The forthcoming article “When politicians behave badly: Political, democratic, and social consequences of political incivility” by Troels Bøggild and Carsten Jensen is summarized by the author(s) below.
Many citizens today believe that politics has an “incivility problem.” In the United States, 69% consider the government uncivil, and two-thirds think the problem is worsening. This perception is, at least in part, grounded in reality: uncivil exchanges between politicians, such as personal insults and interruptions, have become increasingly common and are widely broadcasted through traditional and social media.
Scholars, pundits, and politicians have expressed concerns that this rise in political incivility could harm the fundamental health of democracies. Incivility might not only diminish public trust in politicians but also have broader consequences for citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and their compliance with policies. As such, incivility can decrease both specific support for political actors and diffuse support for the political system and its capacity for problem solving.
The scientific literature has not provided clear insights into the consequences of increasing political incivility. Previous research has suggested a link between politicians’ incivility and public trust, but empirical results have been mixed. Our recent study addresses this lacuna on three levels. Theoretically, we argue that political incivility adversely affects not just citizens’ trust in politicians but also broader satisfaction with the democratic system and policy compliance. We integrate insights from social and political psychology into the literature on political incivility to develop our expectations.
Methodologically, we test our framework with a three-stage setup that overcomes the limitations of traditional survey experiments while maintaining strong causal identification. In the first stage, we develop and validate a scale to measure citizens’ perceptions of political incivility, showing that these perceptions reliably track real-world changes in elite rhetoric. In the second stage, we embed this scale in a multi-wave panel survey with over 6,000 Danish respondents, using generalized difference-in-differences models to estimate how citizens respond to changes in political incivility. In the third stage, we exploit a natural experiment during the COVID-19 crisis, which led to a “rally ’round the flag” effect and a sudden decrease in political incivility. This provided a unique opportunity to test whether this rally effect could be attributed to the drop in incivility.
Empirically, our study reports three consistent findings. First, we find that political incivility negatively affects trust in politicians. Second, we find that political incivility depresses citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and willingness to comply with COVID-19 restrictions. Third, we consistently find that these negative effects are driven by incivility rather than conflict on substantial issues.
Our study offers both methodological and substantive lessons. Methodologically, it provides an integrated approach to studying the effects of elite rhetoric on broader systemic attitudes and policy compliance. We discuss how criticism of survey experimental approaches can be addressed through complementary research designs. Substantively, our findings highlight discernible, negative democratic and social consequences of uncivil behavior between politicians. Importantly, our results show that citizens can distinguish between issue-related conflict and uncivil personal interactions, implying that it is possible to maintain high public trust, satisfaction in a democracy, and policy compliance with fierce political competition, as long as it remains issue-based and civil.
About the Author(s): Troels Bøggild is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University and Carsten Jensen is the director of Platform for Inequality Research at Aarhus University (PIREAU) and editor of Socio-Economic Review. Their research “When politicians behave badly: Political, democratic, and social consequences of political incivility“ is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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