Do Partisans Follow Their Leaders on Election Manipulation?

ABSTRACT Party elites frequently seek to change election rules for their benefit, but these changes do not always align with the democratic principles of the mass public. If party elites are able to influence what the public considers fair, the effectiveness of this public constraint would be limited. This paper tests three possible mechanisms by which this elite influence could function using survey experiments. First, elite cues favoring electoral manipulation could be effective without any appeal to principle. Second, elites could change the public’s perception of whether a given fairness principle applies to a given election rule. Third, elites could directly change which fairness principles people prioritize. I find no evidence that the public is willing to support elites’ explicit attempts at partisan manipulation or that elites are able to directly affect the democratic principles that citizens prioritize. However, elites are able to influence opinion on voting policy issues, regardless of whether the justifying principle they use applies to that policy.