Political Scientists Want to Know Why We Hate One Another This Much

Who among us are the most willing to jettison democratic elections? Which voters not only detest their political adversaries but also long for their destruction?

These questions are now at the heart of political science.

Five scholars have capitalized on new measurement techniques to identify partisan sectarian voters, a category that they said “does indeed predict antidemocratic tendencies.”

In their recent paper “Partisan Antipathy and the Erosion of Democratic Norms” Eli Finkel of Northwestern, James Druckman of the University of Rochester, Alexander Landry of Stanford, Jay Van Bavel of N.Y.U. and Rick H. Hoyle of Duke made the case that earlier studies of partisan hostility used ratings of the two parties on a scale of 0 (cold) to 100 (very warm) but that that measure failed to show a linkage between such hostility and antidemocratic views.

The five scholars wrote, “Partisan antipathy is indeed to blame, but the guilty party is political sectarianism,” not the thermometer rating system:

Insofar as people experience othering, aversion and moralization toward opposing partisans, they are more likely to support using undemocratic tactics to pass partisan policies: gerrymandering congressional districts, reducing the number of polling stations in locations that support the opposing party, ignoring unfavorable court rulings by opposition-appointed judges, failing to accept the results of elections that one loses and using violence and intimidation toward opposing partisans.

Who, then, falls into this subset of partisan sectarians?

The authors cited nine polling questions that asked voters to assess their feelings toward members of the opposition on a scale of 1 to 6, with 6 the most hostile.

The first set of questions measured what the authors called othering. The most extreme answers were:

I felt as if they and I are on separate planets.
I am as different from them as can be.
It’s impossible for me to see the world the way they do.

The second set of questions measured aversion:

My feelings toward them are overwhelmingly negative.
I have a fierce hatred for them.
They have every negative trait in the book.

The third set of questions measured moralization:

They are completely immoral.
They are completely evil in every way.
They lack any shred of integrity.

How, then, to identify voters high in antidemocratic views? Representative questions here were: “Democratic/Republican governors should ignore unfavorable court rulings by Republican/Democratic-appointed judges” and “Democrats/Republicans should not accept election results if they lose.”

The Finkel et al. analysis linking partisan sectarianism to antidemocratic views received strong support but not a wholesale endorsement from Nicolas Campos and Christopher Federico, political scientists at the University of Minnesota, who modified the Finkel approach.