Matthew Levendusky, a professor of political science in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, explains the results of a megastudy that explores whether anything could bridge the political gap between the left and right among Americans.
Historians analyzing the 2024 election will likely highlight a topsy-turvy election cycle in a country whose far left and far right seem to be moving further into their proverbial corners.
The partisan divide is something Matthew Levendusky has studied for a long time. Levendusky, a political science professor in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, and colleagues from the Wharton School, Stanford, Cornell, MIT, and elsewhere wanted to understand whether anything could bridge the gap or change attitudes and behaviors.
To do this work, they proposed an open call for treatment options from academics and practitioners, eventually receiving 252 submissions from more than 400 people on four continents. From those, the team selected 25 promising options to study, which included, for example, watching videos in which people bond despite having just had a political disagreement, or reading news stories highlighting that people on both of the political aisle are tired of polarization.
In findings the researchers published in the journal Science, they showed that most of the treatments they tested—23 out of 25—significantly reduced partisan animosity. Some did significantly decrease support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence, though the numbers were far fewer.
“I’m not surprised that there are multiple ways of reducing partisan animosity,” says Levendusky. “It’s more surprising to me that undemocratic practices and partisan violence were harder to shift. This suggests that these outcomes are quite distinct from animus. Animus still matters because we know it harms democratic functioning: support for compromise, how people evaluate leaders, their policy attitudes and so forth—I showed this in the book, 'Partisan Hostility and American Democracy,' which came out this spring. But we also care a great deal about anti-democratic attitudes and violence. Those are extremely important and worrying outcomes. We need other strategies to tackle those.”
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