2/25/2023 0 Comments Apathetic electorate democracy 3![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() government by removing the president by force.” However, they concluded that “respondents’ opinions are not conditional on clarifying the target and nature of the coup” ( 13). For example, a series of surveys conducted between 20 employing items originally designed for use in Latin America found 23–36% of US respondents agreeing that a military coup would be justified “when there is a lot of crime” or “when there is a lot of corruption.” Researchers concerned that the respondents might be misunderstanding the questions tested a variety of alternative question wordings-for example, specifying that the military would “take power over the U.S. More recently, the limitations of Americans’ commitment to specific democratic norms has begun to come back into focus. Rather, they are grounded in real political values-specifically, and overwhelmingly, in Republicans’ ethnocentric concerns about the political and social role of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos in a context of significant demographic and cultural change. However, the antidemocratic sentiments reported in Table 1 are not primarily products of social isolation or insufficient education or political interest. Others, less discerning in their powers of observation, more circumscribed in their social roles and experiences, or perhaps more parochial in their perspectives, will be less likely to learn the norms” (ref. Why do so many people endorse these undemocratic propositions? Political scientists have mostly conceptualized democratic norms as “consensual” and interpreted lack of commitment to them as a product of insufficient social learning: “Those who are actively interested in political events should encounter little difficulty in understanding the principles on which the system operates. A majority of respondents (50.7%) agreed that “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” A substantial plurality (41.3%) agreed that “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” A near-majority (47.3%) agreed that “Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done.” Almost three-fourths (73.9%) agreed that “It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.” In each case, most of those who did not agree said they were unsure only 1 in 4 or 5 or 10 said they disagreed. The frailty of public commitment to democratic norms in the contemporary United States is illustrated by the responses of 1,151 Republican identifiers and Republican-leaning Independents * interviewed in January 2020 to survey items contemplating transgressions of a variety of essential democratic principles, including the rejection of violence in pursuit of political ends and respect for the rule of law and the outcomes of elections †. The corrosive impact of ethnic antagonism on Republicans’ commitment to democracy underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics. The strongest predictor by far, for the Republican rank-and-file as a whole and for a variety of subgroups defined by education, locale, sex, and political attitudes, is ethnic antagonism-especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40% agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” (In both cases, most of the rest said they were unsure only one in four or five disagreed.) I use 127 survey items to measure six potential bases of these and other antidemocratic sentiments: partisan affect, enthusiasm for President Trump, political cynicism, economic conservatism, cultural conservatism, and ethnic antagonism. ![]()
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