What Would the Neighbor Do?: Harnessing Norms for Democratic Stability

• In Event: Democratic Norms among the Mass Public

Abstract

Previous research suggests that individual commitment to democratic norms weakens when fears that opposing partisans will undermine democracy are heightened (Braley et al., 2023). Within this context of deteriorating commitments to democratic norms, we find that partisans will also over-estimate the willingness of copartisans to break democratic norms. Likewise, when these overestimations are corrected, partisans increase their own willingness to uphold democratic norms and vote for candidates who will do the same. This theory builds upon a larger literature on the role of misperceptions in toxic political polarization and the ways in which generating more accurate views of fellow citizens may weaken partisan animosity and strengthen democracy. While correcting misperceptions about out-partisan commitments to democracy may be one of the most effective documented ways to increase citizen commitment to democratic norms and willingness to vote for democratic candidates (Voelkel et al., 2023), it has yet to be studied whether correcting perceptions about copartisans may diminish or strengthen that effect. By combining the effects of out-partisan and co-partisan corrections, we observe an overall larger impact on commitment to democratic norms, which lends important insight to the development of real-world interventions to stem democratic backsliding in the US and beyond.

Braley, Alia, Gabriel S. Lenz, Dhaval Adjodah, Hossein Rahnama, and Alex Pentland. "Why voters who value democracy participate in democratic backsliding." Nature Human Behaviour (2023): 1-12.

Voelkel, Jan G., Michael Stagnaro, James Chu, Sophia Pink, Joseph Mernyk, C. Redekopp, M. Cashman et al. "Megastudy identifying successful interventions to strengthen Americans’ democratic attitudes." Northwestern University: Evanston, IL, USA (2022).

Author

• Alia Braley, University of California, Berkeley