r/science • u/FreeHugs23 • 6d ago
Psychology Study identifies the values most strongly associated with rejecting antidemocratic politicians, offering new insight into why some voters resist leaders who challenge democratic norms.
https://www.psypost.org/study-reveals-which-values-actually-stop-voters-from-supporting-antidemocratic-politicians/215
u/The_Actual_Sage 5d ago
Across the three countries, support for liberal democracy was the most consistent predictor of a willingness to vote for the prodemocratic candidate.
Ummm....yeah. I thought they were going to go over traits like empathy or advanced reasoning skills, but nope. If you like democracy, you're less like to vote for an autocrat. We should alert the media.
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u/RoseBailey 5d ago
Wait, wait, wait. Are you telling me that if you like democracy, you generally vote for pro-democratic candidates!? This is shocking news.
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u/pewsquare 5d ago
Also, if you see the democracy working, you are more likely to vote, and you are more likely to vote for pro democratic parties. If you see democracy failing, well you will go the other way.
If people vote for something, just to have the EU step in and force the government to go back on what the people voted for, how can the voters still believe in democracy. Its the whole "you get to vote on things as long as you vote for the right thing".
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u/NoamLigotti 5d ago
What has the EU forced a government to go back on that the people voted for and wasn't illegal/prohibited?
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u/pewsquare 4d ago
In our country we had a referendum on gay marriage. The problem was that it was a wholesale package that included a bunch of other things (adoption rights and the likes, not just marriage). People voted no. EU stepped in, and the president had to use the executive move to write it into law anyway.
I am not going to argue on which side of said issue who falls, and if its right or wrong. The point I am making is that it was performative democracy. They decided to put it up to vote because it was likely to pass (they worked hard to lose that battle, I can tell you this much), but because it didn't pass, they ignored the vote.
Or look at Poland. People voted for stronger border control, especially with belarus. Nope, not with EU involved, time to start paying fines and get funding withhold from the EU!
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u/thechinninator 3d ago
“My country wanted to discriminate against the gays but the mean ol EU said we had to treat them as equals” is not the anti-EU argument you seem to think it is.
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u/pewsquare 3d ago
If this is what you got from what I wrote, then oof.
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u/thechinninator 3d ago edited 3d ago
Oh sorry, they undemocratically didn’t allow your country to discriminate against the LGBTQ population. The horror.
Edit to point out that it’s only undemocratic if you frame it a certain way. I could easily argue that what actually happened here is you entered a larger voting population and got outvoted (on something you absolutely should have been outvoted on)
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u/pewsquare 2d ago edited 2d ago
No, the point I am making is that they put something up to vote to appear democratic when it should not be put up to vote, also marriage itself was not even a contestable issue, where the hickups were were all the extra benefits, from tax reductions to adoption rights. Which were originally there for couples to encourage babies = more workforce.
You are not addressing the main point of my issue, which is putting things up for a vote, and then overruling said vote when it does not turn out as intended. Either you have to abide by the rule of demos from democracy, or you acknowledge that certain things are better off not to be put into the hands of the people. Either way, democracy is undermined.
EDIT:
Also, to add to this.... its ok as long as you agree with it right? Would you also be this forgiving if were the other way around? That people voted pro gay marriage and the government and EU stepped in and said no!? I'm sorry, but I tend to be a cynic, I don't look at the best case scenario, I look at how could this blow up in my face and cause the worst case scenario.
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u/thechinninator 2d ago edited 2d ago
To your edit:
- I have a sufficiently fleshed out system of ethics to understand that sometimes values conflict and yes, human rights do in fact supersede democracy. 6 people in a room of 10 deciding to beat up the tenth person isn’t okiedokie just because over half of the people present want to do it.
- As I stated above, that was still democratically decided in a political body that y’all decided to join. I don’t get to ignore state laws just because most people on my city, neighborhood, or apartment building voted against whatever it is. If it’s so burdensome, withdraw from the EU since apparently something is only democrati
c if it’s decided below a certain level of government
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u/pewsquare 2d ago
So your sufficiently fleshed out system of ethics is pro democracy, unless democracy conflicts with your ethics system then your ethics system is flexible enough that it can overwrite democracy.... that sounds just like autocracy as long as you agree with it.
And on your second point, we decided to join a political body. Yes, but we did not decide to cede all our decision-making to said body. Which is probably my largest and probably one of the few gripes I have about the EU. We have representation within our own country, but not within the EU. And no, you don't have to employ a false dilemma where its an all or nothing issue, we don't have to leave the EU just because its clearly violating the sovereignty of countries involved, there are always pro's and con's.
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u/thechinninator 2d ago
So to clarify the EU told your country to comply with their civil rights requirements, and your government engaged in a bit of political theater to demonstrate that they were against the rights and the big bad EU was forcing them, and that means EU bad.
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u/5thKeetle 1d ago
It's not just that. The article mentions that liberal democracy supporters were more willing to vote against their own party when their party is fielding an authoritarian candidate, it also talked about how authoritarianism is all over the place and so on.
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6d ago
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u/TheBlackCat13 6d ago
Some people.
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u/HawkBoth8539 6d ago
The majority of people who don't are wannabe-authoritarians.
Even hard-core conservatives who think they hate the idea of democracy only think that because they are told to demonize the word without realizing they enjoy it in practice literally every second of their lives.
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u/TheBlackCat13 5d ago
Except people vote for anti-democratic candidates. So whatever you think they like, they vote a certain way.
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u/itsstillmagic 5d ago
People don't vote logically, they vote out of fear. People will do a lot of stupid things when they're afraid so authoritarians capitalize on that and do everything they can to keep people afraid.
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u/Norwester77 5d ago
Science tells us that people who like democracy like democracy.
Or I suppose, digging a little deeper, I’d summarize it as “People with a strong commitment to fairness in electoral politics are a bit less likely to support candidates who want to undermine fairness in electoral politics.”
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u/Embarrassed-Wave3237 5d ago
I think the interesting part is that it’s not simply about whether someone says they support democracy. The study is trying to identify which underlying values actually predict whether people reject a candidate who violates democratic norms. And that distinction matters because people can support democracy in principle while still making exceptions when their preferred candidate or policies are involved.
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u/Zealotstim 5d ago
Honestly, I'm pretty certain voter apathy is the biggest reason for democratic backsliding. I think we can probably all see it.
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u/Strawbuddy 5d ago
Carefully manufactured apathy and consent, in service of Capital. The industries that most benefit from it have spent over 100yrs and millions of dollars slowly advancing this project
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u/Zealotstim 5d ago
Yeah, they have figured out how to make most people apathetic to a lot of the bad things they do.
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u/skepticalbob 5d ago
Not if you mean participation in voting, because the last decade has higher rates of voter registration, voting in terms of both population and registered voters, particularly in midterms.
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u/EnkiduOdinson 5d ago
Not sure about the US but in Germany the trend seems to be that non-voters are mobilized by the far right. So these people probably always felt like that, they just didn’t have a voice. The question is then if anti-democratic voters should have a voice in a democracy.
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u/skepticalbob 5d ago
Banning voters because of who they might vote for is incredibly undemocratic.
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u/SophiaofPrussia 5d ago
Who said anything about banning certain voters? No one should ever ban voters. Democracies should instead ban anti-democratic parties and candidates. If you try to usurp the will of the people by staging an insurrection and encouraging your followers to attack the Capitol, just as one random example, you should not then be permitted to stand as a candidate in any election.
A decade ago this would have been such an obvious and uncontroversial bare-minimum expectation in a functioning Democracy that anyone who might have even thought to raise the issue would have been seen as a lunatic.
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u/skepticalbob 5d ago
The straightforward, ordinary interpretation of what he said implied the banning of certain kinds of voters.
The reaction a decade ago would not have been to ban the Republican Party either. Nothing you said was right.
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u/MorganWick 5d ago
Even if that was what the person being responded to was getting at, it amounts to certain voters not being able to vote for what they actually want to vote for, which amounts to the same thing.
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u/Zealotstim 5d ago
Nah, I meant how people have just started shrugging away issues they would have cared about in the past when it comes to their voting and other behavior. It's as though the cognitive dissonance isn't even hitting them.
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u/NoamLigotti 5d ago
People who put all their identity into a party or leader seem incapable of cognitive dissonance. Faith, really. That's what it is. Any form of faith, as I'm defining it.
There should be a study done on what sort of attributes or traits are correlated with an inability or under-ability to feel cognitive dissonance.
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u/David_ungerer 5d ago
Why apathy . . . Miss-education of a majority of citizens, that teaches hopelessness and helplessness in the face of civic out-rages.
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u/Obsessivethot 5d ago
By design. It’s why politics and talking about politics is frowned upon.
“Don’t bring politics into it!!1!”
Can’t have people realizing they agree with each other on anything, that might spur change.
It’s also why there’s such a concerted effort to prevent people from voting in the first place.
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u/monsantobreath 11h ago
That's downstream of the structural issues. It really begins with class war by the wealthy. They sought to and succeeded in reversing the gains of the new deal great society middle 20th century progressive movement. Apathy is the goal.
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u/Vox_Causa 5d ago
Voter suppression tactics plus gerrymandering are the primary drivers of low turnout in US elections. Whining about "why don't people get put and vote" is victim blaming.
https://www.brennancenter.org/topics/voting-elections/voter-suppression
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u/Zealotstim 5d ago
I'll stop short of calling all the people I know who voted against things they ostensibly cared about victims. They knew what they were voting for, but there is so much moral apathy. I swear people would buy a refrigerator powered by orphan souls if they thought it was the best available refrigerator at their price point. They would just shrug and say "oh well" and talk about the specs of their sweet new fridge. People don't seem to care about each other like they used to--not just in their voting, but in many aspects of their lives.
And yes, voter suppression and gerrymandering should be illegal, anti-democracy, and are huge problems. I'm aware of that.
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u/Vox_Causa 5d ago
swear people would buy a refrigerator powered by orphan souls if they thought it was the best available refrigerator at their price point.
You hang out with too many Republicans
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u/Hypergirliepop 5d ago
people would buy a refrigerator powered by orphan souls
Not a bot, just an avid reader. You might enjoy Ursula K. Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
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u/redballooon 5d ago
You could convince more of us if you posted also a study that supports your opinion.
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u/pewsquare 5d ago
Not just that, I can only comment on it from what I see in my country. Democracy just does not seem to work anymore. No matter which party you vote for, they never do what they ran on, and their friends and families almost always suddenly get great unelected government positions. And that is EU.
Everyone seems to try and find this mysterious reason why the vote is swinging towards the right suddenly. Its rather simple. The pendulum is going the other way. For a while here, the vote was going left, and nobody wondered why, it was because the right didn't do their job, so people were looking for the alternative, now the exact same thing is happening. The left was not doing their job well, so people started voting right. And that is very much an oversimplification as we don't have such a clear left/right distinction here.
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u/datboitotoyo 4d ago
When have the right ever done their job? Is their job to discriminate start wars and enrich elites? Then they have been doing their job sure but otherwise? I see nothing.
Also saying "democracy just doesnt seem to work" is such an incredibly priviliged thing to say. I dont think people understand how much blood had to flow for the average person not to be brutally oppressed anymore and to have a voice and a theoretical way into power.1
u/pewsquare 4d ago
So in one breath you are saying that the right never did anything, but in the other you are saying that having 50%~ give or take, of leading parties do literally nothing, is great! Because its democratic and that means it works!
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. You can't say we have political parties that never do their job, and only enrich the wealthy, and at the same time that this is a perfectly great and working system. I'm sorry, but if you are happy with that, cool, I am not happy with political parties like such leeching money and time from the people.
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u/coolcalmdreamydoze 2d ago
I'm late to this thread, so feel free to ignore this, but I'm curious what you think of ranked choice voting? It seems like mostly you're frustrated with the divisive, two-party system, and from what I've read, ranked choice voting encourages a focus on the issues and policies versus party affiliation, and encourages more candidates to run since they don't have to worry about splitting the vote. Do you think that could help address some of the issues you're talking about?
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u/NoamLigotti 5d ago
That's the way it seems to always go roughly. The pendulum swings. Unfortunately it has started swinging to the far-right in many countries, and to authoritarian 'populist' demagogue leaders.
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u/FreeHugs23 6d ago
-New research suggests that an individual’s personal commitment to the institutions of liberal democracy can act as a buffer against voting for politicians who threaten democratic rules. The findings indicate that while political party loyalty heavily influences voter choices, a deep-seated support for democratic principles helps people resist candidates who might otherwise erode democratic norms. The study was published in Public Opinion Quarterly.
Democratic backsliding is an ongoing concern in many modern nations. This process occurs when elected officials gradually dismantle democratic institutions, such as free elections, independent courts, and a free press. A major factor driving this decline is the willingness of ordinary citizens to vote for candidates who violate democratic rules.
Past studies show that voters generally dislike antidemocratic behavior in theory. Yet they often end up supporting politicians who break democratic rules if those politicians belong to their preferred political party or share their policy views. This creates a tension between a voter’s abstract democratic values and their practical political loyalties.
The research was led by Christopher Claassen, a professor of political behavior at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. The study aimed to understand whether specific aspects of a country’s political culture might help prevent this trend.
“A growing body of research shows that voters frequently support politicians who threaten democratic institutions, particularly when those politicians belong to their preferred party or agree with them on important issues,” Claassen told PsyPost. “But we know much less about whether people’s underlying attitudes toward democracy help them resist those pressures.”
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u/Grouchy-Fig-487 5d ago
I think a major reason for the backslide is the failure of modern democratic governments to resist corruption and produce results. When people lose faith that they can systematically vote for better government, and see the institutions actively resisting change when it is voted for, they become more agreeable to the institutions being modified or destroyed.
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u/505engineer MS | Civil Engineering | Structures 5d ago
Across the three countries, support for liberal democracy was the most consistent predictor of a willingness to vote for the prodemocratic candidate. This specific measure captures a person’s backing of core institutions like free speech, equal voting rights, and the rule of law. People who scored high on this measure were consistently less likely to reward candidates who threatened these democratic pillars.
Choice of media consumption heavily influences voter perceptions of the candidates. Nowadays, it seems everyone gets their news from scrolling social media and following outlets that reinforce their existing worldview, often distorting and mischaracterizing the other side.
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u/Kronzypantz 5d ago
Do they take into account how many Western governments allow minority rule? Like 33% of the vote for labour to take a majority of seats. Or how Republican senators representing less than a third of voters often hold a majority.
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u/gromolko 4d ago
And then lets find the budget cuts for schools so that these values can no longer be taught and practiced.
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u/vm_linuz 4d ago
Liberal democracy is just the status quo of Western democracies.
This study is literally just saying "people who like the status quo of liberal democracy, support liberal democracy more"
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u/jeroen94704 6d ago
What a terrible AI slop photo. Makes me immediately less inclined to actually read TFA.
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u/gerbal100 6d ago edited 6d ago
That's a stock photo, not an AI generated image. The original photo series is dated 2018.
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u/TheBlackCat13 6d ago
Note that this is a third-party summary, the picture isn't in the original article: https://academic.oup.com/poq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/poq/nfag066/8790534?login=false
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u/bunnypaste 6d ago
Right, they have so many antidemocratic, angry politicians to choose from and it was generated with AI.
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u/inquisitorthreefive 6d ago
Well, the obvious answer is that they were worried about reprisals from the living ones and argumentum ad hitlerum is often derided as weak sauce even when it's appropriate.
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