Thread by @dhopkins1776

Here's a new #polisciresearch working paper & a 🧵.

We all know about 1/6 and the threat to American democracy that crystalized that day.

Were there *changes* in American public opinion in the years before that foreshadowed the threat?

Not really.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Using the 2007-2020 ISCAP panel survey, I track a population-based sample of Americans who were 18 by 2008.

So I can isolate specific individuals' attitudes & see if they were shifting in ways that might have predicted the coming threat to democracy.

2/

For example, as of October 2020, there was no evidence that people who were Republicans in 2008 thought American elections were less fair than Democrats.

Trends are similar for two measures of system legitimacy.

(Of course, post-election 2020, it's a different story.)

3/

What about support for Trump specifically, and the intensity of that support?

Yes, there was a sizable fraction of people who were very pro-Trump in October 2020...

4/

But Obama actually enjoyed even higher levels of intense support. So the key question isn't about the distribution of views toward the two presidents--it's about how they did or did not mobilize their intense supporters.

5/

And in open-ended questions, Trump supporters were actually less likely to say that they were voting against someone that Biden's supporters were. The responses didn't show much disaffection, either.

6/

What about racial prejudice? Anti-democratic efforts have been connected with the preservation of White citizens' power and the disenfranchisement of Black citizens, American Indians, Latinos, Asian Americans & other groups for centuries.

7/

However, White respondents' levels of expressed racial prejudice against Black Americans have dropped since 2016 and remain well below their Obama-era levels.

That extends a trend S. Washington and I wrote about here:
academic.oup.com/poq/article/84…

8/

Ideological extremity is another worrisome possibility. Citizens who see the opposing side as extreme may be less likely to accept a result that puts it in power.

But there's no real evidence Biden/Trump were perceived as more ideologically extreme than Obama/Romney in '12.

9/

To be sure, there are very alarming features of contemporary public opinion, including high affective polarization & continued racial prejudice.

Those are the building blocks of anti-democratic efforts.

10/

But my point is this: if you wanted to build an early-warning system, there weren't *changes* in American public opinion between late 2007 and October 2020 that would have tipped you off to the emerging threat.

11/

In part, this is important because it suggests that if we want to understand 1/6 or anti-democratic efforts, we can't just look at general population polls. We've got to focus on the much smaller group of elites who mobilize people & the activists who answer those calls.

/end