Os eleitores partidários seguem, geralmente, as pisadas dos líderes.
Os Republicanos andam como carneiros bêbedos, aos tombos, atrás de Trump.
Transcrevo artigo sobre o tema publicado hoje no WP, cf. aqui
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By Alexander Agadjanian
August 28, 2020
President
Trump has a knack for getting Republicans to reverse their stances on
important policy issues. Free trade is probably the best-known example.
For
decades,
the GOP touted the benefits for American living standards of low tariffs
on foreign goods — and often slammed Democrats as economically naive
protectionists. In 2015,
56 percent
of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said trade was good
for the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. Then Trump
came along and bashed international deals with Mexico and China; by
October 2016, that figure had dropped to 29 percent.
Republican approval of trade has rebounded
somewhat, but this Trump effect is evident across multiple issues. In
2015, 12 percent of Republicans held
positive views
of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has always praised
lavishly. By 2017, according to Gallup, the number had climbed to 32
percent. Hawkishness toward
Russia
— the heart of the onetime “evil empire” that GOP hero Ronald Reagan
set himself so stoutly against — faded over the same period. In July
2018, 40 percent of Republicans said Russia was an American ally, nearly
double the figure from 2014. Republicans were
opposed to withdrawing troops from Syria until
Trump announced he would do just that, and then their views
shifted. Even on nonpolitical issues, like
the National Football League,
the president can change minds: About 70 percent of his voters liked
the NFL — until Trump attacked players who knelt during the national
anthem and approval dropped by more than half.
These trends can seem disconcerting, because they appear to reverse the
idealized direction
of influence in a democracy, where the views of citizens are supposed
to guide their politicians. Leadership surely involves the art of
persuasion, but should it really drive such mercurial shifts on core
issues?
Political science research shows that this “follow the
leader” dynamic is hardly limited to Trump. It occurs throughout
history, on both sides of the aisle and in other countries. It happens
even when party elites try to stop it. In general, the people who run
our political parties — particularly the most prominent and charismatic
figures — have the ability to reshape what voters in those parties
think.
After
hearing President Trump praise President Vladimir Putin, Republicans
reported significantly more positive views of the Russian leader,
surveys found. (Susan Walsh/AP)
“Leader
persuasion” is a well-documented phenomenon in political science. Before
the 2000 election, for instance, more than two-thirds of Americans
broadly supported giving workers the option to invest Social Security
funds in the stock market. Then GOP nominee George W. Bush promoted the
idea and Democrat Al Gore opposed it, and the issue became central to
the election. Suddenly, as University of California at Berkeley
political scientist Gabriel Lenz demonstrated in his
2012 book, “
Follow the Leader?,”
Gore voters soured on the policy. Between August and late October 2000,
ardent Gore supporters became about 60 percentage points more likely to
oppose the idea than strong Bush supporters were, according to an
analysis of the National Annenberg Election Survey.
The inclination to defer to the party’s leader occurs on both the left and the right. A
2018 survey experiment,
conducted by political scientists Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope of
Brigham Young University, asked Americans about an asylum policy that
placed families and children arrested by the Border Patrol in a
detention facility before a hearing. Trump had just introduced such a
policy, but it mirrored an earlier Obama practice. Democrats already
somewhat backed the idea — they gave it 3.34 average support on a 1 to 5
scale — but when told that the Obama administration had favored it,
too, their views became
significantly more positive (moving 0.42 points on that scale). My
own research
found something similar: In a hypothetical scenario, Democrats moved
emphatically toward supporting a major free-trade bill — previously
backed by Republicans — after they were told that Barack Obama endorsed
it.
Leader-following patterns appear at lower levels of government, too.
In 2013 and 2014,
political scientists David Broockman, of Berkeley, and Daniel Butler,
of the University of California at San Diego, had eight sitting state
legislators from an anonymous Midwestern state send official
communications about policies they favored (on topics such as raising
the minimum wage and allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s
licenses). Based on an earlier survey, the researchers knew that these
messages would go to constituents who disagreed with them. Recipients of
the messages did not necessarily belong to the same party as their
representative. When the legislators simply stated their positions —
without offering much justification — voters who received a letter were
about seven percentage points more likely to agree than those who didn’t
get a letter. The constituents’ overall approval ratings of the
lawmakers remained unchanged.
Abroad,
we see leader persuasion at work, too. In Britain, in 1997, the
Conservative Party campaigned hard against further European integration,
awakening a dormant issue. Conservative voters, Berkeley’s Lenz notes,
subsequently grew more opposed to integration, while Labour Party
members — who had previously been only a bit less skeptical than the
Tories on this question — increased their support (presaging the Brexit
divide two decades later).
I wanted to know whether leaders’ ability to get fellow partisans in line had limits, so I
studied
two factors that might curb their sway: opposition from other elites in
the same party (think members of Congress) and substantial policy
details that make clearer to partisans what, exactly, they’re opining
on. The hypothesis was that partisans may rely on leaders less when
they’re properly informed. In early 2018, I told about 2,500 Republicans
and Democrats that their party leaders had taken positions that
departed from the party consensus. Supposedly, Trump wanted a major
infrastructure bill previously sponsored by Democrats, and Obama wanted a
big free-trade bill that had received Republican backing.
I told
a random portion of these people that their party’s congressional
leaders had opposed Trump’s and Obama’s positions on these questions,
and I gave others more information about the policies. To Republicans, I
stressed the extraordinary price tag of the infrastructure bill and the
federal government’s large role in directing the program. To Democrats,
I stressed the pro-business aspects of free trade and the bill’s
deregulatory provisions. But it turned out that neither the
institutional check from other elites nor the additional information did
much to dampen leader influence. Both Democrats and Republicans
followed Trump and Obama largely to the same extent with and without
these possible constraints in the picture.
On Oct. 25, 2019, pickup trucks wait to be
loaded onto a cargo plane as part of the withdrawal of coalition forces
from northern Syria. Most Republicans opposed pulling troops from Syria,
polls found, until President Trump announced plans to do so. (Staff
Sgt. Joshua Hammock/U.S. Army Reserve/AP)
That was a
carefully controlled experiment, but we see this happening in the real
world, too. When Trump moved to withdraw troops from Syria in December
2018, and rank-and-file Republicans shifted their views to match his
rhetoric, congressional Republicans, spent
months objecting — and the Senate
rebuked the president’s plan with a 68-to-23 vote. This
hardly dented his influence.
Republican public opinion on Syria troop withdrawal — a majority now
supporting it — was nearly identical before and after GOP elites pushed
back hard.
Maybe
a leader’s sway depends on the prominence of an issue? Perhaps leaders
can persuade voters on questions that aren’t in the limelight but then
fail to influence them on high-profile issues (when many other signals
and information might shape opinions)? Some
scholarship suggests that’s the case, but the picture isn’t clear. For example,
new evidence
from Denmark indicates that when leaders from the two parties that
formed the country’s center-right coalition government reversed their
stances on much-discussed welfare issues in 2010-11 — abruptly cutting
unemployment insurance and early retirement programs — ordinary party
members shifted their opinions on those issues by a substantial 15
percentage points, in the direction of the parties’ new position.
Issues
involving race may be among those where leader influence is weaker than
usual — although here, too, evidence is mixed. Republicans
warmed up toward
the Black Lives Matter movement this year, despite the president’s
vocal opposition. But from early to mid-2016, as Trump slammed the
earlier incarnation of BLM, one study found that White Trump supporters
began expressing more hostile racial views. And in a 2016 survey experiment, exposure to Trump’s prejudiced comments — such as when he
called some Mexican immigrants “rapists” —
led his voters to voice more offensive opinions about minorities.
The
scholarship on leader-following has focused on policy stances. But the
influence extends to misinformation, too, with public opinion around
voting by mail providing a vivid recent illustration. Trump’s frequent
(and unfounded) claim that the system is riddled by fraud appears to
have turned Republicans off of the voting method and created a much
larger partisan gap.
One study
estimates that between early April and late May — as Trump launched
several Twitter attacks on the voting method — Republicans became 10
percentage points less supportive of expanding voting by mail.
Nowhere
are the consequences of voters’ deference more clear than in the
coronavirus pandemic. For months, Trump has downplayed the severity of
the contagion, condemned shutdowns that public health experts endorsed,
ridiculed mask wearers, and pushed to reopen businesses and schools.
Unsurprisingly, the resulting partisan divides on recommended behaviors
have
undermined our collective response to the crisis. In late April and early May, for example, the rate of mask-wearing among Republicans lagged that of Democrats by
more than 20 percentage points, according to one survey.
It’s
hard to not wonder how different the country’s trajectory might have
been had Trump aggressively endorsed masks and social distancing from
the start. Yet the follow-the-leader dynamic works both ways: In surveys
conducted
before and
after Trump
tweeted a picture of himself wearing a mask and called it patriotic, Republicans became five percentage points
more likely to wear a face covering
(halving the partisan gap in that data set). In other words, getting
out of the current pandemic mess might mean counting on the same
mechanism that exacerbated it.
Some observers have
suggested
that Trump has “hijacked” his party — and in attempting to explain why
Republicans would follow him, they have focused on his distinctive (and
unarguable) opportunism and disregard for norms. But the lesson of this
vein of research is that all political parties are vulnerable to
dramatic shifts and “takeovers” by prominent leaders (perhaps especially
in presidential systems, which grant the chief executive inordinate
prominence). Long after Trump is gone, American politicians who win top
positions will be tugging the views of their partisans much closer to
their own, adding yet more instability to an already hostile and
polarized system.
Alexander Agadjanian @A_agadjanian
is a political science PhD Student at the University of California,
Berkeley, and recently was a research associate at the MIT Election Lab.
