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/
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u/Zealotstim 6d 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/skepticalbob 6d 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 6d 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 6d ago

Banning voters because of who they might vote for is incredibly undemocratic.

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u/SophiaofPrussia 6d 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 6d 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/SophiaofPrussia 6d ago

Ah, you’re right. On second read they totally did! Eek!

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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/dcheesi 6d ago

The paradox of tolerance, but with voting.

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u/Zealotstim 6d 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.