Demographic Determinism, Republican Identity, and Democratic Backsliding

• In Event: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: Connective Action & the Rise of the Far-Right

Abstract

This paper describes how race has gone about shaping the Republican Party over time into the present moment. Elites and party members have grown deeply attached to a White identity, which is counterposed by ideas of racial minorities within the Democratic Party. Due to these combined sets of ideas, as the United States continues to diversify, I show that sentiments drive Republicans’ turning away from the system of democracy because they perceive that their party will be unable to win elections on a national scale. Through a set of experiments, I show that Republicans’ attitudes about democracy have grown to be causally related to their perceptions of the party affiliation of racial minorities. Their baseline is that racial minorities identify as Democrats, and when racial minorities are framed to identify as Republicans, it drastically reduces their anti-democratic attitudes.

Author

• Andrew I Thompson, University of Pennsylvania