Political Science, Department of
First Advisor
Pierce Ekstrom
Committee Members
Ingrid Haas, Kevin Smith
Date of this Version
7-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Citation
A thesis presented to the faculty of the Graduate College at the University of Nebraska in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
Major: Political Science
Under the supervision of Professor Pierce Ekstrom
Lincoln, Nebraska, August 2024
Abstract
Studies show that people support their party’s representatives even when their behavior violates fundamental democratic principles for partisan gain. We test the effects of two interventions- each randomly and independently assigned—to investigate the conditions under which people will prioritize democracy over party goals. In the first intervention, we explicitly point out how an in-party politician’s behavior (e.g., banning public gatherings of their opponents) violates a core democratic principle (e.g., free assembly). The second intervention is a question-order manipulation to test if participants are less tolerant of politicians’ antidemocratic behavior when support for democratic principles is reported first. We find that 1) neither intervention reduced support for the politician, and 2) support for the politician was relatively low to begin with. We conclude that people’s support for democratic principles predicts how they react to antidemocratic behavior by in-party politicians. However, the interventions that we tested did not increase participants’ tendency to judge those politicians by those principles.
Advisor: Pierce Ekstrom
Included in
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Comments
Copyright 2024, Zeenat Ahmed. Used by permission