings speak to the interpersonal dynamics of political polarization, highlighting a potential social disincentive against publicly taking nuanced positions on political issues.
Link.
Matthew Yglesias: “Elite misinformation is an underrated problem: Important institutions are too eager to mislead people”
People have a lot of erroneous beliefs about the policy status quo in the United States, and that seems to matter. These beliefs are normally not formed via exposure to some kind of social media misinformation; they’re just about things that aren’t in the news very much and that people misunderstand. Which is to say that “people having information that is not correct” is absolutely a huge deal in politics… it’s just not necessarily “misinformation” in the sense that the misinformation police intend. In Dylan Matthews’ profile of the State Department’s small but very successful intelligence bureau, for example, one thing that comes through is that the bulk of American intelligence agencies genuinely believed that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons program. This erroneous information had a huge impact on the media, on the mass public understanding of political debates 2002-2003, in decision-making in Washington, and on the broad trajectory of American politics.
And I think erroneous ideas that are perpetrated by mainstream institutions — what I’m going to call “elite misinformation” — are a really big deal in an underrated way.
I don’t want to rehash this in detail, because it’s been well covered recently, but a good example of this sort of misinformation is the narrative about a huge rise in maternal mortality in the United States. Because as a growing chorus of critics has been pointing out, this increase was largely the mechanical result of a change in counting methods, not in the public health situation. That’s bad, but what’s really shocking, as I learned from Jerusalem Demsas, is that key actors are totally unapologetic about sowing confusion: