Americans May Be Turning Against Representative Democracy Along With Commitment to Democratic Values

Two major surveys suggest a heightened risk of ‘backsliding’ away from America’s historic checks on autocratic power

Graphic: Montage of photos by Dmitry Demidovich and Anna Om (Shutterstock).

After Jan. 6, 2021, any future election involving Donald Trump was going to make a sizable bloc of Americans anxious about the state of U.S. democracy. Trump’s persistent, months-long lead over President Joe Biden in surveys of the 2024 presidential race thus raises what would once have been viewed as a pointless question: Just how committed are Americans to representative democracy?

Now come two recently published survey reports not on the presidential race, but rather on Americans’ views of democracy itself: the Pew Research Center’s massive survey of attitudes toward representative democracy in 24 countries, including the United States, and the Democracy Fund’s multi-year study of Americans’ commitments to liberal democratic principles. Both provide grounds for concern. Their findings also reinforce why populism poses a distinct risk to representative democracy itself and why that risk, though it might be diminished by the outcome of this presidential election, will remain beyond November.

Representative Democracy: A Fading Ideal?

The Pew project involves a multitude of national surveys conducted in 2023 in high- and middle-income countries governed by some form of representative democracy. As a theoretical ideal, representative democracy—described by Pew as “a democratic system where representatives elected by citizens decide what becomes law”—got high marks in the U.S., with 75% saying it was a very or somewhat good form of government. This compared to just 26% saying the same of “a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from [the legislature] or the courts” and just 15% saying the same of a system in which “the military rules the country.”

Yet this apparently high level of U.S. support for the democratic ideal isn’t as encouraging as it seems. In the United States, the world’s preeminent democracy, the percentage of citizens endorsing representative democracy was below the 24-nation median of 77% and ranked just 20th out of the 24 countries surveyed, ahead of only Japan, Argentina, South Africa and Brazil—nations with rather younger democracies. Wealthy European democracies like Sweden (87%), Germany (86%), the Netherlands (85%), and the United Kingdom (85%) expressed noticeably higher support. And on a separate question asking Americans how satisfied they were with how democracy is actually working in the U.S., just 33% of Americans said they were satisfied—again below the median (40%) and below such countries as Sweden (75%), Germany (57%), the Netherlands (53%) and the U.K. (40%).

To be clear, these findings about the U.S. are somewhat qualified by a difference in the way the surveys were administered worldwide. In nearly every country, Pew asked its questions through telephone or face-to-face interviews; only in the United States were the surveys completed entirely online. One would thus expect relatively lower levels, due to social desirability effects, in Americans’ self-reported enthusiasm for democracy. U.S. respondents would no longer have to admit to a phone interviewer—a live human being, and probably another American—that they dissented from the American ideal of representative democracy. In contrast, on the internet, they could express their skepticism more impersonally and freely.

This social desirability dynamic, however, is unlikely to explain Americans’ dismal view of how well democracy is actually functioning in the U.S. Complaining about government, after all, is an American pastime, and respondents would be unlikely to hold back on the phone.

Nor is social desirability likely to explain most of the reason for Americans’ relatively low support for representative democracy in 2023. Consider that in 2017, Pew’s U.S. and Australia surveys were both conducted by phone, with 86% of Americans and 88% of Australians saying representative democracy was good. Thus, the two country’s rates of support were similar, and they were safely above the 24-country median in 2017 of 78%. In 2023, however, with the U.S. survey completed entirely online and the Australian survey completed almost entirely (97%) online, Australia had declined only slightly to 84% support, while the U.S. fell to 75%. Hence, Australia was still well above the 77% median, while the U.S. had dropped below it. Something more fundamental in Americans’ attitudes than a shift in survey mode appears to be going on.

Democracy in America: Unprincipled in Practice?

True, as noted above, a majority of Americans still say nice things about representative democracy in the abstract—a point that the Democracy Fund report, Democracy Hypocrisy, corroborates. The report’s authors observe that in all four of the relevant Democracy Fund surveys between 2017 and 2022, more than 80% of Americans said having a democratic political system is fairly or very good, and more than 70% said, “Democracy is preferable to any other kind of government.” The study also echoes the Pew report’s finding that only a quarter or less of Americans show interest in rule by the military or by a "strong leader” freed from democratic checks and balances.

In a perfect world, of course, the number of Americans flirting with authoritarian ideas would be exactly zero. But in our imperfect world, Democracy Fund’s more important finding is that most of us are fickle lovers of democratic principles and may often succumb to partisan lust.

Unlike most surveys administered periodically over a number of years, the Democracy Fund’s questionnaires have been filled out repeatedly by many of the very same people. This makes it possible to track how each of these individuals answered any one question over time. The surveys have also tracked more than just attitudes toward general systems of governance, such as democracy, autocracy and military rule; they have also asked respondents about various democratic norms, such as rejecting threats and violence in political settings, accepting election results and upholding various institutional checks and balances on presidential power, including congressional oversight, media scrutiny, laws and courts, and constitutional requirements for congressional approval of executive action.

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Our Survey Finds Populism Is Four Times as Prevalent Among Trump’s Supporters as Biden’s

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Concentrating on 1,633 repeat-respondents to key questions on six Democracy Fund surveys, the researchers found: “Only 8 percent of Americans consistently provided [a] pro-democracy response across the battery of questions over time. This includes 10 percent of Democrats, 5 percent of Republicans, and 11 percent of independents.” On several key democratic norms, many of the people who changed their answer from one survey to another did so in a way consistent with “a partisan double-standard.” For example, of the respondents who changed their minds across surveys on whether the president should “always obey the laws and the courts, even if he thinks they are wrong,” 84% did so in a manner that looked suspiciously partisan: They were either “Republicans who opposed this norm in 2019 [with Donald Trump] but supported it in 2022 [with Joe Biden], or Democrats who supported it in 2019 [with Donald Trump] but opposed it in 2022 [with Joe Biden].” The authors add, “The majority of Americans who changed their views about [congressional oversight,] media oversight and having a strong [unchecked] leader also do so in a way that … suggests a partisan double-standard.”

In the report, Democrats look somewhat more consistent in their answers than Republicans do, with Republicans wavering particularly on respecting election results. The report notes, “Among the 81 percent of Republicans who believed in September 2020 that it is important for the loser to acknowledge the winner of the election, 62 percent rejected Biden as the legitimate president after the election.” In contrast, the Achilles’ heel for Democrats appears to have been their endorsing unilateral presidential action even when it is not constitutionally authorized without congressional approval.

Democratic Dissatisfaction, Backsliding and Populism

Both the Pew and Democracy Fund reports provide grounds for concern about the prospects for U.S. democracy. They also furnish a reminder of the risks posed to liberal democracy by populism. Key elements of populism, as discussed at The UnPopulist before, involve an unusually strong relationship between a populist movement and its political leader; a willingness to support the leader in removing barriers to his or her power to achieve the movement’s goals; an anxiety about social outgroups seen as unduly favored by the political system and a cynicism about the nation’s elites, often its political elites.

The effect of this attitude about political elites emerges in the Pew report when the authors note that, “One factor driving dissatisfaction with the way democracy is functioning [in a country]”—and hence citizens’ opinions about representative democracy in general—“is the belief that politicians are out of touch and disconnected from the lives of ordinary citizens. In every country surveyed, people who feel politicians don’t care about people like them are less satisfied with democracy.” Or as Pew researchers phrased it in a 2019 report: “One way in which people are unhappy with the way democracy works is that they see political elites as out of touch.”

Pew frequently measures this disconnect between people and their political representatives through the extent to which respondents agree with the statement, “Most elected officials don’t care what people like me think.” This statement has been tested by different researchers over the years: the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, for instance, found that 69% of Americans agreed with the statement in 1996 and 73% agreed in 2016—levels of support similar to the 71% Pew found in 2019. These percentages were already considered high, but in Pew’s 2023 survey, 83% of Americans now agreed—tied for second-highest among the 24 countries surveyed, vying with Spain (85%) and Argentina (83%), and well above the median of 74%. Given the rise in this attitude, the decline in Americans’ support for representative government, discussed earlier, is less surprising.

There are multiple reasons citizens might feel ignored by their representatives, but this complaint about elite dismissiveness is characteristic of populism. Indeed, Pew’s 2019 report found that supporters of European political parties categorized as “right-wing populist parties” in independent scholarly evaluations were particularly inclined to dissatisfaction with how democracy worked in their country. The exception to this pattern came when, as in Poland and Hungary, populist parties were in control of the government.

Of course, it’s not shocking that a party’s supporters would be less happy with their system of government when their party is out of power. But it’s worth remembering that populists tend to see elected officials, as a class, less as clueless or inept and more as morally lacking—either uncaring or even manipulative toward the people. This view will incline populists to skepticism about representative democracy itself. Indeed, one of the scholarly indices that Pew draws on to determine whether a party is populist measures how much the party’s public platform advocates direct decision-making by the people rather than their elected representatives. This political approach is a corollary of the populist dynamic.

And interestingly, in its recent report, Pew observes: “People who have favorable views of right-wing populist parties in Europe are less likely to characterize autocracy”—i.e., rule by a strong leader unchecked by parliament or the courts—“as a very bad system. Often, the difference is considerable.”

Being “less likely” to consider autocracy “very bad” isn’t grounds, of course, for assuming Europe’s populist party supporters will stage a coup. But a coup is hardly the only concern. A more likely path from representative democracy to authoritarianism would involve, as the Democracy Fund report describes, a “backsliding” in which a president uses various “emergencies,” not always illegitimate, to “amass greater power, often with the approval of the public,” and slowly dismantle democratic checks on the range of his or her authority. “The extent to which Americans are willing to give the president latitude without congressional oversight—and how their willingness is influenced by partisanship,” the authors write, “can pose a grave, if subtle, danger to democracy.”

This is where populism presents an added threat. The key elements of populism—a strong bond between leader and movement, cynicism toward elites, anxiety about outgroups, and a disregard for barriers to power—provide, when that leader is president, a ready agent with the means, motive and opportunity to gather and concentrate power in his or her hands. In this political atmosphere, democratic backsliding, always a temptation, is primed for premeditation and repetition—advanced by the populist leader above and sustained by a populist coalition below. And given Pew’s findings about populists’ lesser concern about autocracy, populists may push us toward a slope they’re less afraid of sliding down.

An UnPopulist exploratory survey released in January found that the populist dynamic propelling Trump is approximately four times the size of the one backing Biden in the upcoming presidential election. A Trump loss in November could burden him with a stigma of repeated failure, weakening his supporters’ attachment to him and the strength of the populist movement behind him. But this result isn’t guaranteed, and even if his support declines, other political entrepreneurs would likely emerge to vie for his populist mantle.

Ultimately, the important job of ameliorating populist attitudes towards elites, outgroups and curbs on executive power would remain beyond the election. The disaffection and inconsistencies reflected in the Pew and Democracy Fund findings, respectively, would likely persist as well, especially in an evenly divided and polarized electorate in which one voter’s elation often means another voter’s disgust. The ongoing risk is a democratic backsliding that may get a boost from an American public feeling remote from its elected representatives, less inclined to wholeheartedly support representative democracy and less prepared for a populist dynamic that could convert democratic blunders into an increasingly autocratic “democracy.”

© The UnPopulist 2024

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