Examining the Strength of Implicit Partisanship on Postponing an Election

• In Event: Support for Democratic Norms, Values, and Principles

Abstract

Political scientists have demonstrated many times that voters rely on party labels to know how to vote or what policies to support. However, there are many political events that happen without party labels but where party messages are still present. As such, this paper asks, “when partisans cannot rely on party labels, do they still support their party's ideas?" Using data from an original survey experiment in 2020 and a replication from 2022, this paper tests people’s willingness to postpone a presidential election both with and without an explicit party label attached to the president supporting the postponement. This paper finds that voters are significantly more likely to support a presidential proposal for postponing the election if the president doing it is labeled as a co-partisan. When the same idea is presented without a partisan label however, support drops by a large margin. Republicans who care that other people know they are a Republican are an exception to this trend; they recognize the labeled and unlabeled party idea at the same rate. Across both the original survey and the replication, Democratic respondents prefer their co-partisan ideas but resist any Republican actions. While Republican respondents prefer a president of their own party over a Democratic president, their pattern between the two years is different than Democratic respondents. Regardless of the president in office in reality, Democrats resist any Democratic actions. On the other hand, Republican supports in all conditions swings quite a bit when a Democratic president is in office in real life. One potential interpretation of these findings is that Republicans have a much looser commitment to democratic norms and instead have a stronger commitment to partisanship.

Author

• Alejandra Aldridge, Brigham Young University