Political Scientists Want to Know Why We Hate Each Other This Much

Who among us are the most willing to jettison democratic elections? Which voters not only detest their political adversaries, but 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 “does indeed predict anti-democratic tendencies.”

In their recent paper, “Partisan Antipathy and the Erosion of Democratic Norms,” Eli Finkel and Jamie Druckman of Northwestern, Alexander Landry of Stanford, Jay Van Bavel of N.Y.U. and Rick H. Hoyle of Duke make 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 anti-democratic views.

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

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

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

The first set of questions measures what the authors call “othering.” The most extreme answers are

• “I felt as if they and I are on separate planets”

• “I am as different from them as can be” and

• “It’s impossible for me to see the world the way they do.”

The second set of questions measures “aversion”:

• “My feelings toward them are overwhelmingly negative”

• “I have a fierce hatred for them” and

• “They have every negative trait in the book.”

The third set of questions measures “moralization”:

• “They are completely immoral”

• “They are completely evil in every way” and

• “They lack any shred of integrity.”

How, then, to identify voters high in anti-democratic views? Prototypical questions here are: “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 anti-democratic views received strong support, but not a wholesale endorsement, from Nicholas Campos and Christopher Federico, political scientists at the University of Minnesota, who modified the Finkel approach.