Christopher Federico on his new book, "The Authoritarian Divide"

In Professor Christopher Federico's new book, The Authoritarian Divide: Partisan Identity, Voting, and the Transformation of the American Electorate, he, Stanley Feldman and Christopher Weber identify the factors that have shaped and conditioned the sorting of Americans into different belief patterns and partisan camps as a function of authoritarianism over the past 30 years. Through the use of nationally-representative samples, panel data, and experiments, they show how authoritarianism has increasingly structured a wide range of attitudes and become a growing influence on vote choice and party identification. They make the case that authoritarianism's impact on the evolution of partisanship and mass opinion in America has been more complex and contingent than previously suggested. Their findings have important consequences for how to understand partisan conflict in the U.S. and the health of American democracy.

Why is this topic important?

Polarization is a major problem in American politics at present. Exploring the role of authoritarianism as a factor that has conditioned the sorting of segments of the electorate into different parties helps us explain why polarization is occurring. Second, exploring the role of authoritarianism in the polarization of the American electorate allows us to make sense of why the parties are farther apart and why they have become especially further apart on a set of inter-related sociocultural issues related to morality, religious traditionalism, racial attitudes, immigration, among others. Finally, a focus on the role of authoritarianism in mass opinion allows us to see whether current challenges to democratic values have their roots in a psychological preference on the part of some citizens for greater social uniformity and deference to authority.

Why were you interested in exploring this?

We were interested in exploring this for the same reasons why we think the topic is important. However, one other factor loomed large for us: making sense of the rise and continued success of Donald Trump as a political figure. Authoritarianism – in the sense of a preference for greater social uniformity and deference to group authority – is an old idea in the social and behavioral sciences. Since his emergence as the major figure in American politics about 10 years ago, Trump has stood out for his willingness to flout democratic norms and make prejudiced appeals. Much of his persona and many of his appeals would have been unthinkable in mainstream politics 10 years prior to his first election victory. In the aftermath of that, we turned to research on authoritarianism to try and make sense of why Trump was able to receive the level of support he did. We ultimately conclude that the political rise of Donald Trump is both an effect and a cause of the sorting of the electorate into different parties on the basis of authoritarianism.

What did your research for this project look like?

We began work on it in early 2017, right after Donald Trump was elected president. We suspected that support for Trump was rooted in part in some citizens' desire for great social uniformity and strong forms of group authority. We did some earlier analyses showing a growing role for authoritarianism in predicting partisan identity and voting in the lead-up to the 2016 election and published it as a Monkey Cage blog post in the Washington Post. In the months thereafter, it developed into a book project.

From then on, we aggregated a large volume of data. We relied above all on thirty years worth of survey data from the American National Election Studies. This is the best data available to political scientists, and it has the virtue of asking the same questions across decades. We relied on this to track changes in how authoritarianism relates to public opinion in the United States; these analyses form the core of the book. We supplemented this with other data focused on attitudes toward democracy and with three experiments of our own design that were administered to large samples of American adults. These experiments allowed us to determine exactly what kind of political appeals 'activate' authoritarianism and make it a stronger predictor of people's votes.

What were the key takeaways?

A key takeaway is that authoritarianism increasingly structures a wide range of attitudes and has become a more powerful influence on vote choice and party identification. We also find that the impact of authoritarianism on the evolution of partisanship and mass opinion in America has been more complex and contingent than previous research suggested. First, it appears to be limited primarily to White Americans, and has not unfolded over time, even among Whites, in a simple, linear fashion. Rather, authoritarianism sorting intensifies only when the parties offer choices that are differentially appealing to those low and high in authoritarianism. Additionally, authoritarian sorting has proceeded in different ways for White Americans with different levels of education. Highly-educated White Americans have always been more sorted, but those with less education have sorted more strongly over time.

We also show that authoritarianism increasingly constrains White Americans' sociocultural belief systems, their perceptions of ideological polarization between the parties and the extent to which they rely on judgments of ideological closeness to the two parties when voting. 

Finally, we show that authoritarianism predicts anti-democratic attitudes among White Americans within both parties.

Our findings suggest that authoritarianism is more likely to be dangerous to democracy when (1) leaders of competing parties create a discursive environment that leads citizens to sort on the basis of authoritarianism, (2) elites from the party that authoritarians have disproportionately sorted into signal a willingness to pursue exclusionary, intolerant and anti-democratic ends and (3) leaders fail to emphasize that social change and growing diversity can co-exist with a sense of shared values. Leaders can amplify this threat posed by the politics of authoritarianism, but they can also defuse the threat.

What's next for you?

I am working with my PhD student Nicolas Campos on a book that will focus on the measurement of affective polarization. Drawing on recent theoretical work in political science and psychology, we have developed a new tripartite scale measure of affective polarization focused on 'othering' of outpartisans; 'aversion' of outpartisans; and 'moralization' of inparty identification.

We published an APSR piece (Campos and Federico 2025) on this, where we find that the measure uniquely predicts strength of partisan identity, antidemocratic attitudes and support for partisan violence. The big finding is that not all aspects of affective polarization relate the same way to many of the assumed negative correlates of polarization.

The book will build on these findings with new data and explore how the dimensions of affective polarization relate to changes in preferences over an election campaign.

Composed by Sophia Paschke, communications associate