Racism and authoritarianism go hand in hand

Features of american politics are omnipresent in the contemporary media panorama. First, Donald Trump’s rhetoric concerning nonwhites automatically betrays a dehumanizing prejudice. second, there has been a proliferation of what Duke university law professor Jedediah Purdy sardonically labels “crisis-of-democracy literature,” involving americans’ obvious rebuke of democratic norms.

Neither social intolerance nor inconsistent aid for democratic norms, however, is specially new.

In reality, the only constant thread woven throughout American democracy is that white americans’ track records concerning matters of racial and democratic equality is terrible. To what volume, then, is prejudice associated with negative assessments of democracy? Analyzing world Values Survey records from 1995 to 2011, our latest working paper unearths a traumatic negative relationship between social intolerance and aid for democracy.

Social identities, intolerance, and democracy

Linking social (in)tolerance to attitudes about democracy draws from what social and political psychologists know about group identification and how group identity leads to discrimination against out-groups. First, the emergence of prejudice — just like the notion that a member of an out-group is lazy, that integration is awful, or that immigrants are gang members — happens when a pressing social situation like an election or economic disaster emphasizes differences between agencies.

Second, members of a group want to attach pride or significance to their sense of group belonging. When this takes place, the social surroundings is restructured right into a simplistic area of opponents and allies.

Race has long been a — if not the — social and political categorization inside American society. opposition to the extension of the vote casting Rights Act, aid for cruel immigration regulations, and negative responses to Muslims after September 11, as an instance, are inexorably rooted in these intergroup dynamics. in the course of American history more generally, the extension of civil rights and access to levers of power in American politics have been grounded in race.

If social intolerance involves high degrees of expressive identity, then folks who feel threatened via racial or ethnic diversity should feel less positively closer to systems of governance that extend political access to these people. Hence, white americans who showcase social intolerance can also really prefer undemocratic options due to the fact democracy provides the political pretext for people belonging to “undesirable” out-groups to accumulate assets or power that undercut the perceived well-being of the intolerant person.