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Enemy Mine: Negative Partisanship and Satisfaction with Democracy

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Abstract

Polarization has increased in recent decades, including emotional distance between partisans. While positive partisan identity has been linked to the absorption of democratic norms and democratic satisfaction, this article addresses the impact of negative partisanship on citizens’ satisfaction with the functioning of their democracies. Employing two measures of negative partisanship – dislike for a party and unwillingness to ever vote for a party – the article finds that negative partisanship is linked to lower satisfaction with democracy, particularly negative partisanship for major parties. It also finds that respondents’ sentiments towards other parties moderate the experience of electoral outcomes; the win/loss satisfaction gap is greater for negative partisans. Defeat is more strongly tied to satisfaction for negative partisans of governing parties. Coalition membership, on the other hand, is more valuable to them. This relationship raises concerns that increasing rates of negative partisan identity reduces democratic commitment, undermining democratic stability.

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Notes

  1. NPID can also influence apolitical behaviors. American partisans who have strong negative affect towards out-partisans are less likely to award scholarships to out-partisans and are less generous with out-partisans in dictator and trust games; while in-group favoritism plays a role in this pattern, “Outgroup animosity is more consequential” (Iyengar and Westwood 2015, p. 703). Strong negative sentiment towards out-partisans is also reflected in unwillingness to accept them as family members (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012).

  2. Empirical work does not focus on demonstrating the relationship between satisfaction and commitment. However, it can be shown using the 2nd Module of the CSES (CSES 2015a) that individuals who are more satisfied with the functioning of their democracy are more likely to believe that democracy is the best form of government, making them more committed democrats (Online Appendix 1).

  3. Although the CSES has multiple modules, it is not panel data; the module provides point-in-time respondent information from post-election surveys. As such, it cannot be used to look for reinforcing relationships for (dis)satisfaction and negative partisanship cross-temporally. Such questions must be left to future research. It cannot be conclusively rejected that some previously dissatisfied democrats became subsequently negative partisans. For now, this research relies on associational models, and it considers it more likely that the system is evaluated based on its component parties and their interplay than that a voter’s negative evaluation of the political system is being visited on any particular party. Were dissatisfaction to flow into animosity, it seems more likely that it would be generalized; however, the data show that while many citizens would never vote for a particular party, they would not refuse to vote for many of the parties.

  4. As the like/dislike scale was included in multiple waves, those measures were tested as well on the Integrated Module Dataset, which features a subset of questions that have appeared in more than two waves of the CSES. The results are substantively similar to those from the 3rd module (Online Appendix 2).

  5. The CSES codebook identifies the largest parties based on the vote share in the lowest level of the recorded election, ideally the first round of the lower house election.

  6. The 3rd module data for the US assigns a value of 001 for respondents over 90; this is adjusted to 90.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Austin Bussing and Markus Wagner for their feedback on earlier versions this manuscript. I am also indebted to two anonymous reviewers for excellent advice. Earlier versions of this work were presented at the 2019 Midwest Political Science Association meeting and the 2019 American Political Science Association meeting.

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  1. Duke University, 140 Science Drive 208 Gross Hall Campus, Box 90204, Durham, NC, 27708, USA

    Hannah M. Ridge

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Data is available through the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (https://cses.org/data-download/). Replication code is available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/hannahmridge.

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Ridge, H.M. Enemy Mine: Negative Partisanship and Satisfaction with Democracy. Polit Behav 44, 1271–1295 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09658-7

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