The Proof is in the Polling

Back when the atrocities of January 6 were fresh in our minds, I wrote a piece called "Who Cares About Democracy?" in which I opined that the answer is "Almost nobody."

I have lately seen a study coming out of Yale by Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik that provides hard data to support that claim. Here are five conclusions that they draw from their excellent study, "Democracy in America? Partisanship, Polarization and the Robustness of Democracy in the United States" (American Political Science Review, 2020):

1. Americans value democracy, but not much: A candidate who considers adopting an undemocratic position can expect to be punished by losing only about 11.7% of
his overall vote share. When we restrict attention to candidate-choice scenarios with combinations of partisanship and policies that we typically see in real-world elections, this punishment drops to 3.5%.

2. Support for democracy is highly elastic: When the price of voting for a more democratic candidate is that candidate’s greater distance from the voter in terms of her preferred policies, even the most centrist voters are willing to tolerate at most a 10–15% increase in such a distance.

3. Centrists are a pro-democratic force: “Centrist” voters who see small policy differences between candidates punish undemocratic behavior at four times the rate of “extremist” voters who strongly favor one of the candidates.

4. Most voters are partisans first and democrats only second: Only about 13.1% of our respondents are willing to defect from a co-partisan candidate for violating
democratic principles when the price of doing so is voting against their own party. Only independents and partisan “leaners” support more democratic candidates
enough to defeat undemocratic ones regardless of their partisan affiliation.

5. Supporters of both parties employ a partisan “double standard”: Respondents who identify as Republican are more willing to punish undemocratic behavior by Democratic Party than Republican Party candidates and vice versa. These effects are about equal among both Democrat and Republican respondents.

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The moral is, either exalt democracy or get used to living without much more than a shred of it.

Even a Powerful Majoritarianism Cannot be Tyrannous If It is Truly Democratic

In my humble opinion, there is WAY too much talk about "the tyranny of the majority." What the majority has long been, in the U.S. anyhow, is not tyrannous but feeble. Nevertheless, there is a deep-set fear of violent hordes here, and our Constitution is befouled with a bunch of unnecessary separations of power, a bicameral legislature, an Electoral College, and assorted other enfeebling provisions. The reasons that stuff is in there, of course, and the arguments for retaining all it, center around fear: fear of a "mobocracy," fear of armed brown shirts, fear of sans-culottes, fear of Bolshevism. 

Of course, all of those items are quite sensibly feared. (Think of January 6th for example!) But what is missed by the fearful defenders of our cowering Constitution is that none of those groups, events, or "isms" had very much to do with democracy, even with democracy of the most radical kind. That's what my new paper, "Why Radical Democracy is Inconsistent with 'Mob Rule'" is about. 

It has just come out in the new issue of The Romanian Journal of Society and Politics and is available for free download here.