Americans' Views on Democracy One Year Before the 2024 Presidential Elections
Questions about the way democracy is working in America often arise in light of events that demonstrate weaknesses in the system’s stability. The January 6th Capitol attack is not only a cause but also a symptom of rising doubt concerning the strength of the American government to maintain the rule of law. Suspicions around issues at polling stations have been predominant in public debates, with alleged frauds regarding mail-in voting, people voting who shouldn’t, and so forth. A recent article from NPR shows that only about 1 in 10 American adults believes the US’ democratic system is working well or even representing the interests of most Americans, which demonstrates the extent of the issue.
As the 2024 election primaries start in only a few months, assessing how Americans view their country’s democratic performance in the past six years can be eye-opening regarding the legitimacy that people will give to whoever will sit in the White House from January 2025 onwards. With Just over a year before the general election, we thought it would be interesting to look into what does data says about how Americans view democratic stability in the United States and what factors influence how much trust they put in the system.
Starting in late 2017, we have been asking our national panelists a series of questions focused on their view of government and its institutions. One set of questions focuses on the functioning of democracy itself. These questions do not appear often in panelist feeds but there have been roughly 2,500 panelists who have responded to these questions for five or more years.
When panelists were asked to rank how well they think democracy was functioning in the US, where a score of 0 meant that they thought it was completely dysfunctional and a score of 100 meant they thought it functioned perfectly, they only allocated an average score of 40 points. The vast majority gave a score of 50 or less, while less than 1 in 10 gave a score above 90.
Over the past six years, the average score Americans allocated to democratic performance usually fluctuated between 38 and 42 points. However, it hit as low as 30 points between mid-2018 and mid-2019, and 35 points in 2022. It is worth noting that the low of 30 was well before the 2021 insurrection and the period right after January 6th had the highest score recorded until the middle of 2021. Overall, the consistent low scores raise questions that should be investigated, starting with how different demographic groups rank American democratic performance.
Women believe democracy is functioning more poorly than men.
Gender had a slight impact on whether someone was likely to believe democracy in America is functioning, with men allocating five extra points compared to women. Figures confirm that, overall, women are slightly less likely to believe that American democracy is functioning while more likely to believe that it was overall performing poorly compared to men. Figures also demonstrate that men are 40% more likely to believe that democracy was functioning well overall compared to women.
There continue to be differences in opinion when it comes to the US’ track record when it comes to giving all adults, regardless of gender, equal rights. For example, women are twice as likely compared to men to say that gender discrimination is a major reason why there aren’t more women in high political offices, according to a 2018 study from Pew Research. This has a snowball effect demonstrated by institutions such as the Supreme Court especially in recent decisions including the overturning of Roe v Wade.
Surprisingly, Americans who believe that there should be more representation for women in government (another question that has been asked of these panelists) feel, on average, that democracy was functioning well. Indeed, according to our model, respondents who allocated 100 points to the statement that women should be more represented in government allocated around 12 additional points on democratic performance compared to those who allocated no points to wanting more women representation.
These figures can appear contradictory as one might expect that someone who believes women should be more represented would directly be pointing out the flaw of American Democracy. However, these figures demonstrate that those who believe more should be done for women’s representation are also those who put more faith in their country’s democracy for these changes to occur. Additionally, those who are more skeptical about how well democracy is functioning are more likely to believe that there are more pressing problems that ought to be solved to fix our democracy.
This surprising result can further be investigated when analyzing the differences depending on which party the respondents supported. For instance, Republicans rated supporting women’s representation in government an average of 35 points less than Democrats. Figures show that almost no supporters of the Democratic Party opposed the idea that there should be more female representation in the American government, as less than 3% allocated less than 40 points to the issue. Nearly nine out of ten Democrats supported the idea that there should be more representation for women in government while less than a third believed the same within Republican supporters. However, nearly a quarter of Republicans opposed the idea that there should be women representation.
This divide can also be observed by analyzing how Americans react to whether their country functions well democratically. While the impact is less marked than for whether women should be represented in the government, it is nonetheless present, with Democrats allocating 5 points more than Republicans did when it came to ranking how well democracy was performing. Indeed, two out of five Democratic respondents believed that democracy was overall well-functioning while Republicans were 25% less likely to believe this. Logically, Republicans were more likely to believe that Democracy was functioning poorly, with nearly 40% of them ranking it below 40 points, which was about 25% higher than Democrats.
Party affiliation weighed a lot in how Americans viewed democracy.
The surprising result that was discussed earlier can therefore be explained by the predominance of the “Party” factor in how Americans make their decisions. On the one hand, Democrats were more likely to think democracy was performing well while allocating the issue of women’s representation as something that should be dealt with. On the other hand, Republicans, even though they were much less concerned than Democrats about women’s representation, tended to believe that democracy was performing less well. The paradox between wishing more representation for women and considering that democracy is performing well and vice-versa is clarified by the weight that respondents’ parties take in their decisions when answering surveys.
A similar trend can be observed with other issues that Democrats typically are more alarmed about than Republicans. Democrats were more concerned about the threat of climate change, allocating an average of 55 points more than Republicans did when ranking their level of concern on a scale from 0 to 100. Among the questions studied, this was the one in which the party divide was the greatest. Similar to those who believed representation for women was an issue, those who expressed concern with how climate change was dealt with, thought democracy was functioning better than those who didn’t. Indeed, someone who was 100% concerned gave eight additional points compared to someone who was not concerned by climate change at all.
One might expect that those who were concerned with climate change would believe that the democratic system is not dealing with this issue as well as it should, but this is another instance in which the support for political parties overall had an impact on respondents’ decisions. While this issue might not be directly linked to democracy, analyzing this helps understand how those who are worried about the future state of the country and planet think democracy is performing now.
Back to issues that are more tightly linked with how one would perceive American democracy, those who answered positively regarding their concern about every eligible person getting an equal opportunity to participate in voting were also those who were more likely to give higher democratic performance ratings. Someone who gave 100 points to this issue was expected to allocate 6 extra points to whether democracy was functioning compared to someone who rated the issue at 0. Again, Democrats were far more likely to believe that granting equal access to voting was an issue compared to Republicans. The former allocated an average of 35 points more than the latter regarding whether they were concerned with equal voting access.
In our analysis, the only question in which the trend was opposite to those previously analyzed was that of election security. Those who were concerned about election security were more likely to give American democracy a lower rating. Indeed, someone who gave the maximum score to being concerned with election security generally allocated 8 points less to US democracy’s rating than someone who gave the lowest score.
This time, Republicans were more concerned with this issue than Democrats were, being expected to allocate 19 points more to being concerned with election security. While less than half of Democrats were highly concerned with election security, two-thirds of Republicans were highly concerned. On the other hand, Democrats were over twice as likely as Republicans to only have low levels of concern regarding the issue.
Considering the narrative around election fraud that members of the Republican Party and Republican media have pushed forward, particularly since the 2020 election, this result does not come as a surprise. However, this demonstrates that the issues that Republicans tended to focus on to justify their lower rankings of how well American democracy is functioning are based on a select number of questions that are closely linked to the voting process, whereas Democrats generally expressed concerns on a broader range of issues but still tended to rank American democracy higher.
Interestingly, the disparities between how Republicans perceive different issues and how they believe that democracy was functioning were not only limited to concerns that Americans overall expressed but also to challenges directly experienced by respondents. Indeed, those who had encountered a higher percentage of issues while voting were Democrats, while Republicans allocated eight points less to experiencing issues at their voting location. What is even more surprising is that, as for all theoretical issues that were mentioned previously where Democrats tended to express greater concern, those who experienced more issues while voting also ranked democracy’s performance higher than those who did not. Someone who always experienced voting issues tended to rate democracy’s performance with an extra 28 points compared to those who had never experienced voting issues. Therefore, issues at voting locations did not make people rate democracy lower.
This questions the Republican narrative of a lack of election security resulting in US democracy performing poorly. In practice, Democrats reported higher rates of voting issues than Republicans did. Nonetheless, Republicans continue to believe that there is election fraud favoring the Democratic party that harms the strength of American democracy, even though data does not support these claims.
Therefore, it can be concluded that the factor that influenced the most whether Americans perceived Democracy as functional or not was that of the party that they belonged to. Indeed, while gender does visibly play a small role as a demographic, our analysis suggested that the political party supported by respondents had a strong influence on how well they believed American democracy was performing but also how they perceived different issues.
While Republicans were more concerned with the state of democracy than Democrats were, Democrats were more likely to be concerned with the issues studied. Whether the issue was a more general issue, such as climate change, or an issue specifically linked to participative democracy, such as representation for women in government or equal access to voting, Democrats were concerned at higher rates than Republicans were. Overall, Republicans were only more concerned about election security, even though they experienced fewer issues at voting locations than Democrats did. In this case, it appeared that Republicans’ perception of voting security was skewed by other factors - not firsthand experiences - while voting.
Overall, our data suggests that Democrats would have more reasons to worry about the state of democracy but that some external narratives incline Republicans to be more wary about the state of US democracy.