Is partisan hostility so deeply enmeshed in American politics that it cannot be rooted out?
Will Donald Trump institutionalize democratic backsliding — the rejection of adverse election results, the demonization of minorities and the use of the federal government to punish opponents — as a fixture of American politics?
The literature of polarization suggests that partisan antipathy has become deeply entrenched and increasingly resistant to amelioration.
“Human brains are constantly scanning for threats to in-groups,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a September 2023 essay, “Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says.”
“As people affectively polarize, they appear to blow out-group threats out of proportion, exaggerating the out-group’s dislike and disgust for their own group, and getting ready to defend their in-group, sometimes aggressively,” Kleinfeld argues.
Kleinfeld acknowledges that “a number of interventions have been shown in lab settings, games, and short experiments to reduce affective intervention in the short term,” but, she is quick to caution, “reducing affective polarization through these lab experiments and games has not been shown to affect regular Americans’ support for antidemocratic candidates, support for antidemocratic behaviors, voting behavior, or support for political violence.”
Taking her argument a step further, Kleinfeld writes:
Interventions to reduce affective polarization will be ineffective if they operate only at the individual, emotional level. Ignoring the role of polarizing politicians and political incentives to instrumentalize affective polarization for political gain will fail to generate change while enhancing cynicism when polite conversations among willing participants do not generate prodemocratic change.
Yphtach Lelkes, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, succinctly described by email the hurdles facing proposed remedies for polarization and anti-democratic trends:
I don’t think any bottom-up intervention is going to solve a problem that is structural. You could reduce misperceptions for a day or two, or put diverse groups together for an hour, but these people will be polarized again as soon as they are exposed once more to campaign rhetoric.
The reality, Lelkes continued, is that “a fish rots from the head, and political elites are driving any democratic backsliding that is occurring in America. Most Republican voters do not support the anti-democratic policies and practices of their elected officials.”
In their March 2024 paper, “Uncommon and Nonpartisan: Antidemocratic Attitudes in the American Public,” Lelkes, Derek E. Holliday and Shanto Iyengar, both of Stanford, and Sean J. Westwood of Dartmouth found that public opposition to anti-democratic policies is not adequate to prevent their adoption:
The more ominous implications of our results are that 1) public support is not a necessary precondition for backsliding behavior by elites, and 2) Americans, despite their distaste for norm violations, continue to elect representatives whose policies and actions threaten democracy.
One explanation is that when partisanship is strong, voters place party and policy goals over democratic values. Indeed, one of the least supported norm violations — removing polling places in outparty dominated areas — has already been violated by elected officials in Texas, and there are concerns about pending similar laws in other states. Such unconstrained elite behavior suggests that threats to democracy could well manifest themselves in both parties in the future.
The level of public support for democratic institutions will be a crucial factor in the 2024 elections. President Biden is campaigning on the theme that Trump and his MAGA allies are intent on strengthening authoritarian leadership at the expense of democracy.
Political scientists and reform groups seeking to restore collegiality to political debate and elections have experimented with a wide variety of techniques to reduce partisan hostility and support for anti-democratic policies.
These efforts have raised doubts among other election experts, both about their effectiveness and durability. Such experts cite both the virulence of the conflicts over race, ethnicity and values, and the determination of Trump and other politicians to keep divisive issues in the forefront of campaigns.
I have written before about the largest study of techniques to lessen polarization, which was conducted by Jan G. Voelkel and Robb Willer, both sociologists at Stanford, along with many other colleagues. Voelkel and Willer are the primary authors of “Megastudy Identifying Effective interventions to Strengthen Americans’ Democratic Attitudes.” Given the heightened importance of the coming election and the potential effects of polarization on it, their study is worth re-evaluating.
Voelkel, Willer and 83 others
conducted a megastudy (n=32,059) testing 25 interventions designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and anti-democratic attitudes. We find nearly every intervention reduced partisan animosity, most strongly by highlighting sympathetic and relatable individuals with different political beliefs. We also identify several interventions that reduced support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence, most strongly by correcting misperceptions of outpartisans’ views — showing that anti-democratic attitudes, although difficult to move, are not intractable.
Their own data and their responses to my inquires suggest, however, that the optimism of their paper needs to be tempered.
In the case of the “six interventions that significantly reduced partisan animosity,” the authors reported that two weeks later “the average effect size in the durability survey amounted to 29 percent of the average effect size in the main survey.”
I asked Voelkel to explain this further, posing the question: “If the initial reduction in the level of partisan animosity was 10 percentage points, does the 29 percent figure indicate that after two weeks the reduction in partisan animosity was 2.9 percentage points?” Voelkel wrote back to say yes.
In an email responding to some of my follow-up questions about the paper, Voelkel wrote:
I do not want to overstate the success of the interventions that we tested in our study. Our contribution is that we identify psychological strategies for intervening on partisan animosity and anti-democratic attitudes in the context of a survey experiment. We still need to test how big the effects could be in a large-scale campaign in which the psychological mechanisms for reducing partisan animosity and anti-democratic attitudes get triggered not once (as in our study) but ideally many times and over a longer period.
Voelkel cautioned that “one-time interventions might not be enough to sustainably reduce affective polarization in the mass public. Thus, successful efforts would need to be applied widely and repeatedly to trigger the psychological mechanisms that are associated with reductions in affective polarization.”
Willer sent a detailed response by email to my queries:
First, to be clear, we do not claim that the interventions we tested have large enough effects that they would cure the problems they target. We do not find evidence for that. Far from it.
I would characterize the results of the Strengthening Democracy Challenge in a more measured way. We find that many of the interventions we tested, reliably, meaningfully, and durably reduce both survey and behavioral indicators of partisan animosity.
Willer wrote that “the interventions we tested were pretty effective in reducing animosity toward rival partisans, particularly in the short-term. However, we found that the interventions we tested were substantially less effective in reducing anti-democratic attitudes, like support for undemocratic practices and candidates.”
Other scholars were more skeptical.
I asked Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and a leading scholar of affective polarization, “Are there methods to directly lessen polarization? Are they possible on a large, population-wide scale?”
“If we knew that,” She replied by email, “we would have definitely told people already.”
There is evidence, Mason continued, that
It is possible to correct misperceptions about politics by simply providing correct information. The problem is that this new correct information doesn’t change people’s feelings about political candidates or issues. For example, you can correct a lie told by Donald Trump, and people will believe the new correct information, but that won’t change their feelings about Trump at all.
“We think of affective polarization as being extremely loyal to one side and feeling strong animosity toward the other side,” Mason wrote:
This can be rooted in substantive disagreements on policy, identity-based status threat, safe versus dangerous worldview, historical and contemporary patterns of oppression, violations of political norms, vilifying rhetoric, propagandistic media, and/or a number of other influences. But once we are polarized, it’s very difficult to use reason and logic to convince us to think otherwise.
Similarly, “there are methods that reduce polarization in academic research settings,” Sean Westwood wrote by email:
The fundamental problems are that none “cure” polarization (i.e., move the population from negative to neutral attitudes toward the opposing party), none last more than a short period of time, and none have a plausible path to society-wide deployment. It is impossible to reach every American in need of treatment, and many would balk at the idea of having their political attitudes manipulated by social scientists or community groups.
More important, in Westwood’s view, is that
Whatever techniques might exist to reduce citizen animosity must be accompanied by efforts to reduce hostility among elected officials. It doesn’t matter if we can make someone more positive toward the other party if that effect is quickly undone by watching cable news, reading social media, or otherwise listening to divisive political elites.
Referring specifically to the Voelkel-Willer paper, Westwood wrote:
It is a critically important scientific study, but it, like nearly all social science research, does not demonstrate that the studied approaches work in the real world. Participants in this study were paid volunteers, and the effects were large but not curative (they reduced partisan hatred and did not cure it).
To fix America’s problems we need to reach everyone from fringe white nationalists to single moms in Chicago, which is so costly and logistically complicated that there isn’t a clear path toward implementation.
One problem with proposals designed to reduce partisan animosity and anti-democratic beliefs, which at least three of the scholars I contacted mentioned, is that positive effects are almost immediately nullified by the hostile rhetoric in contemporary politics.
“The moralized political environment is a core problem,” Peter Ditto, a professor of psychological science at the University of California-Irvine, wrote by email:
Unless we can bring the temperature down in the country, it is going to be hard to make progress on other fronts. like trying to debias citizen’s consumption of political information. The United States is stuck in this outrage spiral. Partisan animosity both fuels and is fueled by a growing fact gap between Red and Blue America.
Ditto argued that there is “good evidence for the effectiveness of accuracy prompts (correcting falsehoods) to reduce people’s belief in political misinformation,” but “attempting to reduce political polarization with accuracy prompts alone is like trying to start a mediation during a bar fight.”
Attempts to improve political decision-making, Ditto added, “are unlikely to have a substantial effect unless we can tamp down the growing animosity felt between red and blue America. The United States has gone from a politics based on disagreement, to one based on dislike, distrust, disrespect and often even disgust.”
Citing the Voelkel-Willer paper, Jay Van Bavel, a professor of psychology and neural science at N.Y.U., emailed me to express his belief that “there are solid, well tested strategies for reducing affective polarization. These are possible on a large scale if there is sufficient political will.”
But Van Bavel quickly added that these strategies “are up against all the other factors that are currently driving conflict and animosity, including divisive leaders like Donald Trump, gerrymandering, hyperpartisan media (including social media), etc. It’s like trying to bail out the Titanic.”
Simply put, it is difficult, if not impossible, to attempt to counter polarization at a time when partisan sectarianism is intense and pervasive.
Bavel described polarization as
both an illness from various problems in our political system and an outcome. As a result, the solution is going to be extremely complex and involve different leadership (once Trump and his inner circle leave the scene that will help a lot), as well as a number of structural changes (removing gerrymandering and other incentive structures that reinforce extremism).
Affective polarization, Bavel added,
is really just a disdain for the other political party. Political sectarianism seems to be an even worse form because now you see the other party as evil. Both of these are, of course, related to ideological polarization. But affective polarization and political sectarianism are different because they can make it impossible to cooperate with an opponent even when you agree. That’s why they are particularly problematic.
Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, pointed to another characteristic of polarization that makes it especially difficult to lower the temperature of the conflict between Republicans and Democrats: There are real, not imaginary, grounds for their mutual animosity.
In an email, Feldman wrote:
There is a reality to this conflict. There has been a great deal of social change in the US over the past few decades. Gay marriage is legal, gender norms are changing, the country is becoming more secular, immigration has increased.
Because of this, Feldman added,
It’s a mistake to suggest this is like an illness or disease. We’re talking about people’s worldviews and beliefs. As much as we may see one side or the other to be misguided and a threat to democracy, it’s still important to try to understand and take seriously their perspective. And analogies to illness or pathology will not help to reduce conflict.
There are, in Feldman’s view,
two major factors that have contributed to this. First, national elections are extremely competitive now. Partisan control of the House and Senate could change at every election. Presidential elections are decided on razor thin margins. This means that supporters of each party constantly see the possibility of losing power every election. This magnifies the perceived threat from the opposing party and increases negative attitudes toward the out-party.
The second factor?
The issues dividing the parties have changed. When the two parties fought over size of government, taxes, social welfare programs, it was possible for partisans to imagine a compromise that is more or less acceptable even if not ideal. Compromise on issues like abortion, gender roles, L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, the role of religion is much more difficult. So losing feels like more of a threat to people’s values.
From a broader perspective, these issues, as well as immigration and the declining white majority, reflect very different ideas of what sort of society the United States should be. This makes partisan conflict feel like an existential threat to an “American” way of life. Losing political power then feels like losing your country. And the opposing parties become seen as dangers to society.
These legitimately felt fears and anxieties in the electorate provide a fertile environment for elected officials, their challengers and other institutional forces to exacerbate division.
As Feldman put it:
It’s also important to recognize the extent to which politicians, the media, social media influencers, and others have exacerbated perceptions of threat from social change. Take immigration for example. People could be reminded of the history of immigration in the US: how immigrants have contributed to American society, how second and third generations have assimilated, how previous fears of immigration have been unfounded.
Instead there are voices increasing people’s fear of immigration, suggesting that immigrants are a threat to the county, dangerous, and even less than human. Discussions of a “great replacement theory,” supposed attacks on religion, dangers of immigration, and changing gender norms undermining men’s place in society magnify perceptions of threat from social change.
Cynical politicians have learned that they can use fear and partisan hostility to their political advantage. As long as they think this is a useful strategy it will be difficult to begin to reduce polarization and partisan hostility.
In other words, as long as Trump is the Republican nominee for president, and as long as the prospect of a majority-minority country continues to propel right-wing populism, the odds for reducing the bitter animosity that now characterizes American politics remain slim.
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