“I Alone Can Fix It:” Racial Threat, Support for Democracy and the Role of Elites

How do whites’ racial anxieties relate to support for democracy in the United States? I argue that periods in which major events cause racial power dynamics to shift, and create uncertainty as to the future of white dominance, generate specific threats that motivate whites to become less supportive of democracy. As other groups make relative gains, whites seek to restrict democracy as a means of excluding challenging groups from the polity and maintaining power. Three such periods have transpired in American history- the Civil War era, the Civil Rights era and the present era. However, given that the general public tends to perform very poorly in tests of political competence, it is unlikely that the average voter can connect issues of race and democracy on their own. Rather, threats to white dominance create opportunities for elites who gain prominence by signaling their racial hostility. This attracts racially hostile voters. Then, serving as opinion leaders, these elites direct their racially hostile voters toward an anti-democratic values system. I test this account using observational survey data spanning from 1968 through 2016, quasi-experimental real-world data analyzing shifts in support for Trump during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and two original survey experiments. All findings point to the same end- Racial Threat causes predisposed white voters to become more attracted to racially hostile, authoritarian elites. It is then the cues that these voters receive from these elites that cause them to become less supportive of democracy.